Ethics

Ethics and moral standards can be constantly questioned, we have all come across a situation where our morals have been tested and we have wondered what would be the ethical thing to do, the right thing to do. Whether this was when you found out your best friends boyfriend was sleeping with your other best friend, when you were accidentally given too much change, when ate your house mates eggs and decided it was better to pretend it wasn’t you or even when you chose to use get new plastic bags because you couldn’t be bothered to carry a bag for life. All in all, we are faced with situations every day which can be effected by ethics, so it is no surprise with the internet being such a big part of our lives that the concept of ethics online are a rising issue.

A Danish pharma company Novo Nordisk developed a tool in order to help people make ethical decisions, it’s to save people from being stuck in ‘a grey area’ and not being able to make a decision using games and questions to enhance both knowledge and to put to use personal experience.

There have been many ethical issues associated with online communications; we are constantly obsessing with privacy issues and the actions of other online, as well as the actions of brands around us. Brands that act ethically are more likely to be revisited and hold a better status from their customers; an example can be seen from Vodafone who has a high ethical code and corporate responsibility. They introduced moderators into popular chat rooms and increased the trust adults had in Vodafone and kept customers loyal.

Dataveillance: ‘the systematic monitoring of people's actions or communications through the application of information technology’ (Clarke, 2003).

Dataveillance can be used to achieve ‘Behavioural Targeting’ within the UK has been seen as potential for creating a closer relationship with consumers and improving campaign performance. It also leads to more in dept consumer profiling. Addvantage Media conducted a report (2010), they found that the majority of UK consumers though behavioural targeting to be irrelevant, can you blame them? Who would want their behaviour online to be tracked right? I know I’m not a fan of it, even if it does mean that when I’m browsing the web the dress that I was looking at a week ago pops up and reminds me that I wanted to buy it, which having limited funds, acted as more of a hindrance than a benefit. Although we can see the use of Dataveillance is becoming inevitable within consumer communication as we are seeing a decline in traditional forms of advertising, however, brands need to be aware of some of the downfalls associated with advertising so specific and creating more niche advertising.

However it can be argues that dataveillance can give brands the ability to abuse data, picking two things of no relation and find a connection that can be used to their advantage, data such as religion, spending habits, interests and hobbies as well as locations and postcodes, when connections are made such as more religious people live in a specific area they can be more specific in their advertising. Data is everywhere and can be easily accessed. This method also carries certain implications such as privacy issues, and questions like who holds the right to weigh up what is wrong and what is right? So while it can make for effective advertising it can be intrusive to the individuals being observed.