Data Ethics: What Guidelines to Follow in 2019

We’re all living in a digital world, where data is a king. Over the past few years, the attitude towards this king has been changing significantly, and rebellions have been shifting the distribution of his power. Now it’s time to make this kingdom stable and regulated.

Putting all the allegories away, data is massive: it’s being gathered, combined, analysed and shared in every organisation. Data that the company possesses and uses defines its success, as it gives powerful insights and a base for decisions. But it carries some risks as well. While previously the main risks associated with data were cybersecurity threats, now the new risks evolve, namely, unethical or sometimes illegal use of insights leading to less trust from customers or using data for purposes not disclosed to the public. To mitigate these threats, new frameworks should come into effect and one of these frameworks is data ethics.

Let’s first define the term we’re dealing with. According to L. Floridi and M. Taddeo (2016),

Data Ethics is a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing, and use), algorithms (including AI, artificial agents, machine learning, and robots), and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking, and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values).

In simple terms, data ethics is how to do things right while dealing with the data.

Data ethics has become extremely important in 2018 due to the series of data leaks, hacks and surveillance scandals. Social media platforms sharing unauthorised data, companies reselling personal information of their customers or biased algorithms reinforcing social inequalities — all these things lead to increased public concern and re-thinking of how data ethics should be approached. The question to ask: does it influence only companies which were caught in misusing their data or business as a whole?

Although this concern may seem to be related only to big companies constantly working with our personal information, like Google and Facebook, it is actually something to worry about in every business entity. Otherwise, you may risk losing your own customers.

2019 is a year to make changes and build digital trust.

According to Accenture research, 81% of executives agree that as the business value of data grows, the risks companies face from improper handling of data are growing exponentially.

To ensure ethical data usage, firms need to make a set of corporate guidelines and rules of data ethics. They may look like the code of ethics presented by Accenture. It involves several steps to follow while making ethical decisions about data:

1. The highest priority is to respect the persons behind the data.

2. Account for the downstream uses of datasets.

3. The consequences of utilizing data and analytical tools today are shaped by how they’ve been used in the past.

4. Seek to match privacy and security safeguards with privacy and security expectations.

5. Always follow the law but understand that the law is often a minimum bar.

6. Be wary of collecting data just for the sake of having more data.

7. Data can be a tool of both inclusion and exclusion.

8. As far as possible, explain methods for analysis and marketing to data disclosers.

9. Data scientists and practitioners should accurately represent their qualifications (and limits to their expertise), adhere to professional standards, and strive for peer accountability.

10. Aspire to design practices that incorporate transparency, configurability, accountability, and auditability.

11. Products and research practices should be subject to internal (and potentially external) ethical review.

12. Governance practices should be robust, known to all team members and regularly reviewed.

These directions present only a bigger picture of data ethics but give some hint of how to approach this issue. Maybe in the future, there will be a universal code of data ethics, but right now just start with these steps at least.

To conclude, the demand for ethical and responsible data usage is rapidly growing. Hope that this year more companies will start building (or re-building) digital trust of their customers by complying with data ethics.