Ethics for the Digital Age By Gry Hasselbalch on 2016-02-05 ANALYSIS: This January the European Data Protection Supervisor presented his new “Ethics Advisory Group”. A group of experts that will help him “reconsider the ethical dimension of the relationships between human rights, technology, markets and business models and their implications for the rights to privacy and data protection in the digital environment.” He is not the first European decision maker or thought leader to bring forward ethics as a guiding principle in the digital age. Over the last year digital ethics, and in particular data ethics, have become the “talk of the town” in Europe. Based on the realisation that laws have not followed pace with the development of digital technologies, technologists, academics, policymakers and businesses are today revisiting cultural values and moral systems when groping for a new ethical framework for the digital age. Ethics of Technology Technological developments have in history always at some point during their implementation into society forced us to revisit laws, but in particular also ethical value systems and limits. Time and again we are faced with the fact that technology is in fact not neutral, but contain in their very design ethical implications. The photograph was in its early stage of implementation in the late 19thand early 20th century, discussed as both art and reality. This discussion entered the court rooms and the legal rights over a photograph were determined. It was however not only legal rights that were defined, but a delineation of the very ethical implications of a technology (the camera, the photograph) that could reproduce the appearance of an individual with such accuracy. It was an examination of the particularly human consequences (distress and humiliation) of the capacities of this new technology. Defining a right and wrong and attempting to morally manage its implications for individuals. What we experience these years is a pace of technological developments as never seen before. Not only did the World Wide Web and the capacities of digital technologies develop over just a few decades, but the digital evolution expanded into practically every area of life and society over an even shorter period of time. It only took a few years after Tim Berners Lee invented an open source information space interlinked by hyperlinks in 1989 before the first online businesses emerged and ordinary people started using internet services in the mid 1990s. Evidently laws have not followed pace with the countless ethical implications of today’s rapid technological development. Now we are questioning the ethics of automatic systems designed to collect data on us en masse, algorithms designed to predict and profile us, technologies used to surveil us and manipulate us and not the least business models profiting from the most private details on individuals. The only way we can do this is by revisiting our values and morals, t ...

1. Ethics for the Digital Age
By Gry Hasselbalch on 2016-02-05
ANALYSIS: This January the European Data Protection
Supervisor presented his new “Ethics Advisory Group”. A group
of experts that will help him “reconsider the ethical dimension
of the relationships between human rights, technology, markets
and business models and their implications for the rights to
privacy and data protection in the digital environment.” He is
not the first European decision maker or thought leader to bring
forward ethics as a guiding principle in the digital age. Over the
last year digital ethics, and in particular data ethics, have
become the “talk of the town” in Europe. Based on the
realisation that laws have not followed pace with the
development of digital technologies, technologists, academics,
policymakers and businesses are today revisiting cultural values
and moral systems when groping for a new ethical framework
for the digital age.
Ethics of Technology
Technological developments have in history always at some
point during their implementation into society forced us to
revisit laws, but in particular also ethical value systems and
limits. Time and again we are faced with the fact that
technology is in fact not neutral, but contain in their very
design ethical implications. The photograph was in its early
stage of implementation in the late 19thand early 20th century,
discussed as both art and reality. This discussion entered the
court rooms and the legal rights over a photograph were
determined. It was however not only legal rights that were
defined, but a delineation of the very ethical implications of a

2. technology (the camera, the photograph) that could reproduce
the appearance of an individual with such accuracy. It was an
examination of the particularly human consequences (distress
and humiliation) of the capacities of this new technology.
Defining a right and wrong and attempting to morally manage
its implications for individuals.
What we experience these years is a pace of technological
developments as never seen before. Not only did the World
Wide Web and the capacities of digital technologies develop
over just a few decades, but the digital evolution expanded into
practically every area of life and society over an even shorter
period of time. It only took a few years after Tim Berners Lee
invented an open source information space interlinked by
hyperlinks in 1989 before the first online businesses emerged
and ordinary people started using internet services in the mid
1990s.
Evidently laws have not followed pace with the countless
ethical implications of today’s rapid technological development.
Now we are questioning the ethics of automatic systems
designed to collect data on us en masse, algorithms designed to
predict and profile us, technologies used to surveil us and
manipulate us and not the least business models profiting from
the most private details on individuals. The only way we can do
this is by revisiting our values and morals, the ethical
foundations of our societies.
Privacy under attack
The right to privacy was originally defined in legal instruments
such as the European Convention of Human Rights as a
protection against state surveillance. But with the development
of an online market, social sphere and economy, surveillance
evolved. Today surveillance is “ordinary” embedded in the
interactions of every day life and performed by both state and

