Evaluate a Business Ethics News Item
You are responsible for writing and submitting a paper that analyzes a specified business ethics news item from the perspective of the ethical decision rule identified by your instructor.
The instructor will distribute the two best business ethics news items submitted by you or your classmates in response to the news-item submission assignment. You may choose one or the other for your paper topic. Only that article should be used in fulfillment of the assignment—the use of any outside sources without citation (which will not be accepted) constitutes plagiarism.
The instructor will also specify which of the six decision rules you must apply to the article. If you have kept up with the course content, absorbing the readings, videos, and class discussions, you will be able to write the paper effectively and efficiently. If you have not, you will need to become well versed in the selected theory before writing (without the benefit of class discussions), which will reduce the amount of time that you have available to craft an excellent paper. Identify the article’s major and its minor ethical issues, and analyze them from the perspective of that decision rule—as if you are “trying it on” as the decision rule that you might live by.
The paper must be between 275 and 300 words (absolutely no more); place your name and word count in the upper right-hand corner of the paper. You should think in terms of writing a 350-400 word paper, and then paring it down and crafting it into a very tight, brief paper that fits into the required word range. Do not write a “short” paper and then engage in puffery. The paper must be double spaced in Times New Roman 12-point font, and uploaded as a Microsoft Word attachment by the date and time listed in the course schedule. This time is a cutoff—you are welcome to submit the paper early. Papers that miss the cutoff will lose 25% of their points if submitted any time in the following 24 hours, and will not be accepted after that time.
Your grade will be determined based on how closely your paper matches the above requirements, along with the depth of your analysis and the accuracy of your application of the decision rule. Invest sufficient time into thinking through, drafting, and refining your paper: It accounts for 20% of your course grade.
1. Apple Backs down on its controversial photo-scanning plans
A sustained backlash against a new system to look for child sexual abuse materials on user devices has led the company to hit pause.
In August, Apple detailed several new features intended to stop the dissemination of child sexual abuse materials. The backlash from cryptographers to privacy advocates to Edward Snowden himself was near-instantaneous, largely tied to Apple’s decision not only to scan iCloud photos for CSAM, but to also check for matches on your iPhone or iPad. After weeks of sustained outcry, Apple is standing down. At least for now.
“Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material,” the company said in statement Friday. “Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.”
Apple didn’t give any more guidance on what form those improvements might take, or how that input process might work. But privacy advocates and security researchers are cautiously optimistic about the pause.
“I think this is a smart move by Apple,” says Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook and cofounder of cybersecurity consulting firm Krebs Stamos Group. “There is an incredibly complicated set of trade-offs involved in this problem and it was highly unlikely that Apple was going to figure out an optimal solution without listening to a wide variety of equities.”
CSAM scanners work by generating cryptographic “hashes” of known abusive images—a sort of digital signature—and then combing through huge quantities of data for matches. Lots of companies already do some form of this, including Apple for iCloud Mail. But in its plans to extend that scanning to iCloud photos, the company proposed taking the additional step of checking those hashes on your device, as well, if you have an iCloud account.
The introduction of that ability to compare images on your phone against a set of known CSAM hashes—provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—immediately raised concerns that the tool could someday be put to other use. “Apple would have deployed to everyone’s phone a CSAM-scanning feature that governments could, and would, subvert into a surveillance tool to make Apple search people’s phones for other material as well,” says Riana Pfefferkorn, research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Apple has resisted multiple United States government requests to build a tool that would allow law enforcement to unlock and decrypt iOS devices in the past. But the company has also made concessions to countries like China, where customer data lives on state-owned servers. At a time when legislators around the world have ramped up efforts to undermine encryption more broadly, the introduction of the CSAM tool felt especially fraught.
“They clearly feel this is politically challenging, which I think shows how untenable their ‘Apple will always refuse government pressure’ position is,” says Johns Hopkins University cryptographer Matthew Green. “If they feel they must scan, they should scan unencrypted files on their servers,” which is the standard practice for other companies, like Facebook, which regularly scan for not only CSAM but also terroristic and other disallowed content types. Green also suggests that Apple should make iCloud storage end-to-end encrypted, so that it can’t view those images even if it wanted to.
The controversy around Apple’s plans was technical, as well. Hashing algorithms can generate false positives, mistakenly identifying two images as matches even when they’re not. Called “collisions,” those errors are especially concerning in the context of CSAM. Not long after Apple’s announcement, researchers began finding collisions in the iOS “NeuralHash” algorithm Apple intended to use. Apple said at the time that the version of NeuralHash that was available to study was not exactly the same as the one that would be used in the scheme, and that the system was accurate. Collisions may also not have a material impact in practice, says Paul Walsh, founder and CEO of the security firm MetaCert, given that Apple’s system requires 30 matching hashes before sounding any alarms, after which human reviewers would be able to tell what’s CSAM and what’s a false positive.
It’s unclear at this point what specific changes Apple could make to satisfy its critics. Green and Pfefferkorn both suggest that the company could limit its scanning to shared iCloud albums rather than involving its customers’ devices. And Stamos says the NeuralHash issues reinforce the importance of incorporating the research community more fully from the start, especially for an untested technology.
Others remain steadfast that the company should make its pause permanent. “Apple’s plan to conduct on-device scanning of photos and messages is the most dangerous proposal from any tech company in modern history,” says Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights nonprofit Fight for the Future. “It’s encouraging that the backlash has forced Apple to delay this reckless and dangerous surveillance plan, but the reality is that there is no safe way to do what they are proposing. They need to abandon this plan entirely.”
That Apple is holding off on its plans at all, though, is a major concession from a company not typically inclined to give them. “I’m stunned, frankly,” says Pfefferkorn. “It would be hard for them to announce they’re dropping these plans altogether, but ‘hitting pause’ is still a huge deal.”
Reference:
Barrett, Brian. “Apple Backs down on Its Controversial Photo-Scanning Plans.” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 Sept. 2021, www.wired.com/story/apple-icloud-photo-scan-csam-pause-backlash/.
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