Privacy Policies Don't Need to Protect Your Privacy

The motivation behind Moor's 2005 paper on why we need better ethics in developing technologies can be easily seen as we continue our progress through the Information Age. The internet, itself a sub-revolution of the greater Computer Revolution, is vital to communicating and conducting business in the world of today. While the practices of many sites operating on the internet and how they gather data are not strictly unethical, the ways in which the intentions of some websites are communicated can be tricky to understand.

Every website has a policy on how they collect and share data. This may entail how a company keeps data they collect safe, but it may also describe the ways in which a website shares data. This policy is publicly available through a sometimes cryptic document called a privacy policy, which Wikipedia defines as:

...a statement ... that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client's data. ... 

[client's data] can be ... the person's name, address, date of birth, ... ID issue, ... financial records, credit information, medical history, where one travels, and intentions to acquire goods and services.

Is this practice ethical..? While Moor's insight is relevant, how the user is notified of data collection and use is addressed in Turilli and Floridi's 2009 paper discussing the ethics of information transparency. The work centers around three topics, one being "What information affects the ethical nature of information transparency." The authors state that in order to be ethical, information provided must not only consist of "a litany of properties," but must be "semantic content that can be used for epistemic purposes." This allows the user to make informed choices about what information they provide. As such, where policies are not presented in a way to be understood, the practice could be deemed unethical, never-the-less, it remains legal.

Laws do exist to make policies easier to understand, however the world remains divided on what data websites can collect and use. Where legal, the collected data is sometimes sold as a source of revenue alongside more traditional sources of income, like selling ad space or subscription fees. Entities that acquire this data may be brokers who gather information with the expressed intent to sell it to others, meaning...

the only thing separating your data from someone you don't want to have it could be nothing more than an inexpensive pay wall.