Ethics Essay

Ethics are important, especially in the engineering field, which can seriously affect

numerous peoples’ safety, security, and lifestyle with just a quick moment by asking the following

questions, “How many components do we, engineers, add to make a product?” or “How many data

we had to take from the users?” during the design process. Because of its importance, the

Engineering community, for example, IEEE, impose the Code of Ethics, which is the regulation

to help people care about Ethical issues they might confront while their career. It gives general

codes for how we take responsibility for our work, how we deal with conflicts between two

different interests, how we act on bribery and to be kept honest, how to maintain our professional

work, and how we seek other’s critics to improve our work, how we treat other colleagues and

help them, and how we keep our safety. And whenever we confront a situation that could violate

one of the above Code of Ethics, we should carefully look through it and think about how to do

you respond to our situation without damaging our ethics. Of course, we confront different

situations for each case, so sometimes the Code of Ethics cannot embrace all kinds of situations,

but this guide will be very helpful. During this semester, we had the opportunity to analyze various

cases having ethical conflicts and share our thoughts on whether these cases are violating the

ethical code, if so, what they are violating, and if not, why not.

In this activity, I analyzed the Amazon Echo case, which describes whether Amazon has to

hand in their customers’ private records to the investigative agency without consent from

customers. And for the following question, does Amazon have the authority to collect users’

private metadata to improve their products? I chose this problem since as many devices are

connected to our lives, they track data from work time to how many drink. And as we will have

slimmer cases like this, it was interesting to think about whether it is ethical to hand in user data
to an investigative agency and also it is ethical to track customers’ data. I think, for now, they meet

the Code of Ethics and violate it at the same time. First of all, they tried to improve their product’s

quality. Accessing customers’ user data enable their products to work better for recommending

songs or movies. However, at the same time, they did not care about responsibility. As they

collected more data, they had to look at some consequences and make their own rule for treating

user data related to the crimes like in this case. From the Virtue of Ethics, they did not follow

honesty, responsibility, and self-discipline. For a self-discipline, as we saw earlier, they had to

look into how many problems related to their data taking and consider the solution before the

problems like this Amazon Echo dilemma. Also, they were not responsible for their data taking.

From the given case recording, at least, we could not find any active interaction between the

investigative agency and the company to find out a solution to secure users’ privacy and give

criminal data. Finally, they were not honest. Many people did not recognize how much meta and

private data were collected. Even if it is helpful to enhance the product’s quality, they have a duty

to let them know. However, from the newest news, many companies nowadays have their rule for

helping investigative agencies. Some companies give limited data, and others reject every kind of

sharing data, for example, Apple. I think this Amazon Echo case gives a good picture of how

people started to care about new ethical problems following with evolution of technology. The

point is that we will confront similar problems as technology keeps evolving. For example, in our

group, most people shared their thoughts about ethics violation which is harmful to the

environment, and all agreed that we should take more care about the ethical violation, which can

be serious for the environment as the environment worsens due to global warming. Thus, we can

see that as time changes, the new genre of ethical problems and new weights about how serious

this problem also keeps changing, so we have to turn on our alert on these.