A Rising Crescendo Demands Data Ethics and Data Responsibility; Forbes, October 29, 2018

Randy Bean, Forbes; A Rising Crescendo Demands Data Ethics and Data Responsibility

"It is against this backdrop that data ethics has rapidly moved to the forefront of any meaningful discussion about data. A spate of recent articles -- Never Heard of Data Ethics? You Will Soon, It’s Time to Talk About Data Ethics, Data Ethics: The New Competitive Advantage, Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence – underscore the increasing urgency and highlight the ethical considerations that organizations must address when managing data as an asset, and considering its impact on individual rights and privacy.

I recently convened two thought-leadership roundtables of Chief Data Officers and executives with responsibility for data initiatives within their organizations. The increased focus and concern for the ethical use of data is born out of widespread reaction to recent and highly publicized misuses of data that represent breaches of public trust -- whether this be unauthorized data sharing by social media platforms, reselling of customer information by businesses, or biased algorithms that reinforce social inequalities.

It is within this context that we are now witnessing increased corporate attention to data for good initiatives. Companies are increasingly recognizing and acknowledging that ethical action and doing well can be synonymous with doing good. A few corporations, notably Mastercard through their Center for Inclusive Growth, Bloomberg through Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Data for Good Exchange, and JP Morgan through the JP Morgan Institute have been among those corporations at the forefront of ethical data use for public good...

Increasingly, corporations are focusing on issues of data ethics, data privacy, and data philanthropy. An executive representing one of the nation’s largest insurance companies noted, “We are spending more hours on legal and ethical review of data than we are on data management”."