After reading the Terms of Use for Facebook I am completely surprised. It seems like every clause is made to cover their own needs and concerns. They have created a social platform which has allowed numerous people to share pictures, information, etc. with their friends and strangers, yet when you sign up you don't see the fine print of how this information you upload to share with your friends and family will be used for their own purposes as well. They create privacy settings and application settings, but they leave a clause about how they "cannot guarantee" the absolute execution of it. Specifically I find it interesting that they provide the provision for safety that "you will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user" yet later in the document they make sure that any cases which are brought up find Facebook employees free of "any claims and damages, known and unknown, arising out of or in any way connected with any claim you have." They seem to contradict one another.
When applied to moral ethics which we have recently learned about I feel as if the entire document serves a relativist approach. I find that everything secretly says, whatever you decide is good for you is fine as long as I don't do it. It holds no responsibility for Facebook themselves. But they also try to push the idea of duty seen in a Utilitarianism approach. They ask you not to lie, not to hurt others, not to use other people for your own personal benefit, but yet they have no punishment or enforcement of it. They try to regulate it, but out of the many users currently signed up, they can't guarantee they will be able to find or take it down. It's quite confusing...
I look forward to hearing more about it during class today. So that I can clarify and see clearly how to apply it more specifically to these moral ethics ways of thinking.
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