Essay: Business Ethics & Social Response In Google Corp.

Google’s strategy and serving of all stakeholders

Discuss about the Business Ethics and Social Response.

Google is the most popular organization that had given its consumer the best search engine providing knowledge to the students, scholars and any ordinary person who needs to gain knowledge on a particular subject. Sitting at home and gaining knowledge without travelling to libraries and going through a number of books has made this platform preferable for millions of people. Google is often considered to be in the first position among all other such platform because of the huge search results that it provides. Besides, it has YouTube, google chrome, google + and many others which have gained attention. It has a huge fan base all over the world. However, Google although had made huge profits from its brand value and the positive aspects it have, it had failed miserably in maintaining privacy of the consumers. The various regulatory bodies have investigated and found out that although google claims to not indulge into consumers’ privacy there has been cases where such discrepancies are reported.

The report will first establish the different strategies it had taken to make consumers happy, then the ways about how google should respect privacy of consumers at the same time of maintaining profit and lastly how to deal with the growing regulations of every nations that keep a strict eye on Google’s different moves.

Google has become one of the largest platforms that provides the best search results on the internet and has gained the appreciation of a huge number of people all over the world. It has been successful in providing its users with the best satisfaction while searching for their topics of interest. Google is renowned of producing the best results of the searches and makes the most of the expectations of the consumers. In this away it has been able to create a loyal consumer base that had crossed the consumer base of many other rival organizations (Bray, 2016). It has been successful in establishing a powerful position in the rank 1 position of all the similar organizations and had surpassed many others in establishing a brand name for itself. It had surpassed organizations like WebCrawler and Infoseek which used to be the most dominating firms in the market. Not only them, it had also surpassed Bing of the Microsoft, yahoo and many others as well.

It has established a market that mainly covers for about 65% of the global market share. Statistics have stated that there is usually about 3.5 billion searches everyday on an average which is found to be much higher than the searches done on the other websites. Therefore, in order to keep the loyal customer base intact and to attract more and more customer base, Google has always tried to incorporate services so that the best outcome is received by the citizens of different nations (Cao et al., 2014). Google has been believed to expand it reaches to a variety of streams and ventures. It has established a number of advertising platforms along with a digital book publishing space. It has also been successful in establishing its hold in the social networking zones. With the expansions made in the different fields it has become the most successful organization. It has been even seen to buy a large number of companies about more than hundreds in number by purchasing billions of sums over it. The purchased companies were found to belong to various industries like from robotics to even smart home devices and even to intangibles such as the voice recognition technologies. Although a number of various privacy concerns have been raised by different concerned authorities over a large number of years, however many customers and supporters look into the issue otherwise (Toy & Hay, 2014). There are many advertising companies who have been excessively successful in displaying their ads to the ordinary citizens and thereby helping ton increase awareness among the various citizens regarding a particular product. Very attractive advertisements displayed with sponsored links alongside search results for the key words not only provide the companies with benefits but also gives a large amount of profit for the Google corporation’s well (Lopez, Marin & Ca;deron, 2016). Besides this the other strategies that have been proposed by google is to attract a large number of customer through the varieties of services it has started for the global population. Some of them are the most popular web Browser called the Google Chrome that has gained appreciation because of its simplistic handling that provides no hassle but a simplistic surfing (Shafavi & Shukur, 2014). The email system initiated by Google has also helped supporters by providing a huge number of space which was much greater than the rival mailing servers. It has provided a video watching site regarding any query like from scientific experiments to cooking classes to films. Others involve the Android system used globally and the google + which is a similar social networking site like Facebook (Vienot, Garcia & Nieh, 2014). Google has an X-ray department that has world cut technologies that utilizes exciting and cutting edge technique that has the capability to change the world.

Google respecting privacy and still maintaining profitability

Given its business model, Google is bound to collect data on its users’ activities, location, time of login and so on. But in order to do so, the company has to bear in mind that it has to maintain an approach that does not hurt the privacy of its users (Weiss, 2014). Google has been earlier subjected to privacy breeching allegations. Such allegations have not only led the organization to pay millions of dollars as fine to Government authorities of various countries but also have been a prime reason of erosion of trust in the brand among users’ minds. Thus, the need of the hour for the Internet behemoth is to have a more ethical and governed Tracking system for its users which can help its users maintain their privacy and also enable the company to deliver superior value through its services beating the competition (Bryman & Bell, 2015). A few recommendations on how to optimize its services have been listed.

Services such as Google Dashboard should be more promoted to users which gives them clearer control of which information they wish to share with the company while browsing through its range of internet services. The service needs to be constantly upgraded by the tech giant to make sure the user gets the convenience of retrieving huge amount of information within fractions of seconds but not at the cost of losing out own information without free will (Shaw & Barry, 2015).

