The Technoethics Trap

Figuring out what is ethical--a challenge under any circumstances--is trickier than ever in the Internet age.

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Imagine doing business with a company that compiled information about your political convictions, religious beliefs, health, and family. Now imagine that this company turned around and made such information, along with your name and hometown, freely available to the rest of the world.

If you've purchased something on Amazon.com, you've dealt with just such a company. The culprit is Amazon's Wish List, a tool that lets you build a list of books and other items you might be interested in checking out. Such lists can be viewed by anyone, unless you take an extra step to specify privacy. Indeed, it's possible to use the Wish List information to create databases of apparent liberals, gun owners, teenage girls, and so forth, and even to map them by location.

I'm not going to go off on privacy here. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who Web-surfs, gives out his or her name online, or buys things, and then still has an expectation of privacy is either clueless or a whiner. My point is that Amazon, a premium Internet brand and a much-admired company, hasn't done anything obviously wrong. The Wish List is a great feature. Yet the company was splashed with a bit of digital mud a few months ago when the feature's vulnerability to mass profiling was highlighted on Applefritter, a website aimed at Apple computer users. The item was then widely circulated around the Web, where it elicited a chorus of disapproval. One person called the Wish List "an invasion of privacy that could cast the shadow of suspicion onto ordinary, law-abiding people."

The simple fact is, figuring out what is ethical--a challenge under any circumstances--is getting trickier in the Internet age. As technology in general and the Internet in particular bring us more marvelous tools at an ever-increasing pace, companies are finding that moving toward the leading edge can earn them a black eye from some affronted segment of the online public. It's not just sensitivity about privacy but also free speech, marketing tactics, and a range of other issues. "With new technology comes new exposures," says Vivian Weil, a professor of ethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "There are new opportunities for companies to intrude one way or another on what people think is right, and these pitfalls are unfamiliar."

Just ask Sony BMG. In an effort to be proactive rather than just litigious in limiting illegal online music swapping, the label late last year tried something new: music CDs that when placed in a customer's computer installed a program to prevent the copying of songs. Companies have been adding antipiracy features to products for years, so what's wrong with that? Everything, according to an outraged mass of music fans. Installing software programs--even (or perhaps especially) one aimed at protecting intellectual property--without explicit user permission turned out be crossing the line. Even worse, the software made computers vulnerable to viruses. Sony quickly backed down and offered a program to remove the first one. But it just ended up making things worse when the new program was found to have similar security flaws.

Other recent examples: Best Buy was flamed by customers angry that prices they had seen advertised on the company's website--prices that can fluctuate hour to hour--didn't always match those in stores. Wal-Mart was smeared when its online store started recommending that buyers of the DVD Planet of the Apes also consider movies with African American themes. Even Google, celebrated for its "Don't be evil" motto, has taken some blows--for restricting the use of video clips it displays on its site, for example.

You don't have to be a big-name company to get bitten. B&H Photo-Video, a brick-and-mortar camera and electronics retailer based in New York City, has a solid reputation among online buyers. Henry Posner, B&H's communications director, responds to nearly every negative comment about the store, apologizing for screwups and explaining the company's side of the story when he feels a customer is being unfair. It sounds perfectly reasonable, but B&H has been blasted by online commenters who accuse the company of trying to dilute criticism inappropriately. "I aspire to be diplomatic," says Posner. "But there are people who will yell and scream no matter what I post."

How do you avoid being cast as the villain in the Web community's view of the world? Learn from others' mistakes. Here's a quick rundown of some of the ways you could run off-course in the blurry, dynamic, and sometimes no-win world of high-tech business practices. Note that in most of these cases, the companies could reasonably argue that they didn't do anything wrong--but lots of angry people begged to differ and were not shy about spreading the word.

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