Do Business Well

We will now consider more specifically the benefits and drawbacks of ethics to online marketing:

Ethical benefits

• Online marketing has the potential to remove prejudice and barriers, as transactions are carried out via disembodied computer screens.

The lack of need for a physical presence in a particular place allows the inclusion of people whose physical needs make working in an office environment difficult.

Internet-based business activities are opening up markets, thereby improving information provision and freedom of speech about different products, including non-corporate information (see Hamelink 2000: 139-164). For example, typing ‘Nike’ into a search engine also finds sites about Nike products alleging human rights abuses by the company.

Ethical drawbacks

Technology and law have so far been unsuccessful in controlling what is available on the Internet. This means that inaccurate claims made in relation to products or services are difficult to control.

As systems of protection for intellectual works such as patenting and copyright were designed for tangible products, there is currently no clear protection for electronic data, or understanding of the limits of ownership. Such issues are compounded by the potential for mass dissemination via the Internet and email. The potential for the dissemination of incorrect information is significant.

The increasing prevalence of computers in the workplace has focused the minds of employers on the use of organizational equipment for non- organizational tasks, such as booking holidays on the Internet. The most difficult area to discern is the intersection between use and abuse, meaning the area where personal use may have some positive workplace implications, and work use may have some personal implications. For example, Internet surfing for hobby interests will hone the IT skills of employees who use those same skills for work tasks.

Electronic monitoring has enormous potential for infringing on the privacy of employees and customers. The archiving aspect of computer- mediated communication means that monitoring of employees in the workplace can be done at unprecedented levels of detail. This is a particular problem in call centre work in which people may be paid according to the number of calls handled in a particular time. It can be very demotivating when even the length of toilet breaks is measured!

Hamelink goes on to demonstrate how Internet communications have some important and distinctive ethical characteristics:

• Communicating to many anonymous people simultaneously is very easy. For example, sending an unsolicited email to a group can be construed as `spamming’.

The disembodied nature of electronic communication — communication is in text, and hence does not convey tone of voice or other non-textual clues, although ’symbols’ are increasingly used to convey, for example, a joke or happiness = ©, or sadness :- ( = O. It is easy, therefore, for the ‘meaning’ of the message to be misinterpreted.

• Where a common language is understood, communication of images, documents and complex ideas can be made across the world as long as the technology is available.
• Cyberspace is not secure. This means that transactions on the Web can be accessed by those not party to the transaction. Security is improving, however, and of course terrestrial transactions are not 100 per cent secure either.

* The `borderless’ nature of the Internet makes control extremely difficult. Attempts at national controls, such as prohibiting the purchase of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf over the Internet in Germany, have failed.

• Communication in cyberspace has extraordinary archiving capabilities. Internet sites accessed are recorded and firms can also track the cyberspace activities of those who have visited their Web site. There are clear implications here for consumer privacy.
• Those who control the technology become very powerful, witness for example recent court cases over the monopolistic behaviour of Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation.

From this brief list you can see that the ability to communicate quickly and easily with people across the world through the Internet has a number of ethical implications. Another, related new phenomenon is the advent of ‘flaming’, where individuals send offensive email messages to individuals or sometimes groups. However, it is important to recognize that few of these problems are fundamentally new to the Internet. Whysall (2001) notes that many of the issues discussed above can be paralleled in conventional business ethics.

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