DATA ETHICS
Data ethics has various meanings but basically refers to the principles behind how organisations gather, protect and use the data of their various stakeholders. These stakeholders can include employees, prospective employees, business partners, customers, suppliers, competitors and so on. It is an area of ethics that focuses on the moral obligations that organisations have, or are expected to have, when collecting and processing stakeholder data.
For the purposes of this article, we define data ethics as values and practices that seek to preserve the trust of stakeholders when collecting and processing their data.
Jeff Desjardins estimates that by 2025, individuals and companies around the world will collectively produce 463 exabytes of data each day. With this in mind, most businesses have begun to address the operational aspects of data management (such as gathering, storing, accessing and securing data from various business software solutions) but few have considered or started to address the ethical aspects of data management, which could have wide ranging consequences and responsibilities.
Large organisations, which in many instances have suppliers or customers that are also competitors, have access to sensitive competitive information that can easily be misused to obtain an unfair competitive advantage. Ethical lapses such as these can lead to significant reputational and financial losses. Similarly, if algorithms are designed with biased data sets, consciously or unconsciously, organisations will lose the trust of their stakeholders and incur significant reputational damage, which may lead to financial loss or even regulatory sanction.
Jul-Sep 2023 Issue
SCCE