Many professions have established ethical codes, such as medical ethics, legal ethics, military ethics, scientific ethics, engineering ethics, accounting ethics, and educational ethics. In contrast, the field of information technology has less prevalent, less developed, and less emphasized ethical codes.
With the traditional IT function evolving to include digital business enablement, there is a pressing need to establish and uphold digital ethics. The number of lawsuits that are filed against Google, Meta and Apple by different countries are growing at a rapid scale and help shed light on the unintended consequences of technological advancements and their rapid amplification present significant risks. There was a report circulating a few years ago when Donald Trump won elections in 2016, the report claimed that a data analytics firm hired by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was able to collect data on 50 million users without their knowledge through a harmless quiz app. The impact was so huge that it pushed CEO Mark Zuckerberg to apologize publicly and pledge reforms.
Digital ethics encompasses a wide range of issues, including security, cybercrime, privacy, social interactions, governance, free will, and their broader implications for society and the economy. In fact, digital ethics sits at the peak of the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Privacy, 2024, as people are becoming increasingly aware of the value of their personal information and frustrated by lack of transparency and continuing misuse.
Gartner defines digital ethics as the systems of values and moral principles for the conduct of electronic interactions among people, organizations and things. With the adoption of artificial intelligence, for the first time, the ethical discussion is taking place before — and during — a technology’s widespread implementation.
Amidst the growing concern on protection of information online, there is a massive pressure on organizations to secure personal data and for governments to implement strict laws to enforce it. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2025, more than 80% of companies worldwide will be facing at least one privacy-focused data protection regulation.
Proactive and mature organizations are moving away from reactive compliance towards proactive privacy implementation. They are investing into innovation that enables them to encrypt data in a way that their users feel comfortable in browsing their apps or website.
New innovations added to this year’s Hype Cycle for Privacy are: (source Gartner)
- Influence engineering – creating algorithms that automate aspects of digital experiences to guide user choices at scale, utilizing techniques from behavioral science. While still largely theoretical, advancements in areas like emotion detection and language generation demonstrate promising potential for automating key components of communication.
- Federated machine learning (ML) represents a significant innovation for retraining ML algorithms in a decentralized environment while protecting sensitive information. By leveraging model coefficients from local nodes, such as smartphones, softbots, (semi)autonomous vehicles, and IoT edge devices, federated ML allows for more personalized experiences without the need to exchange data samples, thereby preserving user privacy.
- Sovereign cloud refers to the provision of cloud services within a specific geographic location, ensuring compliance with data residency and other regulatory requirements.
As a digital marketing agency, where do you draw the line of ethics?
While technology innovation is working to protect consumer privacy and ensure a safe internet browsing environment, however, there are no laws to digital marketing, governments have enforced laws for protection of data but what about the content clutter that digital agencies are generating?
The whole idea of digital marketing is to convert digital lookers to lifelong consumers. While there is a huge amount of data at disposal of marketing agencies to help tweak their campaigns and reach to the right audience, it’s imperative that these agencies do not end up invading privacy of users or feed their timelines with fake claims. It’s important to build privacy and trust through total transparency. Rather than thinking about privacy as really just a compliance issue, it would be a good idea for marketers to use privacy disclosure as the first touchpoint with their users. Rather than spooking them off by showing that we collect their data, we can make it meaningful and let users understand the value of data exchange for their better-personalized experience that’s not creepy but meaningful.
Please be cognizant of the naive minds of children
We have created a whole new world of digital but we have failed to foresee the repercussions. For e.g. Barbie. Although childhood is built on this toy, owning a doll and watching how it is presented in marketing and the media can promote body dysmorphia. With less representation of color and unrealistic body shape, Barbie is unhealthy psychologically and physically to both young girls and boys. An obsessive pattern of picking at the flaws in one’s body. Kids have more brand loyalty than adults and with firms manufacturing kids products, targeting them directly, it’s extremely dangerous and misrepresenting.
Brands need to not curate such content that is targeting children, kids content should be age appropriate and send the right message to their young impressionable minds. We cannot be selling things to kids, digital space should be a platform for children to learn, educate and not to feel insecure and depressed.
Let’s stop digital clutter
Spam is junk and should not be sent to people’s inboxes and social feeds.
We’ve all had it: a barrage of irrelevant and uninvited advertising that gets in your face and tries to sell you products you don’t need. Sometimes it’s so annoying that you end up blocking the brand or uninstalling the app.
Spammers and unimaginative brands will show you whatever they want you to see, the polar opposite of the laser-targeted meaningful advertising. Privacy barriers are meaningless; once they get their hands on your information, they’ll use it to spam your digital world.
Final thoughts
As an agency, it’s your moral duty to enable consumers to feel confident while shopping online or browsing digital content. Brands have a moral responsibility to look out for investors, buyers, employees and other people involved in their daily work. Hence, it becomes really important to understand the importance of being ethical digitally regardless of marketing platform.
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