Digital Rights and good corporate governance

I was preparing for a meeting on a project for digital rights survey when it hit me that digital rights could probably be served in a more palate-friendly way to corporations as a corporate governance initiative: Protection of digital rights IS good corporate governance.

More and more corporations and taking their businesses online. This does not only mean having online showrooms for their products but conducting actual sales and a wide range of transactions over their websites and apps. We routinely furnish corporations with our personal data, automatically clicking on consent buttons without a second thought to the implications. Were you just agreeing for the corporation to process your data or did you just say it is okay for the corporation to sell your information to third parties? TL;DR, right?

On the other hand, corporations race to be the first in their industry to have an online presence. They are probably leaving it all to the decision-making to their tech guys, without considering what liabilities they are opening themselves up to by receiving and processing their users’ personal information. Information security? Time enough to worry about that later right, since the regulators don’t seem to know what they’re doing either.

The SEC recently issued the 2015 Philippine Corporate Governance Blueprint, which finally encourages corporations to make further use of ICT. In its broad strokes approach, however, no mention of a corresponding obligation of corporations to acknowledge and uphold digital rights is made. I am not expecting any clamor for addressing this oversight in the near future as digital rights are still beyond the radar of most Filipinos.

Without the clamor for upholding digital rights, corporations could hardly be expected to take the initiative. Most corporations would not be willing to spend on protecting digital rights unless they are required to do so by law. However, if, for instance, the Philippine Stock Exchange decides to adapt some digital rights protection standards as inputs to its annual PSE Corporate Governance Disclosure Survey, then publicly-listed corporations would be incentivized to adopt these standards. The changes to be adopted may be as basic as having a clear policy on how the corporation treats information obtained from their customers/users. Or procedures on how the corporation responds to requests for information from third parties (including government). The important thing is to start somewhere.