Current Event #2

The Slippery Slopes of Silicon Valley
About a year ago there were many ethical dilemmas happening in the Silicon Valley. Start-up tech companies were using the data given to them by their users and clients to perform studies and to take down their competitors. Some examples of this are Facebook and Uber. Facebook recently changed up the news feeds of over half a million users to perform a psychological study. This allowed them to alter the number of positive and negative items seen on a user's wall. While this may not have had very significant effects, Facebook was manipulating information in different ways for different customers without their knowledge. Uber, a taxi service, also used technology to take down one of their greatest rivals, Lyft, by sending in fake orders and canceling them. Many people in the world look up to Silicon Valley as the center of the technology industry. However, their loose ethical standards seem to suggest that maybe they aren't the shining pinnacle of inspiration we should all be looking to. Hopefully as these young start-ups grow up they will also mature in their interactions with those around them.