**Republished from an IAF Blog dated March 2018, in anticipation of the GDPR compliance date**.
As the race to EU GDPR enforcement date in May heads into overdrive, should companies start looking around the corner to what's next?
GDPR implementation has required deep focus on technical and procedural legal compliance. Yet recent pronouncements from the EU Data Protection Supervisory Ethics Advisory Group and the UK ICO are reminders that ethical considerations are part of data protection programs:
On December 7, 2017, UK ICO Liz Denham said: “The GDPR does not specifically reference data ethics, but it is clear that its considerable focus on new technologies – particularly profiling and automated decision making – reflects the concerns of legislators about the personal and societal effect of powerful data-processing technology. It’s hard to separate data protection by design from data ethics by design…Companies must ask themselves questions that identify the risks they are creating for others and mitigate those risks. There is every reason to include ethical considerations as part of that process. The most innovative companies will go further and use these tools as a springboard to think of ways they can integrate their data protection and ethical assessments. That just makes common sense.” https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2017/12/techuk-data-ethics-summit/
On January 25, 2018, the EDPS Ethics Advisory Group wrote: “…’data rich’ public and private organizations will have greater ethical responsibilities towards citizens and customers.”
Ethics-based, stakeholder-focused data stewardship requires enhanced transparency and accountability, enabled by the specific application of ethical considerations. Look for more soon on a project I'll be leading with the IAF, bringing my extensive years of experience as a CPO and business process expertise. The objective is to provide a framework and tools that help companies transform from pure compliance to accountability, ethics and stakeholder-focused data stewardship. The GDPR will push organizations to towards more robust, demonstrable and accountable data governance.