Data ethics: What it means and what it takes

Now more than ever, every company is a data company. By 2025, individuals and companies around the world will produce an estimated 463 exabytes of data each day, 1 1. Jeff Desjardins, "How much data is generated each day?" World Economic Forum, April 17, 2019. With that in mind, most businesses have begun to address the operational aspects of data management--for instance, determining how to build and maintain a data lake or how to integrate data scientists and other technology experts into existing teams. Fewer companies have systematically considered and started to address the ethical aspects of data management, which could have broad ramifications and responsibilities. If algorithms are trained with biased data sets or data sets are breached, sold without consent, or otherwise mishandled, for instance, companies can incur significant reputational and financial costs. Board members could even be held personally liable.