Student name: Kanokgan Chokchaiaphiwat (Amy) Student ID: 10611746

Cambridge Analytica Ethical Analysis

Introduction

Social media is a useful tool for individuals and organizations to communicate with

one another. This case study will discuss the ethical issues of Cambridge Analytica’s

misuse of information obtained from Facebook on how it breached users’ privacy.

The analysis will address ethical issues from the lenses of Virtue Ethics, Utilitarian

Ethics, and Deontological Ethics.

Privacy means that you as an individual have a claim to own your body and your

image, as well as any information which you generate about yourself or any

information which is generated about you. You are the person who ultimately

controls that information (Manjikian, 2018, p. 83). In the context of a social media

user, one should have the right to privacy of one’s information and have control over

who can access one’s information. The Cambridge Analytica case was not a case of

an unauthorized entity collecting personal data illegally, but a trusted social media

company that has the responsibility to protect the data from being misused.

Background information

Cambridge Analytica Ltd (CA) was a British political consulting firm headquartered in

London, England established in 2013. The company worked on Donald Trump’s

presidential campaign in 2016. The personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users

were acquired via the 270,000 Facebook users who used a Facebook app created

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Student name: Kanokgan Chokchaiaphiwat (Amy) Student ID: 10611746

by Alexsandr Kogan called "This Is Your Digital Life". This was a personality profiling

app and asked simple personality questions similar to other Facebook quizzes

(Wikimedia Foundation, 2023). Cambridge Analytica successfully used the personal

information collected from Facebook to profile and target American voters, and

influenced their decisions to elect Donald Trump as their president. On 11 April

2018, Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg admitted to the US Congress

that Facebook has knowledge of Cambridge Analytica obtaining the data. Mr.

Zuckerberg went on and said, “It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent

these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference

in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy” (The Key

Moments from Mark Zuckerberg's Testimony to Congress (11 April 2018) The

Guardian).

Ethical analysis

In this section, we will discuss ethical issues in the Cambridge Analytica case

through the lenses of Virtue Ethics, Utilitarian Ethics, and Deontological Ethics.

Virtue Ethics is concerned with an individual and, in this case, from the perspective

of the owner of the information. One can ask oneself. As a Facebook user, would I

like my personal information to be obtained by a third party without my consent for

the purpose of political manipulation? The answer is no. It is a failure of Facebook as

a social media company that was not doing the best in its power to protect my

personal information. And the deceptive conduct of Cambridge Analytica who used

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Student name: Kanokgan Chokchaiaphiwat (Amy) Student ID: 10611746

my information to profile and target me to carry out an influenced decision. It is clear

that both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s conduct is unethical.

Utilitarian Ethics is concerned with the outcome that benefits the majority, and

seeks to achieve pleasure and to avoid pain (Manjikian, 2018, p. 44). We can start

from the outcome by defining what should be the best possible outcome for an

election. If the ultimate outcome of an election would be the American people voted

for the right candidate to become the president without being influenced by media

manipulation. Then the conduct of Cambridge Analytica using the information

obtained from Facebook to influence people’s decisions in the election is unethical.

As a social media company, Facebook should have acted in the best interest of its

users by preventing Cambridge Analytica from obtaining the data and misusing it.

Therefore, Facebook’s conduct was also deemed unethical in this situation.

Deontological Ethics is concerned with the duty or obligation to do the right thing

by the people (Manjikian, 2018, p. 35). And we as humans should make decisions

based on what is best for one another. We can ask if Facebook does the right thing

by allowing Cambridge Analytica to obtain users’ personal information and not acting

in its best capacity to make sure that the data was deleted. The answer is no.

Facebook did not do its duty to protect the information from being misused.

Facebook has broken the trust that the users had in the company. As a political

consulting company, Cambridge Analytica used the obtained information to benefit

their client Donald Trump to win the election. Their conduct of influencing the

election went against the main objective of Deontological Ethics of doing the right

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Student name: Kanokgan Chokchaiaphiwat (Amy) Student ID: 10611746

thing by the people. In this way, both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s conduct

is unethical.

Conclusion

The Cambridge Analytica case has presented a number of ethical issues that

resulted in the breach of privacy. Facebook, as a social media company, should

have acted in the best interest of its users by preventing the data to be obtained and

misused by Cambridge Analytica. The conduct of Cambridge Analytica is a

deliberate act of misusing information for the purpose of social engineering and

media manipulation to influence American voters' decisions.

It is apparent that social media user privacy is a concerning issue for many people

from all continents of the world. The reason is that we are all interconnected with one

another via social media platforms. It is important that we have a reasonable legal

precedent to protect the right to our own information and its privacy. To develop

legislative basis which will help to restrict significantly the operation of companies

like Cambridge Analytica and exclude the possibility of the worldwide uncontrolled

use of personal data in social networks (Boldyreva, 2018, p. 99). This case has

brought to our attention that there is much to be done to ensure the security of our

personal information and its privacy.

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Student name: Kanokgan Chokchaiaphiwat (Amy) Student ID: 10611746

Bibliography

Manjikian, Mary, Cybersecurity Ethics: An Introduction (Routledge, 2018)

Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, May 23). Cambridge Analytica. In Wikipedia.

Retrieved June 4, 2023, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

The Key Moments from Mark Zuckerberg's Testimony to Congress (11 April 2018)

The Guardian

Boldyreva, E. (2018). Cambridge Analytica: Ethics And Online Manipulation With

Decision-Making Process. In Proceedings of the European Proceedings of Social &

Behavioural Sciences (Vol. 12, pp. 91-102). doi:10.15405/epsbs.2018.12.02.10

Amer, K., & Noujaim, J. (Directors). (2019). The Great Hack [Film]. Netflix