Currently, I’m still in this course but an assignment that stood out to me had to do with a module about ethics of care. On this assignment, students were tasked to apply the concept about ethics of care to the problem of Google street view and privacy. Furthermore, I was able to gain more insight on how our private information is really not private at all. It allowed me to learn more about the issues around privacy and these big corperations. Below is an artifacts of my written argument about the matter.

Emmanuel Agyei

Cybersecurity Ethics

September 16, 2021

                                                                                           CASE ANALYSIS ON PRIVACY

             In Vaidyanathan book, he states that when Google street view was first Launched in May 2007 in New york and San francisco, it purpose was to capture images of ground level, streets, intersections, and many more of various locations. This was to be done by sending people with special automobiles with cameras on top to capture these images, they were called the Google Mobiles. However, it caused anxiety within people because it invaded their privacy and clear images of people, license plates and many more were captured and made public. Google responded to this by saying that they would be happy to remove or blur peoples images but as a  default, it is set on maximum exposure. As time passed people got more used to it, especially in the United States. They use it to scout homes, busy parking areas, restaurants, various travelling locations and even use it to write books. In this Case Analysis, I will argue that Kant’s deontology proposition shows us that Google should have respected the privacy of others and taken down street view.

                  Furthermore, the Floridi case study says that “Distracted by a technology that invites practical usage more readily than critical reflection, peggy only half perceives that ICTs are transforming society profoundly and irrevocably. The foundation of our information society was laid down in the thirties. It was difficult to make complete sense of such a significant change in human history, at this early stages on it’s development. Today, the commodification of digital ICTs begun in the seventies, and the consequent spread of a global information society since the eighties, are progressively challenging the right to information privacy, at least as Westerners still conceived it in Virginia Woolf’s times. As inforgs inhabiting the infosphere, we are getting used to information flows being pervasive and respecting no boundaries. And yet as Woolf wrote in an essay on Montaigne that she published in the Common reader in 1925.” All this is saying is that because of the practical usage of technology overpowers our reflection, and as time goes on the idea of privacy decreases because of that. Therefore, even as we are more used to technology and the significant changes as time goes by we have a right to privacy itself. Floridi argues that privacy doesn’t rely on any external factors to be significant but it’s significant itself and as well as valuable. Evidently, Google street view goes against the laws of privacy and Kant also lets us know that it is not right to disrespect others, in this case people’s privacy for the greater good. The greater good being the advancement of technology, which serves as a distraction because of its practical usage instead of critical reflection. In my unlocked ethical tool, I stated that “Superman’s ideal world where dignity, honor and justice can become a reality we all share is if everyone has an understanding that these three things are core factors of life, good things always come with bad things. Society needs to learn  that even though everyone was raised on different moral grounds, there’s a straight line of right and wrong, no matter the emotion or the sugar coding. Kant points this out by saying that “the duty to respect others is absolute, and it’s never right to fail to respect others for the greater good”. In addition, the things we value have no value until there’s bad things to make the good things look good for us to present or approach with a clear viewpoint of the good and the bad.” For this reason, Google should have not created the street view feature, because that would have been the right thing to do ethically. It has proven itself to be useful in many ways but according to Kant, one can’t not make exceptions when it comes to universal law. In addition, it has also done a lot of damage because of its significant aid in revealing sensitive information to the public. People can get robbed, killed and caused harm because of all the information being at the tip of anyones hands, all they have to do is to look. Of all the types of privacies this would be Alice’s informational privacy. It is defined as a freedom from informational interference or intrusion, achieved thanks to a restriction on facts about the individual’s unknown or unknowable. With this type of privacy being invaded all your information can be clearly known to the world. 

                     In James Grimmelmann’s, “Privacy as Product Safety” it says that, “people use Facebook in complicated ways, sometimes leading to privacy trouble. There is often a significant gap between what users expect will happen with their personal information and what actually does happen. Overall, the beneficial uses of Facebook outweigh its dangers, but it would be good to find ways of preventing some of the specific privacy harms. Facebook probably cannot be made perfectly safe for privacy, but it could almost certainly be made safer. Put this way, there is a natural affinity between the privacy law challenges facing Facebook and another area of the law: product safety. It is true that using Facebook can be hazardous to your privacy, but a hammer can be hazardous to your thumb. People need tools, and sometimes they need dangerous tools. Hammers are physically dangerous; Facebook is socially dangerous. We should not ban hammers, and we should not ban Facebook. The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that the tools people do use are not unnecessarily dangerous.” All this is saying is that the good things about the social platform overweighs the bad things, even though the social platform is dangerous to people’s privacy it shouldn’t be shut down but instead made better by policy makers to help with the issues of privacy.  Even though this statement is very logical, how many trial and errors do policy makers have to go through to make the products to be “good enough” to respect people’s privacy. By the time they are done with those trials about eighty percent of people’s information would already be out there. So in this case, they should make a product that respects privacy from the start, not after it’s already started to cause harm. Therefore, Google street view was better off not developed if one takes a look at the grand scope of things. Unless society is willing to give away their right to their own privacy, no matter how important one hundred percent. Furthermore, one can believe that a google associate wouldn’t be very happy if their own privacy is invaded, they are people as well and privacy is part of the nature of humans as a whole. Not only is privacy for protection but it’s also for a sense of relief about the facts that you are not being watched every second of the day. Therefore, they should have had a sense of respect for people’s privacy as well as themselves enough to not launch the google street view feature.

                     In conclusion, I don’t support the Google street view feature, the more ethical thing they could have done was to not develop it at all. It wrongfully invades people’s privacy and also shows no respect, even for the greater good. No matter how helpful it is, google cannot blur every single person’s face and information on those images. Privacy is the nature of humans, we need privacy for so many things that are common yet sensitive. In addition, it goes against Kantianism, which states that it is wrong for one to make exceptions for the greater good, there should be a straight line of right and wrong. It goes against Kant’s preposition, the Google team didn’t have  enough respect for people’s privacy.