Friday, February 7, 2020

Transparency: What are we really seeing?


Transparency is not always clear. In his paper, Information Transparency, Floridi talks about one version of Transparency: information visibility; today we will be talking about the other version mentioned: information invisibility. This is the more concerning one in our society today when it comes to the topic of ethics in the ever growing technological world we live in.

What exactly are companies and apps doing with our information, are they telling us everything they are doing, and is transparent as to what is actually being collected? These questions raise many ethical issues today. One main topic for discussion is: who owns this information, is it the person who the data is about or once you have given it to a company, in some way, is it now their property. This is were it becomes very important that companies and apps are transparent about what is being collected and for what use it will be put to.

Everybody has run into scenarios where you have to give personal information in order to use a technology, for example you name and date of birth to play certain games. The gaming companies claim they are using this information to check the user against their age restrictions, but now they have this data and can use if for other purposes.  

For a lot of apps and web services you have to agree to terms; but most people accept without actually reading the terms. What are you agreeing to? This could be allowing companies to use your personal information. This brings up another issue: is it ethical for companies to create very long and extensive term and conditions pages, that can be very complicated for their users to understand.

All of these issues will continue to evolve and split peoples on what is ethical. However, some of them may be coming to a head, with the government wanting access to criminals iPhones from Apple and their Facebook accounts.  

2 comments:

  1. Hi Sean, I thought the points and questions you brought up in your post were interesting and worth thinking about. At the start of your blog, you say Floridi talked about information visibility, but then you say we’re going to talk about something else. The post is supposed to revolve around the contents of a reading, but that’s the last we hear of Floridi. Maybe one thing worth talking about is why the terms we agree to might not be considered transparency. There are also many simple grammatical errors, so I suggest reading through the post to make corrections.

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  2. I like how you tie the reading into a real life example. In addition, I like your use of pictures to guide the reader through the blog. Moving forward I believe your blog would benefit if you mention the reading more than you do at the moment. While you mention Floridi in the introduction, you fail to mention him for the rest of the blog and this does not follow the criteria for the class.

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