Question 1 — Multiple Choice
15 points · 30 questions · 0.5 eachQuestion 2 — Short Answer
31 pointsQuestion 3 — Scenario: The Fitness-Tracker Data Sale
5 points
Scenario: Yousef is a data analyst at a small fitness-tracking
startup. He discovers a way to quietly sell users' precise location
histories to a third-party data broker — the users' privacy policy
vaguely mentions "aggregated data sharing" but was never updated to
disclose this specific practice. The startup is two months from
running out of cash, and this deal would generate enough revenue to
make payroll for its 40 employees through the next funding round.
Yousef is the only one who understands how easily the "anonymized"
location data could be re-identified back to individual users.
Part A (1 pt) — Apply Kant's Categorical Imperative (1st
Formulation) to evaluate the maxim "I may sell user data without
proper disclosure when my company needs the revenue to survive."
Answer Key
Universalizing this maxim means every company facing financial
pressure would sell user data without real disclosure. If that
became a universal rule, no privacy policy or consent disclosure
would be trusted or believed, which defeats the very purpose of
having disclosures in the first place — the rule is self-defeating.
So the maxim cannot be universalized, and the action is wrong under
the 1st Formulation.
Part B (2 pts) — Explain how the Categorical Imperative (2nd
Formulation) applies to Yousef's decision.
Answer Key
The 2nd Formulation requires that we treat people as ends in
themselves and never merely as a means. By selling users' location
data without real disclosure, Yousef and the company are using the
users merely as a means to generate revenue and save the company,
without respecting the users' rational ability to consent to (or
refuse) that use of their data. Because the users never had the
chance to make an informed decision, they are being treated only
instrumentally — which is a violation of their status as rational,
autonomous beings — so the action is wrong regardless of the good
outcome (saving jobs) it produces.
Part C (1 pt) — Contrast how Act Utilitarianism and Rule
Utilitarianism (the Greatest Happiness Principle) would evaluate
this decision.
Answer Key
Act Utilitarianism looks only at the consequences of this single
act: since saving 40 jobs and the company likely produces more total
happiness than the harm to users from a data sale, an Act
Utilitarian could justify going through with it. Rule Utilitarianism
instead asks what would happen if the rule "companies may sell user
data without real disclosure whenever they need revenue" were
followed universally — the long-term erosion of trust in tech
companies and repeated privacy harms across many users would produce
far less net happiness, so a Rule Utilitarian would oppose the sale.
Part D (1 pt) — Using Social Contract Theory, discuss whose rights
are at stake and whether Yousef's company is honoring its
obligations to users.
Answer Key
Social Contract Theory holds that users implicitly agreed to the
terms of the platform's stated privacy policy in exchange for using
the service, and companies are obligated to honor that agreement —
no one, including the company, is above the rules of the
arrangement. Because the actual data-selling practice was never
disclosed, the company is violating users' negative right to be left
alone (control over their personal information) that they reasonably
believed the contract protected, breaking the mutual trust the
social contract depends on even though the deal benefits the
company's own employees.
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0/15MCQ
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