May 2019 Covers

May 2019 , I ssue 3

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and on goes the stories of tech scandals, mishaps and more in 2018.

Regardless of the topic, all these stories center around a common theme -“digital ethics.” Gartner listed “digital ethics and privacy” as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends of 2019, citing that “people are increasingly concerned about how their personal information is being used by organizations in both the public and private sector, and the backlash will only increase for organizations that are not proactively addressing these concerns.” " Proactively addressing these concerns "… that phrase is key to the attitude of 2019 . It is no longer sufficient and acceptable for companies to merely curtail poor digital habits or processes to achieve compliance or establish skeletal best practices as an afterthought. In 2019, the market is seeing a shift from digital compliance to digital ethics; digital ethics involves not only proactively addressing the concerns of compliance – privacy, data usage, etc -but also fundamentally doing the “right thing” with the data. What does “doing the right thing” with the data mean? It is looking beyond the obvious technical, financial and economic ramifications of decisions made in data usage internally and externally to how specific data sets usage could impact human behaviors, lifestyles and cultures.

Digital ethics highlights a company's responsibility to protect the public's data.