Today when I was reading the news online in the morning, there was a piece of American political news astounding me: “Trump Completes Repeal of Online Privacy Protections From Obama Era”. This piece of news also mentions that experts claim this change will allow broadband and telecom providers to collect consumers and users’ browsing history and other personal information and data without any restrictions from governments or industries and sell them to advertisers or any other third parties for commercial purposes. Since telecom services are worldwide necessities nowadays for almost everybody, we can’t imagine how terrible it would be if personal information can be commercially traded worldwide from telecom suppliers.

In Chapter 12: Decision Making, Creativity, and Ethics, there is a concept called corporate social responsibility, and it’s defined as “the organization’s responsibility to consider the impact of its decisions on society”. In this case, I hope all the telecom provider companies in the U.S. can take the corporate social responsibilities and obey the ethics as much as possible.

Although I don’t know both why Trump completes the repeal on privacy protections and why telecom providers need to collect personal data and information, I definitely have my understanding of the clear lines in the ethics. If the companies are providing users’ personal information and data for governments to help with nationwide research for public projects or keep track of criminal suspects, the behaviors are not only ethical but also rewarding since it serves the interests of majority of individuals; if the companies are purely commercially trading with exchange of users’ personal information and data for profits, then it should be unethical since it serves for the self-interests of a few competitor companies in telecom industry and harms the privacy rights of majority of individuals. I wish journalists should also act more actively to catch and expose the unethical behaviors of telecom companies who are able to take advantage of collecting users’ personal information.

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Reference:

Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition