Digital ethics sits at the peak of the Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle for Privacy, 2021, as people become increasingly aware of the value of their personal information and frustrated by lack of transparency and continuing misuse.
Gartner defines digital ethics as the systems of values and moral principles for the conduct of electronic interactions among people, organisations and things. With the adoption of artificial intelligence, for the first time, the ethical discussion is taking place before and during a technology’s widespread implementation.
Organisations are moving to secure personal data and governments are implementing strict legislation to enforce it. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2023, more than 80 per cent of companies worldwide will be facing at least one privacy-focused data protection regulation.
“Even where regulations do not yet exist, customers are actively choosing to engage with organisations that respect their privacy. The application of new technologies such as those on this Hype Cycle will provide a path to protecting privacy in a volatile environment,” said Bart Willemsen, Research Vice President, Gartner.
To address these changes in law and customer demand, security and risk management leaders must carefully select technologies that balance innovation with compliance. Gartner predicts that by 2024, worldwide privacy-driven spending on data protection and compliance technology will exceed US$ 15 billion annually.
Proactive and mature organisations are moving away from reactive compliance towards proactive privacy by design. When they do, they start to invest in innovations on the left side of the Hype Cycle, such as homomorphic encryption, a set of algorithms that enable computation on encrypted data; and differential privacy, a system for using or sharing a dataset while withholding or distorting certain information about individual records in it.
