Trent Abraham’s post’s link:  https://blogs.ubc.ca/tabraham/2014/09/10/protecting-your-privacy-on-the-new-facebook/

While I was reading blogs from my classmates, Trent’s post “Protect Your Privacy on the New Facebook” caught my eyes. In his post, Trent concisely summarizes an article whose topic is the privacy updates implemented by facebook. And he claims that it is ethical of facebook to use users’ information to make profit under the law. I would like to bring a different point of view on this issue. I agree with him on the point that there is nothing wrong with using users’s information to make profit. However, in my view, whether it is ethical depends on how far facebook goes on this track. If facebook use the privacy information just to help companies to allocate advertisements so that the commercials could be more effective and more targeted, then it will be totally fine. But if it uses the information to help other companies manipulate consumers’ behavior (which they have already had the capacity to do it), there will be a serious problem. Since this will be actually controlling consumers — a type of aggressive selling, which is totally different from normal commercials. This seems like a paranoid imagination. But according to the assumption that  companies will do whatever they take to maximize their profit, I think the concern is reasonable and necessary.

The time when there is no laws to regulate is the time when companies should consider business ethics. Unfortunately, improvement of laws can never keep up with development of technology. So it is especially important for IT firms to take ethics into consideration so that the society as a whole could be better off.