Why you need a code of ethics (and how to build one that sticks)

Josh Fruhlinger
cio.com
Originally posted September 17, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Most of us probably think of ourselves as ethical people. But within organizations built to maximize profits, many seemingly inevitably drift towards more dubious behavior, especially when it comes to user personal data. "More companies than not are collecting data just for the sake of collecting data, without having any reason as to why or what to do with it," says Philip Jones, a GDPR regulatory compliance expert at Capgemini. "Although this is an expensive and unethical approach, most businesses don’t think twice about it. I view this approach as one of the highest risks to companies today, because they have no clue where, how long, or how accurate much of their private data is on consumers."

This is the sort of organizational ethical drift that can arise in the absence of clear ethical guidelines—and it's the sort of drift that laws like the GDPR, the EU's stringent new framework for how companies must handle customer data, are meant to counter. And the temptation is certainly there to simply use such regulations as a de facto ethics policy. "The GDPR and laws like it make the process of creating a digital ethics policy much easier than it once was," says Ian McClarty, President and CEO of PhoenixNAP.  "Anything and everything that an organization does with personal data obtained from an individual must come with the explicit consent of that data owner. It’s very hard to subvert digital ethics when one’s ability to use personal data is curtailed in such a draconian fashion."

But companies cannot simply outsource their ethics codes to regulators and think that hewing to the letter of the law will keep their reputations intact. "New possibilities emerge so fast," says Mads Hennelund, a consultant at Nextwork, "that companies will be forced by market competition to apply new technologies before any regulator has been able to grasp them and impose meaningful rules or standards." He also notes that, if different silos within a company are left to their own devices and subject to their own particular forms of regulation and technology adoption, "the organization as a whole becomes ethically fragmented, consisting of multiple ethically autonomous departments."

The info is here.