Unethical behaviour can be seen all over the internet, whether it’s from high class business companies or 16-year-old kids on TikTok. You are never safe. Internet security and privacy issues are seen every day, and concerns are increasing. Take last year Optus security leak for example where customers names, date of birth, addresses and etc, were exposed to the world of both current and former customers (ABCnews, 2022) or more recently TikTok and their recent rejection to concerns about their data security, which has led the video-hosting service to be banned in multiple countries to download on governmental devices, countries including Australia (The West Australian, Perthnow, 2023). This is causing more and more concerns for the government, for parents and generally for everyone, and it has to be recognised and resolved immediately before it starts to impact our daily lives.
Unethical behaviours may mean different things to different people, however the basis of it is doing morally incorrect, neglectful or malicious activities that can cause distress, harm or worry to others. Unethical behaviour can be easily view from one of the worlds most downloaded and used app’s TIkTok which has a rough number of 1-2 billion download across 154 counties (software testing help, 2023). In 2021 Bobby Allyn published a media article on npr covering the dosens of lawsuits against TikTok and the discovery of the Chinese video platform sharing personal data of users without consent, some users as young as 6 years old, this concluded by Tiktok choosing to put an end to the court case and settling, paying $92 million dollars.
Unethical human activities such as data-leaks and security breaches are affecting privacy around the world due to big corporations breaching policy terms and scam artist attacking children and elderly by using big names to cover up their schemes. Scam artists tend to lead to personal details being leaked. If big corporations can establish notable tell-tales or recognisable trait to ensure customers and buyer aren’t tricked, it would help the public to stay safe. As the scammers are getting smarter and smarter with stealing our personal details which then in turn leads to money being stolen, court cases being fraudulent and homes being unsafe to possible scammers invading, it is vital we come up with an effective action plan to stop vulnerable patrons being at risk to cyber-security attacks.
If policies and terms are not upheld our safety is always going to be at risk, big corporations such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have a high influence on today’s society and have access to various personal details and data from our computers, phones and tablets/iPads. These million-dollar companies are responsible for keeping our personal data secret in order to keep us safe from possible aggressors or terrorist, therefore, you would expect them to take serious precautions and calculate every possible way that they could be hacked or breached to combat future or current attacks, however, looking back at the past 3 years there have been multiple reports and cases of data breaches. Another example of a company who has been subject to legal court cases due to personal data leaks is Facebook and just as TikTok did they denied responsibility saying the data was “scraped” from publicly available information on the site (BBC news, 2021) this data leak led to mobile phone numbers being leaked and other personal details, the astonishing part of this scandal was that it affected around 530 million people around the world.
Companies such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have implemented age restriction policy in order to keep young children and teenagers safe, their age policies all start at the age of 13. Now if you ask me 13 is such as young and vulnerable age and without proper monitoring can lead to serious harm coming for those children. As these social media and video platforms are free to the public anyone can see your content and with the dopamine children get from being liked and followed, they often do not track who they follow back or who are looking at their post. This sadly can lead to catfishing, grooming, cyber-bullying and more, these low age restrictions are repulsive and put so many children at risk either from predators or even from their own peers. The rate of teen suicide and adult suicide have gone up drastically since social media became its own world-wide pandemic, this pandemic is so serious to the point where companies have found it necessary to build social media victims helplines and also train therapist in dealing with depression stemming from cyber-bullying. One company out committed in the revival of today’s youth and the helping to save children from depression is The social media victims law Centre another organisation out there to spread awareness of the possible risk of using social media is headspace. This just goes to show that the big branded companies are neglecting the fact that poor, vulnerable people are out there getting attacked and feeling unsafe on their platform, they are doing the bare minimum to ensure our safety.
Another important factor to have a deeper look into are predators. There are only the bare minimum policies and report functions that we can used to keep ourselves safe. Thousands of predators get away with grooming and catfishing young teenagers everyday, and it not normally until its too late that something is done about it. Report functions are implemented in sites such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram but there are always way to get around it such as creating new accounts, re-sending demonetised posts, or even using hacking software to reverse the report. We need to create a system which stops predators making new accounts after their accounts have been dissolved and we need to be more strict on reports such as if someone was reported for sexual harassment they should also be fined on the platform, as sexual harassment is a serious offense and not every person is confident enough in report them to the police themselves. Dirty, disgusting and vulgar people are making our online lives difficult and dangerous, making it a very unsafe place to belong or communicate. These mega corporations need to do better!
All I hope is that the rich guys out there getting money of these platforms which are putting lives at risk due to their unethical behaviours and their noticeable neglect for our safety get it through their heads that things need to change, that we need to implement more policies and restrictions in order to help our vulnerable people in this decaying society. I hope that this helps spread awareness of the importance and the effect that these social media platforms have on our everyday lives and how unsafe they are at this current time. Big corporations you need to change our we’re going to need to put a stop to you, you’re making our lives unsafe and we’re getting more scared everyday.