This chapter focuses on aspects of digital ethics in technology and investments and covers the background of the growing surface area of the technology and its concerns related to data; it provides an overview of the data-related challenges and their ethical uses by organizations and people. It also covers emerging technology like artificial intelligence and its impact on ethical challenges. It provides an overview of the potential ethical challenges of technology that investors should consider and focuses on the criticality of the framework requirement and its implementation within businesses to make the right decisions. The author lays out the view on ethics and regulations and why companies should commit to ethical practices for their growth.
TopIntroduction
Digital Technology is transforming our way of living, and this fast-paced transformation is causing ethical challenges for organizations and regulatory bodies globally. Growth in technology benefiting societies and people with a growing focus on Tech for Good. However, it's raising a fundamental question about being ethically digital.
Early growth in telecommunications and the internet led to connectivity & customer reach with low acquisition cost and incremental margins, which led to exponential growth in data per capita. Data and privacy regulations are still insufficient & vary significantly across the world. Big tech companies exploit and commoditize through social channels, eCommerce or logistics, and disruptive tech growth. Tech Giants like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook hold significant amounts of customer data. They might not need to share the data per the regional regulations, and it's not ethical.
Technology involvement and the pace of its development across the businesses' value chains create a significant ethical dilemma for organizations trying to monetize through technologies and impact users. And it's a regulatory challenge for governing bodies. These challenges are well beyond organizations; they create an ethical challenge for investors, as they need to analyze potential ethical issues, understand business models and risks. Regulators are struggling to respond to the pace of disruption and innovation set by tech giants. In the absence of defined regulations, it becomes the investors' responsibility to understand the potential issues and seek clarity. It is incumbent upon companies themselves to self-regulate. Global reach comes with global responsibilities and increasing risks to business models. Global platforms must maneuver local laws, geographical sensitivities, data privacy, and sovereignty with the lenses of digital ethics. It won't be an exaggeration to say disruptive innovators' primary risk relates less to business models than regulatory risk. Digital ethics in investment is becoming critical with growth in technology, investments, start-ups ecosystems, and disruptions. With start-up ecosystems and technology investments, lines blur between Impact investment, ethical investment, and digital ethics, which are perceived as a mirror of business ethics.
The Digital Ethics of Technology
Within a decade, and with a lot of hype, this transformation resulted in many platforms/ products and services being offered, leading to shifts in the traditional markets that were understood to be non-competitive, highly regulated, and regulated. The impact of this was not just a disruption to existing markets but created entirely new markets. The adoption and user-generated content in many ways democratized media and entertainment and had powerful implications for further regulation. Net neutrality is one such example; Net neutrality is the principle that all data on the internet should be treated equally, and open internet is essential for an open society.
Despite exponential growth in data generation, has the right balance of business practices and ethics been maintained? Only a few years ago, Facebook and Google were being scrutinized for data tracking and privacy concerns. Digital advertising has become the largest revenue generator for large and small companies, and it is a powerful marketing tool. However, who is the target audience for these services, and what data is collected? Should companies be able to collect data on the activity of users without their consent? With digital advertising, the company buying the ads need not disclose the primary purposes for collecting the data. One of the earliest controversies was about tracking web browsers without the user's permission.
Smartphone now has nearly 3.8 billion users (Turner, 2021), Facebook has two billion-plus users, over 1 billion WhatsApp users, and three billion-plus active Alexa users globally (“Global social media stats,” 2021). Mobile payments are now a $4 trillion industry, and cash has not escaped the marketplace, with numerous mobile banking options and Alipay being by far the most dominant. On this backdrop, Tech for good (T4G) is beginning to debate by corporate organizations, policymakers, and their equivalents. T4G has been framed from the industry perspective as the ethical evolution of the marketplace. The transformation of the last century's technologies towards social good brought about the right conditions to create a virtuous cycle with breakthroughs in health care, information technology, and even media.