It's true that "what is ethical? " would be just as good of a question and I would absolutely be interested to find out more answers to it. In my point of view and in this case, ethical means that our website should focus on facilitating our users to achieve the goal THEY set for themselves and we don't use any mechanism that is deceiving, hidden, makes use of human vulnerabilities to our benefit (or third parties benefits) or has consequences that the user has not intended.
An example to that would be with Facebook Pixel: users don't know it's there, will be benefiting a third party without consent and will further have consequences outside our website that most of the time users don't want. Therefore, I consider using it unethical.
I think relating to specific contexts, like websites in this discussion, ethics might be something more actionable and straightforward, helping people like us create environments that are more mindful towards our users.
It's true that "what is ethical? " would be just as good of a question and I would absolutely be interested to find out more answers to it. In my point of view and in this case, ethical means that our website should focus on facilitating our users to achieve the goal THEY set for themselves and we don't use any mechanism that is deceiving, hidden, makes use of human vulnerabilities to our benefit (or third parties benefits) or has consequences that the user has not intended.
An example to that would be with Facebook Pixel: users don't know it's there, will be benefiting a third party without consent and will further have consequences outside our website that most of the time users don't want. Therefore, I consider using it unethical.
I think relating to specific contexts, like websites in this discussion, ethics might be something more actionable and straightforward, helping people like us create environments that are more mindful towards our users.