Digital Ethics
Digital ethics is a set of rules and moral guidelines that supervise interpersonal behaviour between individuals and/or companies that is mediated by computer technology, either inside a company, markets and society.
Over and above what is admissible from a legal perspective and what conforms to privacy regulations, digital ethics asks whether certain actions are the right thing to do. This encompasses actions such as collecting, connecting, or selling particular data sets, treating different groups of individuals differently due to vulnerabilities linked to their sociodemographic characteristics or other factors, or leading people to engage in addictive or otherwise unwise behaviours in the digital environment via technological nudges of various kinds by exploiting human weaknesses and biases.
How do we know what the right thing is? The philosophical answer points to the code of conduct practice in culture, industry, or belief group. Difference communities have sets of tenets that dictate behaviours that are acceptable and unacceptable and prescribe various types of punishments for deviating from these codes. When it comes to technology, these codes are often out of date.
Others are specific to the digital context, such as prioritizing the development or implementation of a new technology without concerns for how it could be misused, using biased data without understanding how it was generated, or aiming for a solution that performs well enough, good enough, except for a few outliers that, upon closer examination of the data, turn out to belong to a disadvantaged, underrepresented minority who is further harmed, marginalised, or burdened by the encoding of the societal bias in a digital form.
As our world is becoming increasingly reliant on digital products, let us be respect each other and our digital world.