Ethics and My Study
By: Johnathan Sellers
Distribution of media programming including music, movies and television has been revolutionized by the iTunes software in recent years. As illegal downloading of copyrighted material including all of these media grew more popular, Apple’s iTunes software was the one of the first to provide a legal alternative to purchase high quality versions of all of these media types digitally and is now considered the largest digital media distributor (Apple's numbers).
The iTunes software has completely changed the media distribution business, changing how people are able to purchase and consume their media. It has also changed how people find out about media they are interested in, as Apple has developed ways to provide users with information on media content that they may be interested in. These features include Apple taking information from users’ iTunes media libraries so that they can make recommendations for media that they feel that particular iTunes user would like and be willing to purchase. Apple has also provided ways for users who are connected to a large network to view other iTunes users content libraries and even enjoy their media.
These features have lead to debates on the web over whether or not it is ethical for Apple to take your personal iTunes library content information and use it to try and sell the consumer more content. It has also led to different discussions of whether further social networking features should be implemented into the software to increase connectivity which will raise additional privacy concerns.
These three links discuss the ethical issues of Apple using customer’s information from an iTunes user’s media library in order to sell more media content to that specific customer. The first is a news article (iTunes news article on privacy concerns) that describes the possible privacy concerns when the new technology was released. The other two articles debate on whether or not the feature is good or bad for iTunes users.
These next two links discuss the further implementation of adding additional social networking features to the software. Some argue for the additional implementation like in this article but others are a little wearier as seen in this article.
The purpose of my study is to examine iTunes consumers to see how they feel about being connected to other users and how they feel about their own privacy using this software. These ethical issues are important and will help shape further media distribution as digital distribution continues to grow both thru the use of iTunes as well as other possible digital distributors in the future.
Image provided by Appleinsider.com
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