Services like Street View which have been earlier a hub of controversies need to be rightly offered to users. The service must ensure to keep peoples’ faces, vehicle registration plates to be anonymous while providing real time view of any desired location to its users (viewers) (Desjardins & McCall, 2014).

Further emphasizing on Google Adwords, which happens to be Google’s cash cow maybe further worked upon to gain advertisers’ trust. Google needs to inform its advertiser exactly how many clicks on his/her advertisement link could get the link to what kind of ranking order among search results. In doing so, the advertiser will get a better understanding whether the ad is actually relevant to that segment or it needs to be placed in some other campaign (Speikermann et al., 2015).

The ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling in the EU needs to be more stringently adhered to. Though it is hard to take a decision on contents to be screened and displayed, the company must dedicate enough resources to make sure that it doesn’t get embroiled in major lawsuits especially with Governments (Nofer et al., 2014). The ‘Do not Track’ call to action must come up with every upgraded version of Google Chrome.

The unified Privacy Agreement commissioned on March 1, 2012 should be improvised to become more lucid, giving the user a profound understanding of the information the user is going to divulge to the company in the course of his activities in the company services.

In spite of lofty privacy agreements, there has been breach of trust from Google’s end a number of times leaving Governments and users in shock and awe. Thus, adhering to the mentioned terms is the only concern for the Big Bull. So, in a nutshell, it may be said that developing trust among its users through transparency and optimized servicing of requests is the key to unlocking huge revenue coffers for the Giant (Boreale & Paolini, 2015).

Privacy is a possession that must be maintained by an individual and is his birthright. No medium in the world has the right and audacity to inherit your privacy without sheer permission and reflects negligence in providing respect to that individual. Many nations have active organizations that are seen to be very particular about the privacy maintenance of each and every member of the nation. They have active monitoring sectors who perform their task very diligently and undergoes thorough researches and analysis to understand the extent of an organization in the private zone of citizens and lao look over any breaches in the policies on privacy maintained by that nation. Google is a site that mainly performs it excellence depending upon the information that it derives from the individuals either through track down system or by following the searches made by the organization on the shopping sites, asking for allowance on the phones through their android system thereby knowing a lot about a person that the person is himself unaware of ("Google Privacy Breach", 2017).

A poll has recently stated that about 52 percent of its users are very concerned about the level of privacy that google have crept into. A similar issue was found when it was told to the safari users that thy were protected when the actual case was not so. Google cookies were still installed when it was not supposed to. Google, admitting it as a mistake immediately took it away from the public sites. This situation was actively handled by the Federal Trade Commissions called the FTC who launched an investigation and found Google to be guilty. Google faced a huge loss in this scenario to pay $22.5 million as the fine for refraining from its privacy policies. Google also had to pay a total sum of about $17 million to settle the different charges brought out by 37 states and the District of Colombia. Even Google maintained breaching of privacy policies when it went around neighborhood collecting information and scanning data from unsecured networks of users. When caught by the Information commissioner’s office in UK, it apologized but even carried their work. In the United States also they had to pay a settlement of about $ 25, 000 to the Federal Communication’s commission for intentionally delaying their investigation on privacy policies. FCC released statements that the privacy breaches were intentional and were done deliberately to which google requested them to be confidential about their findings. This resulted in a loss of $7 million by the google. Even Google has faced huge obstacles while establishing its base in China. Government had put many restrictions to Google to spread their business. Moreover, its competitor called BAIDU in china had also given it a very hard time. Moreover, here Google had to agree to a number of Self-censor filters in accordance with Chinese Law because it never followed this policy before and always followed a free and open access to information. Google here had to provide many strategies to earn profit and also establish their base successfully. Therefore, the Google should strategize their business plans and develop markets in an ethical sense where the privacy of it consumers should be respected and not breached. In this way, it will get into less struggles with the regulating bodies of different nations and can face less penalties and break down of consumer trust on them (Martin, Borah & Palmatier, 2014).

Conclusion:

From the above report, one can easily understand that the main loophole in business strategy is that it has no specific ethical considerations that an organization needs to have to gain consumer trust. In order to create a loyal base of customers, the organization also needs to be trustworthy which will be reflected in the activities and the strategies that it undertake. It should not be the scene that an organization in order to make profit are violating privacy rules and systems of the people of the nations (Paganini & Pierluigi Paganini is Chief Information Security Officer at Bit4Id, 2017). The profit-making strategy and the quest for being the best in the industry should never overcome the ethical considerations and the moral virtues the company is based on. Trust creates a brand value and the brand name should not be affected by keeping consumers in darkness. Therefore, Google in his future ventures should be careful and strategize their approaches based on moral virtues and principles so that its reputation does not get affected.

References:

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