Title

Business Ethics Concern on Alexa (Virtual Assistant) by Amazon

Assignment 1

Group Members
Aneeq Anjum (7309)
Mansoor Shahbaz (7311)

Supervisor Name

Dr. Fatima Omer

 Introduction of Amazon Alexa:

Success never comes without a price, this adage couldn’t have been more pertinent to the case of
Amazon’s voice assistant device i.e., Alexa. Since its introduction in November 2014, Alexa was
able to hit the waves in market and its success can be gauged from the fact that within the span of
three years its sales soared to the staggering figure of 21 million units (Lauren Byrd, 2023). The
ground breaking launch however, was not able to escape the lens of critics hence, it accompanied
the wave of controversies that the parent company might have never accounted for. Despite its
utility, Alexa got swamped with the allegations ranging from data privacy (Adetunji, 2020) to
objection on the name; “Alexa” (The Ethics of Amazon Alexa, 2023). Amazon’s attempt to give
human name to its product had mixed reactions. For some it was an attempt to bring AI in
proximity to technology but for others it turned out to be a painful joke. There were instances
where women named “Alexa” had to legally change their names. Unfortunately, name was not
the only concern for Amazon, it soon came under the pump for allegedly breaching the data
privacy of its users (Kelly & O'Donovan, 2023). The scope of this work will revolve around the
concerns over the data privacy pertaining to the voice recording feature of Alexa and moral
predicaments encompassing it.

 What can you build with Alexa?

Create Alexa Skills

Alexa can reach to more than 100 million individuals by enabling Alexa apps to various devices.
Which allows individual to control their home essentials, entertainments, shopping through
voice.

Develop Enterprise Solutions

With Alexa, you can power up your business with automation by assigning quarterly stock
management and enabling operations through voice. Alexa can also enable your workstations
through your voice assistant.

Build Alexa Devices

We can integrate our devices with Alexa to configure their operations. Alexa can control all your
devices with Bluetooth connectivity

 How Alexa is violating business ethics:

As studies in Business Ethics. We leads to apply all concepts of moral, non-moral, morality and
business ethics on Alexa.

1. Moral Standards (Ethical Principles):

Moral standards refer to rules about right and wrong that guide human behavior in all aspects of
life. Moral standards related to Amazon Alexa includes:

 Privacy: Ensuring that Amazon Alexa should respect user privacy, advocating how far
data is being stored and manipulate. Several charges has registered against Alexa of
storing voices of children without the consent of parents. (Kelly & O'Donovan, 2023)
 Transparency: Amazon should clearly inform users about what and how long Alexa
stores data, how it is used.
 Inform User about new updates: Moral standards demand that Amazon Alexa should
inform user timely about their new policies of data retention and uses. Amazon is also
abide by law to inform user what kind of data they store for better recognition of speech
for their items. (The Ethics of Amazon Alexa, 2023)As they claimed, they had improved
50% efficiency as compared to last year of Alexa.

2. Non-Moral Standards:

Non-moral standards are social norms and rules that do not relate to concepts of right and wrong.
However, they significantly influence aspects such as etiquette and manners.

Advancement in technology: Stakeholders has already set up the rule for Amazon Alexa to
improve efficiency of voice recognition to transform machine learning into NLP. (Fowler, 2019)
Applicability: Amazon Alexa applicability to transform their integration with work stations.
Play stations, Offices, Home devices. All of these standards and requirement composite of user
experience and their requisition.

Response Timing: Expectations regarding the speed and efficiency of Alexa's responses to user
commands, which impact overall user satisfaction.

3. Morality:

Morality refers to societal norms. Amazon Alexa should compile about these rules and regulation
in accordance with their technology.

