Author: Christian Ofori-Boateng
Publisher: Forbes
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: The following article discusses how, for businesses, data represents customers, and customers drive profit. It’s easy for a business to be distracted by company profits and less concerned about safeguarding customer information. A Lack of data risk mitigation could significantly impact a business’s future. To appropriately incorporate data ethics, here are 6 ethical steps: 1). Inform and consent (customers have adequate information about what their data is used for, and there is complete transparency between a business and its customers); 2). privacy and protection (businesses must ensure that customers’ information is kept private and secured to avoid any misuse of customer data); 3). two-way transparency (businesses should allow customers to opt-out of any use of their data with which they are not comfortable with); 4). respect the rules (businesses must follow industry best practices and adhere to the country’s laws in which they operate); 5). privacy by design (this framework has been a practical structure that many businesses have incorporated during the planning and development stage for ethical solutions); and 6). algorithm evaluation and auditing (businesses should audit their algorithms to ensure that data are input correctly to produce accurate models).