Introduction
Social, Ethical and Legal issues are important to employers, particularly in the IT industry. In each profession, the companies rely on employees to fulfil successful work with professional behaviour and above their own personal gain. Employees are relied on by their own organisation to follow the code of conduct, these employees have certain responsibilities whilst working for a company, employees are expected to carry out work with accordance to the code of conducts provided by the professional bodies regardless of the circumstances.
Behaviour of an employee is expected to follow the code of the conduct which provides certain standards, each employee should carry out these standards whilst working for a company. The standards set provides employees with a professional relationship to the colleagues and company they work with. The behaviour of employees creates a certain status and the expected activities which every profession requires (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2008).
In certain companies, particularly in the IT industries, employees do not always follow the standards set within the code of conduct, this creates social, ethical and legal issues. This then then causes an unprofessional status to the company and the employees that fail to address the standards. Most employers become immediately concerned with the wrong manner taken by their own employees, the responsibility to ensure skilled behaviour by employees and the understanding of the code of conduct depends on the employee keeping the qualified behaviour in account whilst working as a qualified employee. An issue within a company with a high specialised status is more than likely to solve the issue publicly, which therefore provides the public with assurance the company solves issues accordingly. (Bott, 2005).
Social Issues
Microsoft has been charged with a lawsuit claiming accusation of gender discrimination. An employee believes that she has been passed over for a promotion during her work at Microsoft on more than one occasion because of her gender (CNN, 2015). Morally this is wrong, and in any business discrimination should be non-existent. Talent could be hidden within any individual, and for employers to discriminate against their own employees for something such as gender may limit their future hires, as nobody would want to be in that position. Her lawsuit claims that this was in comparison to her male colleagues, who she believes were less qualified (Microsoft Gender Case, 2015). Up until the year of 2014, Microsoft used ‘stack ranking’ to evaluate which of its employees were further in line of a promotion by rating their work performance from 1 (good) to 5 (bad). This bad promotion system caused employees to work against each other, and selfishly take more credit for themselves in order to be ranked higher on the stack. Microsoft has since then abandoned using this method. In order to battle the lawsuit, as a response, Microsoft claims that they have been working on trying to improve the role that women have within the company, now run by CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft spokespeople have made statements to say that the company is working towards becoming more committed to a diverse workforce (Wired, 2015).
Sony Corporation, best known for their games consoles and mobile devices fell a target of major hacking (BBC, 2014). As a result of this 93,000 online network accounts were affected (Thornhill, 2011). The problems for Sony were increasing rapidly as personal details of Sony’s clients were also now being stolen as a result of the hack. “77 million peoples’ details on the PlayStation Network (PSN)”. (Arthur, 2011). Sony has reportedly shut down its computer network as a precaution and advised employees that resolving the situation could take anywhere from one day to three weeks.
Customers details where a major part of the hacking which meant the names, birth dates, addresses, emails, phone numbers and passwords of people who had entered contests promoted by Sony were all stolen (Bloxham, 2011). And therefore as a result left Sony losing money and customers because they were hesitant to stay with the company. While competitors have the advantage due to this issue, Sony have apologized to all their customers and offer incentives to customers to prevent them turning to competitors (Daily Mail, 2011). Sony admit their security system was weak and wasn’t always up to date, further to their apology they also added software monitoring and enhanced data protection and encryption as new security measures.
Sony have now implemented a stronger and reliable up to date security system which they believe will address further attacks. Although Sony haven’t commented on what security measures they have used. According to (Alapati) on how to avoid a giant data breach is by “Encryption “The first and most important is to encrypt sensitive data relating to customers and the company. “Monitor access” The second most important is to audit data access to protect against insider threats. If new security system are as strong, there should be no breach of hacking as the system should be secure and if there was a potential threat, it can be easily visible.
Ethical Issues
In 2010 Apple published their Supplier Responsibility Report which reviews Apple’s suppliers facilities, these reports ensures Apple’s Code of Conduct is followed and all issues are fixed. The Supplier Responsibility Report is published each year and informs any issues across Apple’s iPad, iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch factories.
In 2010, 62 workers in an iPhone factory were hospitalized due to inhaling harmful chemicals. This particular chemical was known as a poisoning chemical to the suppliers but the workers were not informed it would affect their health. This ethical issue is a high concern for businesses, injuring by through negligent actions is not acceptable in any working environment and Apple’s Code of Conduct was created specifically for the appropriate working conditions within the factories (Apple Inc. 2016).