3. industry actors. One can argue that this evolution of
surveillance was in many ways made possible by the legal grey
zones left open to interpretation by the fast paced technological
development and exploited heavily by not only state actors but
also a data driven industry.
Laws are framed to include interpretations and exceptions that
permit data collection beyond the norm e.g. for purposes such
as law enforcement, public safety and security, Robin Wilton
from Internet Society writes in a paper on ethical data handling,
and he continues: “A major challenge is to ensure that such
carve-outs remain consistent with what is just and fair,
particularly since data use practices tend to evolve much faster
than the related laws and regulatory measures” .
But this checks and balance of fairness in data handling clearly
did not happen (as the Snowden revelations have illustrated).
Similarly business innovation in the digital age have evolved
within the legal grey zones of privacy rights and data protection
laws. Being innovative in the digital market means to be
innovative with user data. Innovation in a data driven economy
is data-inspired price setting, forecasting, market design,
marketing, user design, business decisions etc. Listen to this
panel debate between digital media venture capitalists at
Stanford from 2013. The start ups that these venture capitalists
reward with capital, innovate in legal grey zones and push the
legal limits of data protection laws and privacy rights. Privacy
is in digital business innovation an obstacle, something to be
reiterated later.
In sum our fundamental privacy rights have been under constant
attack from all sides over the last couple of decades. Until very
recently it’s been a silent attack that has gone by mostly
unnoticed by the average citizen who’ve even participated
actively to their own surveillance when engaging with digital
services and businesses. Unnoticed because they are built on

4. an opacitybuilt into the design of the online services and
products we use, and because the privacy and ethical
implications of business and state practices lack, as Robin
Wilson also argues a clear ethical problem to solve.
From Laws to Data Ethics
But tides are turning. Due to a number of geopolitically critical
events such as the Snowden revelations of a global surveillance
infrastructure, countless data leaks and hacks, not to mention
the consumers’ increasing sense of lack of control over their
digital identities, “online privacy” has now been transformed
into one of the most intensely debated topics with intricate
power relations among interest groups and global key players.
Most evidently shown in a number of pivotal legal judgements
such as the Right to be Forgotten ruling and the CJEUs
invalidations of respectively the Data Retention regulation in
2014 and the US Safe Harbour agreement in 2015.
Moreover, the European Data Protection Reform represented a
key battlefield for the renegotiation of roles and power relations
in the global information technologies community and the
economic interests of the different entities, the institutions of
the European Union, civil society organizations, the industry
and third country national interests.
All of these movements are exposing the limits of current laws
as to the protection of the right to online privacy. We see the
lack of remedies, enforcement, clashes of national laws, legal
approaches and jurisdictions, and in general too many legal grey
zones open to individual interestbased interpretations.
A New Digital Ethics
It is exactly at this point that we turn to a discussion about
ethics and in particular data ethics. These days Europe is
groping for the words to define an ethics for the digital age.

5. We’ve seen enough examples of the fact that in the
technological era “Not everything that is legal is ethical”.
This is not a new thing. We turn to ethics in transitional phases
where the formal agreements in society do not follow the
progress of society. We have turned to “data ethics” because it
is our privacy rights that are under fire and it is in particular the
ethical implications of businesses’ data innovation that is
exposed today.
When laws do not follow progress, we revisit our cultural value
systems. Ethics are not neutral, neither are laws and technology.
Digital Ethics is a moral management of the human implications
of digital developments. With ethics we determine “the right”
and “the wrong” with a view to shared cultural value systems
and social agreeements.
Evidently in these days, when European and US data protection
laws and cultural approaches clash, Europe revisits a
particularly European ethical value system based on “personal
dignity”. European leaders start “systematizing, defending, and
recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct”. They,
as Julia Powles and Carissa Veliz recently put it, begin a fight
to change in particular US technology companies’ “wrecking
ball” ethics by developing the industry’s “moral compass”.
Business ethics become data ethics
The world’s leading information technology research and
advisory company Gartner Inc have predicted that by 2018, 50
percent of business ethics violations will occur through
improper use of big data analytics. In combination with the
emergent focus on ethics, these numbers will add data ethics
to the list of criteria that deems a company ethical or not, trust
worthy or not, competitive on a social corporate responsibility
level or not. The companies that do that little thing more than

