When Gartner highlighted “digital ethics and privacy” as one of its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2019, it noted that “any discussion on privacy must be grounded in the broader topic of digital ethics and the trust of consumers, constituents and employees.”
We are currently experiencing the fourth industrial revolution, characterized by a blurred fusion of all things physical, digital and genomic. Each revolution has been accompanied by a wave of privacy legislation, linking governance to the accelerating pace of change. However, with this wave, privacy incidents are also rising in magnitude and frequency at an unprecedented rate. Regulators respond to such incidents by enhancing the stringency of privacy legislation (e.g. punitive responses and mandatory breach disclosures). However, this approach to privacy faces a number of challenges, such as:
- New technologies are fast outpacing legislation and enabling increasing consumption of unprecedented quantities of data.
- By predicating regulation on mandatory breach disclosure, the approach waits until the horse has bolted and the damage is done.
- How can we regulate risks we cannot yet conceive of?
Doing “Privacy Rights” Versus Doing “Privacy Right”…
In 2018, the then-European Data Protection Commissioner Giovanni Buttarelli argued that for privacy to be effective, organizations would have to adhere ethically to the spirit, not just the letter, of GDPR. Shifting from privacy to ethics moves the conversation beyond “doing privacy rights” toward “doing privacy right.” This ethical approach to privacy recognizes that feasible, useful, or profitable does not equal sustainable, and emphasizes accountability over compliance.
Organizations need to find ways to let their consumers know that they use consumer data in a law-abiding and ethical manner. Organizations that ethically manage data and solve the consumer-privacy-trust equation are