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.

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.

 

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.

 

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:

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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."