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Ethical implications of digital risk

Published on April 30, 2025   23 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hi. My name is Amalla Barthel. I'm an advisor, consultant and educator in the areas of digital risk, digital data risks, privacy, compliance, and governance. In this talk, in the digital risk series, we will explore the "Ethical implications of digital risk". Digital risk has brought on a new dimension of risk: ethics and fairness. We will look at the intersection of digital risk with these new dimensions and the concerns organizations non-government organizations or non-profits and the society in general have to ensure ethical technological sustainability and impact on future generations.
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Complexity in requirement systems and data uses has led to increasingly sophisticated personal information management and ethical issues, the dawning of the personal information services economy. A prestigious paper aptly titled "The Biggest Lie On the Internet" by Jonathan A. Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch finds that effective strategies for realizing digital reputation and privacy protections remain unclear while self-governance efforts by proprietary platforms provide de facto protections as per DeNardis and Hackl in 2015, leaving privacy and reputation to companies monetized through data-driven business models seems problematic. It's a little bit like the fox in the chicken coop. Ethics has been a concern early on when technology advanced. We know that in the Second World War, the IBM computer using its novel database concept was used to help classify the non-German populations in this very new concept so that they were easy to identify. We know what happened next, unfortunately. We know that the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was created as a challenge to current physics. But what governments decided to use it for was frowned upon and quite simply opposed by scientists. Just because you can it doesn't mean you should, says the old adage. After the Snowden revelations, we all learned that governments engage in invasive surveillance for various reasons. They ask for backdoors and technologies so they can use them to protect the state's interests. In exchange, they allow these tech giants to make huge profits. Is this ethical, both the backdoors and turning a blind eye to profit? As you can see, there is a fine line between interests and ethics. Let us introduce to you the term "technoethics".

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