How to Decide if Tech is Ethical
Is it Ethical? Your Call.
Determining whether a tech company is ethical isn't easy. It all boils down to what you consider ethical, which ethics you prioritize, and how the company aligns with those values. There's no right answer, and different people have ethical priorities. In this article, I’ll cover some basic ethical criteria to help you make your own judgment.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but they are things that I look for when I’m evaluating whether a company meets my ethical standards or not. Do you have other things you look for? I’d love to know! Let me know in the comments, or reach out to me directly bytesizedethics@substack.com.
Ethical for Whom?
We have to start this by defining what we mean by ethical, and who’s ethics are prioritizing. There is no right answer here, and people will weigh different ethical factors differently, which means that two people can ethically evaluate a piece of tech and come out with two different solutions.
For this piece, I’ll use simple ethical criteria:
Does the company respect human rights and dignity of its customers and its employees?
Does the company operate ethically, insofar as we can ascertain from publicly available information?
Know how the Sausage is Made
Internet sleuthing will tell you how the company treats its customers and its employees, and how it conducts business. Running an internet search and checking reviews sites can give a lot of insight into how the company conducts itself.
Run an Internet Search
When you are researching whether a company’s values and ethics line up with your own, the first thing you should do to run an internet search of the company. Doing due diligence research enables you to make better, more informed decisions.
Are any controversies or exceptionally bad behaviors?
Are there any awards or exceptionally good behaviors?
For example, did you know that it takes an army of folks in underdeveloped countries looking at violent and sexually explicit material to keep ChatGPT clean? Or that a CEO recently fired 90% of his customer support staff … in favor of an AI bot that’s poorly trained and wrong most of the time, but responds with those wrong answers in under 2 minutes? Both of those things should factor into whether you want to use or engage with the company.
Check the Review Sites
Good companies will have more good than bad, but everyone company will still have some bad reviews. You want to discover:
How does the company treat its customers?
How does the company treat its employees?
There are tons of websites that offer customer reviews of companies. Yelp, G2, and Better Business Bureau will give you a good insight into how the company interacts with its customers. Some companies respond to criticisms with empathy and respect — even when disagree with the review. Other companies will insult and accuse their customers post critical reviews.
Take it a step further and check out the company on Glassdoor and similar sites. These sites allow employees to rate and review their employer. Reading the commentary and looking at the scores will give you insight into how the company treats its employees.
Read the Privacy Policy
The software’s privacy policy is going to tell you a lot about how a business runs, and whether how they run matches your morals, ethics, and values.
Yes, they are terrible to read. They are long, full of legal-ese, and sometimes even intentionally complicated. Luckily, you skim over most of it if you don’t want to spend the time reading it word for word like I do. There are three parts to the privacy policy you should always read, and luckily:
What data the company collects about you
How they use that data
What they share with third parties
Will they use your data to train AI models?
Ask yourself: Do I agree that the company needs all of this information about me or my company, and am I OK with how they are using it and sharing it?
The last point about AI models is rapidly growing in importance, as AI continues its meteoric rise into every aspect of our lives. Google recently updated its privacy policy to allow them to scrape anything on the internet ever to train their AI, and it’s raising some eyebrows. Some folks are fine with having their data and property be used to make AI models better, and other people see it as a breach of their privacy. It’s important you know whether you are OK with it, or not.
Check for Social Commitments
Companies that are willing to make a public statement about social issues and their commitment to it are more likely to be ethical. Check for these pages on the company’s website:
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion commitments (DEI), especially those that have things like Human Rights Campaign Awards
Sustainable / Climate-conscious business and development practices commitments and awards
Trust / Ethical commitments
A company having these public commitments isn’t a guarantee they act ethically, but it’s a good starting point. Most companies will have something token about DEI on their website. The more prominent and visible, the more likely that they aren’t ethics washing. Look for things like initiatives they’ve launched, money spent - anything that shows they’ve turned their words into actions.
A company that has a public Trust commitment is probably the single best indication that they are trying to operate ethically. Trust sections generally include breakdowns of privacy protection, data usage, security, and compliance commitments all in one place. If a company takes the time to create this section, they’ve put real money and effort behind their Trust program.
See Trust in action: Trust @ Productboard
Be Prepared to Make Tradeoffs
Making a difficult ethical choice means you are going to miss out on something. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be difficult. In our world, the implications are layered so thickly that we are forced to prioritize what ethic we are going to make our decision based on - because there is no wholly ethical choice in the world of technology.
You might decide that Foxconn using children overseas to make iPhones is a bridge too far and that you can’t in good conscious use an iPhone. Or you might decide that the iPhone’s stance on privacy in response to the repeal of Roe v. Wade means that it’s the only phone you can stomach.
You might decide that Wayfair deciding to support concentration camps at the southern border means you won’t make purchases from them anymore, no matter how much you like some of their furniture.
You might also decide that a contractor who does work that you love and brags about using sustainable and reclaimed materials to minimize environmental impact, but openly berated and insulted customers on that review website, isn’t going to get your business.
The Verdict
You are the only one who can decide whether something matches your ethics or not. There is no right answer, which is why I named this article “How to Decide if Tech is Ethical,” because it is ultimately up to you. No piece of technology is going to be wholly good, or wholly bad, it is just one giant smear of gray with random pockets of good and bad.
You have to look at all the evidence and decide for yourself whether you can live with this… or not.