6. mere compliance with data protection laws. Have the highest
level of transparency in data handling processes, collect
minimum amounts of data, develop privacy considerate
organisational structures, privacy by design products etc.
Where lies the answer?
These days we see an emergence of stakeholders planting their
flag in the data ethical debate. All will claim they have created
the perfect solutions to the problems posed by the technological
challenges to the individual’s privacy rights. And we haven’t
seen the end of it. New laws will continue to be developed to
manage privacy (and ethical) implications of state and business
conduct. Technologists will present one privacy by design
solution after the other. We will see more and more new and old
companies presenting their products and services as the
solutions to the ethical dilemmas described in this article (we
describe these in our book “The Data Ethical Company ”
coming out at the end of this year).
Many of these will fail us as humans (and many have already
failed us gravely). Some of these might support us or even
empower us.
But not one will develop the perfect solution to the ethical
dilemmas that we are facing today. And we should not look for
perfect solutions. We need to see these as what they are and we
need to acknowledge the context they are evolving in. They are
experiments and we are in an age of experimentation where
laws, technology and not the least our limits as individuals are
tested and negotiated on a daily basis. It’s the sum of all the
efforts in the name of “ethics”, “privacy” and “human dignity”
that will pave the way into an ethical technological future.
Managerial Supervision Interview & Reflection Paper

7. Due Date: March 21, 2017 at 11:59 PM – No late submissions
will be accepted!
A supervisor is a manager at the first level of management,
which means that employees
reporting to the supervisor are not themselves managers.
Each student is to conduct an interview about managerial
supervision with a business professional in an industry of your
choice. You should contact the individual early in the semester,
so that you will have flexibility and time to schedule the
interview, conduct the interview, and allow sufficient time to
write the reflection paper by the due date.
IMPORTANT! When you contact the individual, please be
courteous and professional during the entire process. Explain
that you are completing an assignment for Industrial
Supervision and are interested in scheduling approximately
thirty minutes to meet and discuss their experiences as a
supervisor within their field. Be on time for your interview,
whether it is conducted in person or over the phone. Finally,
make sure to thank the individual after the interview, which
always helps in maintaining strong professional contacts. Send
a Thank You note as soon as the interview is complete.
After the interview, the student will submit two (2) documents:
· The first document will consist of actual interview
results/notes. In all likelihood, you will be taking notes by
hand and, thus, will have a handwritten document. You may
scan this document or take an image of it, perhaps with your
smart phone, and place it in the provided digital drop box space.
· Subsequently, each student must also submit a reflection
paper. This paper should synthesize what you have learned
from the interview. While the summary will not necessarily be
exhaustive, it should include key content from the interview
questions that you consider the most relevant as well as your
personal reactions to or thoughts on what was covered.
Both documents should be turned in by the due date shown

8. above.
The attached list of questions should be incorporated into the
interview. Feel free to modify the general questions to be
suitable for the industry, the professional you interview, and the
flow of the interview. However, please make sure that all
questions listed are addressed in some way. You may also add
your own questions/discussions.
The reflection paper must meet the following guidelines:
· At least two pages in length (body of the paper must be at
least two pages);
· No more than three pages in length;
· Double-spaced;
· Standard one inch margins on all sides;
· Times New Roman / 12 point font; and
· Correct spelling and grammar.
Interview Questions
Date & Time of Interview
Name & Title of Interviewee
Describe your present position and career progression for an
individual to hold this type of position.
Describe the organization and industry where you work, such as
number of employees, types of employment positions, services,
and products.
What are the most rewarding aspects of your job?
What are the most challenging aspects of your job?
What would a typical day be like for someone in your position?

9. What is the mission, vision, and values of the organization?
Does your company do strategic planning and are you involved
in the process in your position?
Could you summarize the general hiring process for vacancies?
How are employees recruited, trained, and retained?
How would you describe the culture of the company?
What characteristics do you consider important for the type of
job that you have?
What advice would you give an undergraduate student who
might be interested in this professional career or what type of
educational and community experiences would be relevant to
the job?