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Digital and Data Ethics: The key foundations for organisations
Bailiffs entering the homes of vulnerable energy customers who are unable to keep up with enforced pre-payment meters, show how unethical business decisions can cause a negative societal impact. Ethical considerations encompass a wide range of factors, from ensuring accessibility for end users to promoting transparency and sustainability in the digital supply chain. In this article, we focus on Digital and Data Ethics – setting the right foundations.
2022 witnessed a continued debate around digital and data ethics with widespread concerns over the appropriate use of emerging technologies. We saw headlines ranging from AI technology being deployed to deter migrant channel crossing, to Twitter getting hacked, T Mobile having its eighth data breach since 2018, and Advanced, the NHS IT Provider, refusing to state if patient data was compromised in August’s cyberattack.
We all have a responsibility to be ethical
In January 2023, Moorhouse held our first digital and data ethics breakfast roundtable, exploring the importance of digital and data ethics to modern organisations, and best practices for developing and delivering ethical digital products and services. We welcomed senior stakeholders and leading experts from industries such as AI, healthcare, transport, and energy to discuss how they are responding to these societal changes.
“Organisations don’t know where to get started [with digital ethics]” resonated with many attendees throughout the discussion. The complexity of this subject matter feeds into broader considerations on how to instil an ethical culture driven by genuine concern rather than ‘ethics-washing’, whilst also not stifling innovation or business growth. Organisations will want to remain cutting edge in their adoption of the latest tech and passionate about integrating this into the latest rollout of products and services. The drive for innovation can sometimes come at the cost of ethical thinking but this relationship must be negotiated with commitment and expertise to ensure a balanced outcome.
The Digital Ethics Landscape
Understanding the broader landscape of your industry is crucial in shaping your internal ethics strategy
Key considerations
- Examining the relationship between regulation and changing market trends allows you to understand how quickly legislation adapts to digital and technological advancements. If you are part of a heavily regulated industry, it’s worth considering how can you utilise existing legislative frameworks to inform your ethics approach.
- Governance strategies are being fulfilled through maintaining compliance with existing legislation often without a focus on digital ethics. However, within specific industries, organisations are increasingly embracing ethical practices. By taking a moral stance and going above and beyond legal requirements, these organisations are starting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in this space.
- Shifting customer behaviour patterns have led to greater expectations around ethical practices. Their mindsets should be central to shaping your vision, and it’s worth exploring how ethically your consumers expect you to act, and how crucial being ethical is to your brand identity.
Establishing the context for the role of digital ethics within your industry provides the foundations to implement, build and drive it within your organisation.
Our Digital Ethics Roundtable highlighted that the lack of cross–industry standards hinders ethical foundations within organisations
Key considerations
- Unlike compliance legislation such as GDPR, digital ethics lacks regulation, control, and standardisation. Organisations must develop an internal code of conduct that aligns with their digital beliefs and values. There are existing frameworks that can support setting your code of conduct when interacting with digital and data, e.g. Central Digital and Data Office’s Data Ethics Framework.
- A code of conduct extends to how you want to manage third party suppliers and digital procurement. Key questions to think about when evaluating third party standards include who owns the data, how is consent for data use managed, and how ethically do they conduct their business operations.
For effective implementation, your code of conduct needs to incorporate your end-to-end change journey and operations, not just the ethical delivery of your products and services.
Setting a code of conduct is redundant if you do not have the culture to support the implementation of ethics
Key considerations
- Establishing and maintaining an ethical culture requires a collaborative effort, utilising both a top-down and bottom-up approach. Management must ensure the right capabilities exist to embed the ethical code of conduct within the business. Hence, attention should be given to the recruitment strategy and process, and the type of training being provided. In conjunction, every member of the organisation must grasp the importance of their roles and actions in upholding digital ethics within the organisations’ digital transformation journey.
- Incorporating and tracking ethics into your risk register can enhance accountability. You may decide to resource an ethics officer who can help implement the code of conduct and establish and maintain standards internally.
There must be recognition that digital ethics deals with multiple layers and isn’t just accountable to specific individuals or departments within the business.
This is all propped up by a foundational layer of testing and controls, and is the functional methodology that upholds the overarching digital and data ethics strategy
Key considerations
- By adopting an ethics by design approach, ethical considerations will be applied to the development process of products, services, and systems. Using this approach throughout the development and delivery lifecycle will promote transparency and accountability in digital solutions. Mason’s PAPA Framework (Privacy, Accuracy, Property, and Accessibility) is an example of how organisations can test the design, creation, development and delivery of products, services and programmes, focusing on ethical outcomes.
- Before introducing new technologies, conducting an impact assessment is crucial in evaluating the ethical implications. This makes digital and data ethics a significant factor in both the evaluation of new technologies and the continuous testing and refinement of existing ones.
Incorporating testing and controls for digital and data ethics requires a proactive and ongoing effort and requires organisations to continually evaluate and improve their practices.