Within the 2010 Supplier Responsibility Report, Apple included improved efforts will be made to ensure suppliers understand the responsible working conditions within the factories (Chen, 2010). Regarding this improvement, in 2014 an investigation was made at a factory which reported workers were working for at least 12 hours per day and in poor conditions (Bilton, 2014). Apples responded with a statement “We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions”. Williams (2014) reported apple’s Supplier Responsibility team are working to improve the working conditions within the factories.
Google is one of the most dynamic IT companies whose impact is especially huge in the search engine category where it is the leader. The company faces the ethical issues of balancing its growth strategy with governments’ demands such as censorship in China. Practices such as censorship are highly unethical (Lee, 2013). The company has adopted a bold strict non-censorship strategy that is in line with the company’s mission of making information universally available (Lee, 2013). Facebook, Inc which is the largest online social networking services firm faces the ethical issues due to its actions that infringe the privacy rights of its users. For example, in 2012 researchers from the company in collaboration with Cornell University manipulated news feed of 700,000 Facebook users of whom some were less than eighteen years old. Users had not authorized this experiment. The company has instituted a strict user privacy strategy whereby users have more control over their privacy through different user account’s settings (Albergotti & Dwoskin).
Legal Issues
Snapchat were confronted with legal issues of violating the company’s own privacy policy. Snapchat’s privacy policy stated that images and information sent between users were not saved once the messages had been sent, and the messages were erased forever, this insured users when sending messages they would be kept private and safeguarded from data collection (McLane, 2013). Snapchat is the publisher of a mobile application which allows users to share photos, videos and messages to other users, this lead to an investigation whether or not Snapchat was using Privacy Enhanced Technology, this technology correctly eliminates data collected through applications, when investigated it was revealed Snapchat falsified their privacy policy (Electronic Privacy Information Center, 2013).
The investigation of the legal issue revealed that the information passed through the application to different users were saved on different servers, some of this private information were sent to unknown third parties without users consent (InfoSecurity, 2013). The updated privacy policy informs users that any information shared with them, they may share that information to any other company.
Snapchat mislead users by violating and misrepresenting the privacy policy, this lead to the company confronting allegations and legal issues which concluded to an agreement of not misleading users (Neuman, 2014). Through this legal issue, Snapchat was revealed and reviewed as “a company built on the lie of privacy”, the reviews of the new privacy policy has raised concerns to users, but Snapchat has now corrected their privacy policy and are no longer misleading or taking advantage of inexperienced users (French, 2015).
Google has publically admitted to tax avoidance in the UK by sending the majority of their profits to Bermuda, which is considered a ‘tax haven’ for multinational organizations. As further evidence to this claim, it is known that Google has made roughly £2.5 billion in sales, but paid only £6 million in tax. (Independent, 2012) Google is not being shy about these allegations, as Chairman of the Company, Erik Schmidt has openly said in an interview that “he is proud of the structure which they have set up”. Although there are many benefits for Google to remain in business with the British public, Google refuses to pay any more money in corporation tax (Independent, 2012). Erik Schmidt believes that they have paid their taxes in a way which breaks no laws. This should be unacceptable, since other workers pay their full tax, yet big companies such as Google can get away with paying only a fraction of the profits that they earn doing business in the country. On top of this, there are also further allegations that many multinational corporations such as Starbucks, IKEA, Amazon and Apple have also previously taken part in a similar tax avoidance (Sky, 2015). In order to combat this, the diverted profits tax has been introduced. This new tax will charge companies such as Google 25% of their UK made profits which have been hidden away in a different location such as Bermuda (Sky, 2015).
Conclusion
In conclusion, we believe that companies which face these Social, Ethical and Legal issues are making an effort to improve their flawed ways. However, this does not justify their actions prior to their responses about the allegations made against them, as a few of the issues outlined above are more centred on carelessness rather than business mistakes. As an example of what we mean by this statement, it is outlined in the issue regarding Apple’s iPhone factory. Any good business leader should be aware of the health risks they pose on their employees when letting them deal with harmful chemicals which they put in their products, and it should be their responsibility to make sure that the environment their employees work in wont cause harm to them.
Having researched and reviewed the cases above concerning Microsoft, Sony, Google, Snapchat, Apple, and Facebook, we believe that it is no secret that these companies are working toward creating a better environment for their employees, and attempting to provide a better business for their consumers. Time will tell, whether similar issues with these companies surface in the near future, but given the position they are in they should be more careful and pay closer attention to their management, as this has an effect on their reputation, their customers, and their workers. On that note there are many agreed and disagreed statements, but it is a very complex matter that is of great interest.
References
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PIC Group 21 