Business Ethics – Ad Blockers
Business ethics refers to the moral compass that drives people’s actions in activities related to commercial operations. The ethics can refer to the business person’s moral ethics as well as external factors that they must adhere to like legal compliance. There are many times businesses are faced with ethical decisions. Choosing what is good for the business and what the society thinks is right is a real struggle when it comes to business ethics.
So the business may take some steps prioritize its profitability or the business may also favor the public in order to be ethically right in the eyes of the public.
Referring to business ethics, we can relate the ad pop ups which appear on most of the websites we use in our daily life. Using ad firms, many businesses do make a lot of income as people actually get to see these advertisements. But is it always useful to the people who are visiting those sites. I chanced upon an article written by Joseph Donia published on the Huffington Post, there he mentioned about a comment on an article about Ad Block via The Atlantic. The comment was, “ I used and ad blocker because the ad companies do not quality check their ad for malicious content. After installing an ad blocker my computer stopped getting random install requests”. So my point is that, is it ethical for a business to earn from these ads and the public suffer from these malicious contents. This causes computers to be infected by virus and there are also various data losses. Moreover, many people have to buy the ad blocker online. So this kinds of ads are not ethical.
Stopping ads from websites is not a solution too. But we can refer to the saying “quality over quantity”. This means that ads should be there in websites but the ads should be better targeted. For example, a website about a bank should indicate ads for ATM booths nearby or money exchange facilities. These ads are useful to the user who is seeing the site. So we can say it is morally ethical.
On the contrary, some ads that appear on websites are not related at all, which in other words can be considered inappropriate. Some ads are about semi-pornographic content which leads you another site automatically, which makes people really irritated as these sights puts a halt to that person’s work.
So what I can say is that businesses should think about the ads they post on their websites. They should think about income as well the user satisfaction visiting their sites, so well targeted ads should be posted on the websites.
Word count: 450
sources:
article- http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/joseph-donia/its-time-to-get-serious-a_2_b_8400344.html
image- https://storify.com/ALTALOMAN/pop-up-ads-end-the-madness