In a world where people and machines are in-creasingly interconnected, the challenges for companies are becoming more complex. All stakeholders expect digital products, applica-tions and services to be secure, data-saving, privacy-friendly and transparent - in short, trustworthy . In this context, legal issues must be clarified in the use and commercialization of data. Data law considerations form the basis for this. Moreo-ver, it is a question of responsible handling of data and algorithmic systems, which must be considered from an ethical perspective. The combination of both perspectives results in the assumption of digital responsibility.
Digital responsibility thus provides answers to both the ethical and legal questions of our digital world. We at b.yond have therefore specialised in consulting services within the large intersections of digital ethics and law. Together with our clients, we explore the ethical dimensions of digital business models and thus accompany them on the path of digital responsibility.
In data law as part of a digital responsibility, the burning questions must be considered holistical-ly and across legal fields:
Increased requirements for cybersecurity and IT- and data security are among the more stringent compliance obligations of business managers. In the event of violations of data protection law for personal data (General Data Protection Reg-ulation, GDPR/Federal Data Protection Act), companies are threatened with fines and data-related legal protection proceedings (data priva-cy litigation) by authorities, but also initiated by competitors and consumer associations.
In addition, there are new legal issues in the use and commercialization of data, e.g. in the con-text of big data, AI robotics and networked data structures in digital ecosystems like the Europe-an GAIA-X. Who owns data, who is allowed to participate in the commercialization of data? How are data assets reflected in corporate bal-ance sheets? What other data-related legal obli-gations can companies expect in the future?
Digital ethics helps to find an appropriate way of dealing with new technologies and their ef-fects in a rapidly modernizing society with its numerous digital devices and applications. People are empowered to recognize and antici-pate the risks of digitality. As such, digital eth-ics is an integral part of corporate digital re-sponsibility.
The importance of ethical issues in the context of digital technologies and business models has grown in recent years. Rapid advances in the areas of so-called artificial intelligence (AI), for example, in connection with automatic facial recognition or autonomous driving - are driving the debate. While legislation cannot keep up with this speed, politics, society, science and industry are already working on the topic from different angles.
For companies, this raises numerous questions that influence the design of future-proof digital business models: How can algorithms be used for automated decision making without violating human autonomy? How does one decide wheth-er to include publicly available data sets when it is not clear how this data was obtained? How do you responsibly use digital technologies for which there are no standards yet? And when will Germany follow Denmark's example and intro-duce reporting requirements on companies' data ethics strategy?