Ethics deal with more of behavior of some kind. This can be in a person or in a company or you daily life. In this blog I will talk about major ethic issues from a digital point of view. I have listed some issues which are common in Digital world when we talk about data.

• Privacy, Security and Integrity
• Trust Promotion
• Biased Ideas
• Accountability
• Business Culture

Privacy, Security and Integrity

It’s always a good approach for a company to design their product or services from privacy, security and integrity point. This principle should be considered from first day into product designing and service building that a company is planning to offer. There are many issues in dealing with this challenge. For example, how the data is collected, managed and secured. Due to data fluid nature, It’s easily spreadable and collectable in a short period of time. We have already experienced how some digital companies sold the users personal data to other companies to gain their benefits. This act of companies is unethical. So, we as a professional should make sure from technology start to secure the user data along with its privacy and integrity. We should start thinking this ethical behavior from start rather than in the middle of designing any sort of services. The ownership of data resides to the user. It would be a shame for a company if they invest into a product and service and they are not adhering to an ethical principle. This will be then a waste of investment.

Trust Promotion

These two important questions should be adhered while building the service.

• How we can prompt a trust as part of our daily business?
• Can we trust on a product or service that we are buying?

If you go for a shopping then you can see the product and check its quality before you actually buy it. But in digital world, the product is not touchable. There are many questions that comes in mind before you buy from a digital If you buy them how the provider will handle your data. Big stores like Amazon have win the trust of their users. But customer has an insecurity while buying a product from an unknown website. If you buy once from a ‘ABC’ website and they deliver your product as specified then a company wins their customer trust. You will recommend their service to others or yourself buy from them again. If they lose customers trust at first place then of course the company did not lose his customer but might be others as well. So, it’s very important for a company to build the trust relationship, so that customers can rely on your services with blind eyes and share their personal data, business or bank details while getting your company services.

It’s not only enough when a company say that they are trust worthy. Trust needs to be built into your product and services that you provide without having insecure feeling.  

Biased Ideas

How biased ideas effect the company in providing digital services?

This is very important to know the in-depth detail about “Bias ideas” as the technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning and AI are integrated more and more into providing the digital services. AI is a good example where biased is an issue that we need to worry about. The training data that companies use to train their algorithms should not be biased. If it’s a slight biased then the decision based on this data will also be biased in nature. There are some methods that ensure that training data is biased free or less biased. This is the point where AI and Machine learning industries needs to talk about and address this issue.

Accountability

Who is accountable if something goes wrong?

As we go more and more into decision making, move more data into clouds we put more AI into the hand of Data scientist. The issue of accountability becomes more interesting. In Globalization, where a company is in Germany but the more customers are in China or Asia. Data accountability should be ensured in a professional way. There needs to be proper rules and regulations like data ownership, accuracy, security etc. should be in place. This is more important when human life is involved like Autonomous Driving where customers give complete accountability to the computer algorithms.

Business Culture

Companies need to promote more ethical behavior into their culture. Ethical and moral discussions should be bringing into place. This should not be limited only in providing digital services but also in bringing the ethical behavior, nicely treatment of people and no discrimination at a workplace.

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