GDPR and other privacy rules, such as the impending California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), are forcing businesses to think about ethics as a competitive advantage.
Ethics teams, ethical review committees, and data ethics officers that understand the consequences of machine learning or algorithms on customer trust and commercial outcomes are helping innovative brands stand out.
As data privacy becomes more prominent, CEOs in positions of power bear a significant amount of responsibility for ensuring that data is used ethically. They must oversee well-organized data administration while also enabling their firms to turn data into meaningful business value.
Using data to balance advantages and hazards
Data must be transformed into something useful by organizational teams. CIOs must work with these teams to create something that benefits the entire sector while minimizing the risks associated with data use. An ethics review committee must ensure that personal data is not put in danger.
Technology leaders have a societal obligation to avoid bias as they develop AI-powered technologies.
It’s also important to use data ethically for internal purposes. To generate effective advertisements, marketing companies should examine how much personally identifiable information (PII) is required. If the organization’s tech leaders don’t think about how it controls data, the implications could be dangerous for the people involved.
Before using client data, technology leaders must ensure that they do not discriminate, stigmatize, or damage individuals in any way. This type of balancing act is most relevant to global data ethics because it is linked to utilitarian principles.
CIOs should examine the following approaches to achieve the correct balance and use data ethically:
- Checks for ethics while balancing reduced risks
Leaders in technology should do privacy impact evaluations to determine the inherent hazards of specific technologies. It should also examine compliance with appropriate controls.
CIOs must advocate for the formation of an ethics review committee made up of persons with ethics experience who can implement excellent governance and tight standards to determine whether an organization’s data practices reduce individual risk.
- Use of ethical data that leads to long-term innovation
Technological advancement is generally helpful to society when corporations accomplish persistent innovation. Delays and failed implementation trials result from innovation that does not reinforce ethics.
For example, facial recognition technology has not completed the necessary ethical effect evaluations and is already encountering hurdles. Similar legislation was recently established in San Francisco to stifle any progress made with more ethically sound items.
Tech executives must be aware of the hazards associated with their data usage and take steps to mitigate them as much as feasible. CIOs who fail to include ethics compliance into their teams’ procedures will be unable to sustain innovations or provide long-term societal benefits. So, it’s time for CIOs to up their game and become proactive!
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