Spring GDS 25th Anniversary
A logistics company that ships to 190 countries built something to ship to itself.
Data ethics
What is data ethics?
Data ethics is the study of what an organisation should do with data, as distinct from what it is legally allowed to do. Compliance answers the second question. Regulations like GDPR set the floor: get consent, secure the data, let people delete it. Data ethics starts where that floor ends and asks the harder questions about fairness, consent that people actually understand, and harm that no law happens to name yet.
The gap between legal and right is where most data scandals live. Collecting location data with a buried consent checkbox can be perfectly compliant and still a betrayal of the person who tapped "accept" without reading. Selling anonymised data that turns out to be trivially re-identifiable clears the legal bar and fails the ethical one. The Cambridge Analytica affair was, in large part, a story of data used in ways its owners never meaningfully agreed to.
In practice, data ethics means collecting only what you need, being honest about why, storing it no longer than necessary, and treating the people behind the records as people rather than rows. It is a design constraint, not a legal afterthought.
Data ethics at Dallonses
We are a certified B-corp, and we treat data as something we are trusted with rather than something we own. When we build a customer data platform or a reporting system, we start by asking what data the client genuinely needs, not what they could technically hoover up. Less data collected is less data to leak, less to misuse, and less to defend.
That principle runs through the engineering. We design for consent that holds up, retention that expires, and access that is logged and limited. Our QA and governance work treats privacy failures as defects, because a system that leaks or over-collects is broken whether or not a regulator has noticed yet. We would rather tell a client to gather less and use it well than help them build a liability they will spend years apologising for.
Building systems that handle people's data? Let's build them right.
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