Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Final Version of Final Ethics Assignment

Case: 25 Million NAVER Accounts Breached using Stolen Data


Description: NAVER is South Korea's largest web portal, which was hacked by hacker named 'Seo', who bought private information including names, residential number, Internet IDs and password of 25 million people from an Anonymous Korean-Chinese. He developed the hacking program that automatically enter users' IDs and passwords. He sent spam messages and other illicit emails to the Naver account holders to rake in illegal profit of some 160 million won ($148,000). Company's officials said, “the best preventive measure for now would be for users to change their passwords on a regular basis so that even if someone should access their accounts the impact would be minimal.” Further, he stressed that Naver was not at fault regarding the incident, adding that a bigger problem was that it was too easy for people to get their hands on the personal information of others. Similarly, earlier, 20 Million Credit Cards in South Korea were stolen in the country of 50 million population, which is approx. 40% population of the country.

Moral Reasoning: Is the right to privacy – the right to be left alone and to control one’s personal information – really a right? Is privacy just a privilege that can be revoked any time it conflicts with other more important needs, like the need to protect our security? Who has the right to infringe upon our privacy and for what purposes? Selling or Buying someone's private information is not right at any condition. Using their accounts and sending spam messages and making profit is totally illegal and strict action must be taken. Attempt by 'Seo' is totally wrong and arrest of hacker 'Hong' is not right at some point because he didn't develop the program for this type of hacking. 'Seo' used his software to hack Naver's accounts. The program was not intentionally made for this purpose by Hong.
On the other hand, how can someone buy or sell someone’s private information, if there are some laws related to that. Government should be more aware of protecting their citizen’s privacy. It is important for Government to understand and make strict rules that no internet providers should not rent or sell user’s information to anyone, for any reason. And users also need to pay attention, one must not put their private information on any website. And if someone’s account gets hacked, only he/she is responsible for that.

For example, Take a look at this scenario:

“Suppose you want to steal your neighbor’s Car. Now obviously, for this you will need to make a duplicate key of his car, to unlock it. The duplicate Key can be made only if you get a chance to trace the original key. And this is possible only if your neighbor is careless and can be easily manipulated.”
The same scenario can be interpreted in the context of email hacking. when your Account gets hacked, that’s only because of your carelessness. Believe it. Now a days hackers are targeting social networking profiles like Facebook, twitter, etc. rather than email accounts. Same thing is focused in the case where South Korea’s social networking is hacked.

Contextualize: I want to use quote from William Parent’s article “Privacy, Morality, and the Law” from Philosophy & Public Affairs. Vol. 12, No. 4

“Privacy is the condition of not having undocumented personal knowledge about one possessed by others. A person’s privacy is diminished exactly to the degree that other posses this kind of knowledge about him. I want to stress that what I am defining is the condition of privacy, not the right to privacy. I will talk about the latter shortly. My definition is new, and I believe it to be superior to all of the other conceptions ……………..”

Parent explains that he proposes to defend a view of privacy that is consistent with ordinary language and does not overlap or confuse the basic meanings of other fundamental terms. He defines privacy as the condition of not having undocumented personal information known or possessed by others. Parent stresses that he is defining the condition of privacy, as a moral value for people who prize individuality and freedom, and not a moral or legal right to privacy. Personal information is characterized by Parent as factual and these are facts that most persons choose not to reveal about themselves, such as facts about health, salary, weight, sexual orientation, etc. Personal information is documented, on Parent's view, only when it belongs to the public record, that is, in newspapers, court records, or other public documents. Thus, once information becomes part of a public record, there is no privacy invasion in future releases of the information, even years later or to a wide audience, nor does snooping or surveillance intrude on privacy if no undocumented information is gained.

Furthermore, what has been described above as the constitutional right to privacy, is viewed by Parent as better understood as an interest in liberty, not privacy. In sum, there is a loss of privacy on Parent's view, only when others acquire undocumented personal information about an individual.

Bibliography

Parent, W., 1983, “Privacy, Morality and the Law”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12: 269–88

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