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Trust is a concept that is key to the charity sector because without trust charities cannot exist and thrive. That means that every charity has to have its own clear ethical standards which govern what it will and will not do, who it will and will not deal with, how it will and will not treat its service users, suppliers and partners, and so on. And, crucially, the charity has to uphold its ethical standards in order to earn the trust and support it needs to carry out its charitable activities.

One of the key areas in which digital ethics is likely to be vitally important in the future is in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). This is an emerging technology and one which is unlikely to fulfil its potential for good unless it gains acceptance through trust.

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Charities need to ask themselves some questions. Do service users who come to a charity expect their personal data to be sold to an advertiser even if they give permission for the charity to do so? Ought charities to raise funds by selling personal data supplied to them by people seeking help? Does the good that the funds generated by selling service users’ data outweigh any reservations a charity might have? What happens if the data sold to an advertiser is subsequently stolen and leaked by a hacker? These are all questions of digital ethics that charities need to consider.

This also highlights the relationship between digital ethics and security. Aside from the obligation imposed by regulations like GDPR to store personal data securely, any digital ethics book will emphasise that data security is an ethical obligation as well.

A charity’s digital ethics should dictate that it ought to keep its data secure: failure to do so would be a huge breach of the trust placed in it by its constituents: its partners, supporters, and particularly its service users who may be vulnerable and who rely on the charity to look after their interests.

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There are many formal definitions of digital ethics – Wikipedia, for example, defines digital ethics (also called information ethics) as "the branch of ethics that focuses on the relationship between the creation, organisation, dissemination, and use of information, and the ethical standards and moral codes governing human conduct in society".

The purpose of this digital ethics code is to lay out the principals of conduct that should be practised by charities in digital activities such as increasing their reach using social media and using donor data to inform fundraising campaigns. In these examples, digital ethics would influence how donor data is stored, used, and shared, and how social media should be employed to provide news and information, as both an advertising medium and a source of contacts.

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The flip side of the coin, and the area that garners far more attention, is “corporate digital ethics.” Again, because practically everywhere on the internet is “private property,” the rules these private sector players choose to impose on their users have far-reaching privacy implications.

Corporate digital ethics primarily revolves around the practices of online platforms like social networks collecting sensitive information about users. This collection is often necessary for platforms to deliver their product’s experience, but there is no uniform expectation for what can and should be done with this information.

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Personal digital ethics encompass how individual users honor one another’s right to self-determination online. What makes these unique compared to the typical ethics guiding interpersonal conduct is that, given the nature of online infrastructure, communications is almost always mediated by some private interest or third-party.

For example, in the physical world, your location has little impact on how you should treat other people — whether you're on public or private property, the expectations of courtesy are essentially the same. By contrast, whether you're dealing with someone over email or on Facebook greatly changes the obligations you have to them.

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We live in a golden age of technological growth! Technologies that process and create data in novel ways, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deployment of robots and the use of blockchain technology are finding their way into our everyday business and life.

Organizations are pursuing innovation through the capabilities these new technologies provide. From aiding decision making and advanced customer insights, to increased robotization. At the same time concerns around ethical use of data and technology are on the rise. Incidents have shown the risks of losing consumers trust and reputational damage when companies fail to manage undesired, often unintentional, consequences of technology application.

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The problem is that many people instinctively do not trust AI because they fear how it could be used. In particular, they fear how AI could breach privacy rights and enable organisations to know more than they are comfortable with about their habits, preferences, tastes, beliefs, and so on. One way to foster trust in AI is to introduce rules governing its usage – and indeed organisations such as the European Commission have put forward a series of recommendations about the use of AI aimed at ensuring that business interests do not take precedence over the wellbeing of the general public.

But organisations can go a long way towards engendering trust in AI by adopting a code of digital ethics in the workplace which makes it clear what they do and do not regard as acceptable uses of AI. The European Commission’s Andrus Ansip stated this emphatically: "The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on. It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies."

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The bottom line is that digital ethics is about moral values: it is concerned not so much with what a charity can do in the digital sphere, but what it ought to do. Or perhaps, more importantly, it is not so much about what it can’t do, but what it ought not to do.

This distinction is important, because what organisations can do with digital data – as opposed to what they ought to do – is already governed and restricted by rules and regulations such as the General Data Protection  Regulation (GDPR). This places a number of obligations on organisations that collect and use digital data about people, including:

Asking for permission to collect and store data about users

Asking for permission to sell any personal data that has been stored

Giving users the right to request that data about them is deleted

Giving users access to personal data that has been collected and stored

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Using data and technology responsibly, or Digital Ethics as we refer to it, adds the element of moral and conscious decisionmaking to the journey into new technologies. Digital Ethics goes beyond the question of what is within legal boundaries. It revolves around the question of how one should handle data and new technologies in a responsible manner.

Digital Ethics is not just about managing risk but also about how to differentiate oneself by doing responsible business. Customers increasingly prioritize and select products and services based on personal values. Privacy, sustainability, fairness, transparency, diversity, and other values become prevalent in buying decisions and loyalty.

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The implication of this is that charities can collect and store personal data about their service users and donors if they have permission to do so, and they can sell it on to whomever they like as long as they have permission to do so. But any entry-level digital ethics course for students will tell you that even if you are permitted to do something (such as store a user’s data), it may be the case that doing so would be unethical. Collecting and storing personal data about a service user because you think it will enable you to provide a better service to them in the future is one thing.

Collecting and storing it without any clear purpose, despite the risk that the data could be breached and leaked by a hacker, is quite another. In this respect, digital ethics both guides and is dictated by what a charity feels it ought to be involved in.