Privacy Violation: Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the
recordings? For most people, the answer is, “Are you crazy?”. (Fowler, 2019)Amazon
Alexa has accused by FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to act as a surveillance to record
their actions even its switched off. This has raised a concern of morality. However, moral
standards deemed to provide privacy to each individual. This question has become crucial
that even by signing off the consent. Amazon is violating moral standards. (Lynskey, 2019).
Considering the route to ethical behavior suggested by (Velasquez, 2014) in his book

“Business Ethics Concepts and Case” , this situation can be framed as ethical situation
because the act of data breach can cause imminent harm to the user of this device (Lynskey,
2019) , proximate in a sense that the sensitive information of children could be misused and
by every mean defy moral standards. However, the obstacle to the moral reasoning in this
case was the failure of Amazon to accept their immoral behavior. Rationalizing the
company’s act, Amazon’s spokesperson claimed that the organization does not disclose the
information the customer’s information unless it is demanded by the government or law
enforcing agencies (Adetunji, The Conversation, 2020) , however, this statement could not
justify the fact that the conversation of the customers was recorded and kept without their
consent.
  Excess usage of technology: A widespread uses of technology of AI has marked
humans more dependent on gadgets. A cost of critical thinking is vanishing with the
passage of time. Users are reluctant to perform quite easy task. This has raised a question
on human health and self-development. This is contradicting morality.
 Content Appropriateness: Ethical guidelines on the type of information and responses
Alexa provides, ensuring that it does not disseminate harmful, misleading, or
inappropriate content.

4. Business Ethics:

Business ethics refers to ethical principles that apply in the corporate world. For Amazon Alexa,
this includes:

 User Protection: Being a multi conglomerate company. Amazon assure confidence to

user about their security of data. They are abide by business ethics to conduct user
consent to user their personal information if required. (Lauren Byrd, 2023)
 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Amazon Alexa is reflecting CSR by promoting
high quality educative content with the help of (NLP) for students as well as for
researchers. Amazon voice assistant also enabling disable individuals to interact with the
technology. Also Alexa devices setting up in classroom to design and teach in a multiple
direction to students. In addition, Teachers are using accessibility to design quizzes.
(Monda, 2023)

5. Moral Reasoning:

A person begin to do ethics when s/he turns to look at moral standards learned from family,
friends, society and examined whether these standards are up to the mark or not. In the case of
Amazon Alexa, we will examine thoroughly through moral standards whether the actions are
considerable and convenient to the society or not.

Alexa's Behavior: Follows instructions based on direct input from users or pre-set rules. For
example, Alexa only responds correctly to commands because it's programmed to do so, not
because it understands any moral implications.
Example: If asked to perform an illegal action, Alexa would not comply simply because it's a
pre-programmed software. Moreover, when Amazon was sued in (FTC) against charge of
recording the voices of individuals without their consent. It was not how Alexa process and
control, it was the build in program to record individual voices to improve recognition without
their consent. Being an stakeholder of a company, it would certainly not appropriate to the moral
standards as Alexa should design in a way to assure trust among consumers.

Recognizing an Ethical Situation:

We have studied since childhood that listening secretly to individuals is unethical and against
moral standards. Similarly doing or recording something without a person mutual consent is
also unethical. However with the case of Amazon Alexa, as it is programmed to listen
individual at their premises to better recognize their needs, wants and demand. This may help
however Amazon to increase scalability, but contradicting against moral standards. Amazon
spoke person announced that they only record voice to improve recognition of their Alexa
devices reflecting, “Rationalizing the actions”. With the advancement of Alexa recognition
processing, amazon is able to deem your demand more than you are. In addition, apparently
only those customized advertisement is displaying which a person usually discussed. This is
how Amazon able to sustain its dominancy by reflecting diffusion of responsibility as they
claimed they want to be customer most centric platform but contradicting many of the moral
standards.

6. Moral Responsibility & blame:

The breach of basic ethical standards by Amazon by recording the voices of users
has sparked a debate over the role of its employees in hiding the truth from public.
The question is that are the managers equally responsible in staying complacent
over the fact the organization was breaching fundamental right? The answer is yes.
Since the workers and the management knew, what they were doing and they made
the choice of staying in an organization out of their free will. They could have blown
the whistle and opted out of the company. (Lauren Byrd, 2023)The burden of
responsibility cannot be shifted away from the employees just because they were
doing what they were intruded to do organizing displacement of responsibility.

Contribution:

Mr Mansoor covered (Moral, non moral standards, business ethics).

However Mr. Aneeq has covered (Introduction, Moral reasoning and moral responsibility)
Bibliography:

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