Ethical and Professional Issues: Reading Responses

The topic on online censorship has both legal and moral consequences that must be addressed. First, if the United States were to implement a mass online censorship program, in many cases it would most likely infringe upon its citizens’ right to free speech. In addition, we must ask ourselves if we want to silence individuals whose only, or most effective, avenue of being heard is through the internet. That being said, based on my prior beliefs and the readings, I do believe it is okay go have some online censorship in specific situations such as in the fight against terrorism. I will return to this topic later. To me, it seems like online censorship is a very slippery slope and, for this reason, there must be only very specific situations in which it is okay. Addressing the situations presented in the question, I do not believe that it is ethical for companies to remove dissenting opinions for governments. I understand this situation is simply a suppression of individuals beliefs in...

Corporate personhood is the idea that a corporation as a whole has some of the same rights that its people (owners, employees, etc.) have. For example, a corporation has the right to have contracts between itself and others in the same way that people can have a contract with another. There is an ongoing debate over to what degree or extent corporations have the same rights as an individual person. One of the readings, How Corporations Got The Same Rights As people (But Don’t Ever Go to Jail , brings out a good point when it states the difficultly of identifying who is responsible for breaking a law when looking at a group. It is relatively easy to do this on a person to person scale but by giving a corporation the same rights as those people makes some cases very difficult to punish. Oftentimes, we see the CEO or owner of a company take responsibility for an illegal action taken by a corporation because of this and there is a hunt for evidence to prove that the individual did know abo...

Online advertising is always something that has creeped me out a little bit but at the same time I am thankful for it. One cannot deny the convenience of going to your favorite website, such as ESPN, and checking the scores of last night’s games and at the same time seeing advertisements for the running shows you have been looking for the past few weeks scroll along the side and bottom of your screen. That being said, however, it is definitely troubling how our what we think is private may not actually be and that these companies are able to track what we have been searching for every day. The Privacy and Surveillance in America Article states that “people in America complain about eroding privacy, but have taken only “modest steps” to curb data collection. In a study last year, Pew found that some Americans responded to concerns about surveillance by changing their privacy settings on social media (17 percent); using social media less often (15 percent); avoiding certain apps (15 pe...