Legal, but not ethical — more thoughts on ethics in business and UX
I’m still thinking about ethics as I go into next week’s workshop at UXinsight Festival.
These things are also on my mind because of global politics and current affairs, which, unfortunately, have many examples of what I want to discuss today.
A question I’ve been asked before is, how do you start a conversation in your product team about ethics when others don’t care to the level you do? It’s an excellent question; it’s not easy to answer like many excellent questions. And it is an important part of the discussion in the workshop.
A starting point of an ethical discussion can be what is and isn’t legal, especially when thinking about data protection.
But, it can only be the starting point because what is legal is often insufficient. What is legal and what is ethical don’t always overlap. Ethics often lies in the grey areas that aren’t touched by law, regulation and codes of conduct. And there are also unethical laws, which take us to the territory of the ethical imperative to break unethical laws; even the most minor/small-scale ethical dilemmas may involve elements of deliberate lawbreaking.
We are swimming in choppy waters, but that is exactly where the ethical dilemma’s live. Ethical dilemmas are where you need to make decisions between right and right such as:
- Truth v loyalty
- Individual v community
- Short-term v long term
- Justice v mercy
Or the breaking of unethical laws.
Two examples in the wider world that are at the forefront of my mind of legal but not ethical:
- Current Trans healthcare bans are legal, but they are not ethical. Yes, it is legal to deny people access to gender-affirming healthcare in many places, but this is in no way ethical. Forcing doctors to choose between the Hippocratic Oath and the laws of where they live.
- The outlawing of abortion later than 6 weeks is but one of many examples of this kind of law. It is legal to deny people who are pregnant bodily autonomy and force them to give birth, but it is in no way ethical. I think you get the point.
The ‘legal not ethical dilemma’ can also be found in business and UX.
Marketing tactics can walk a fine line between persuasion and manipulation, and this is an area where subjective ethics come into play. For example, tactics can exploit harmful addictions by eliciting emotional responses.
And, just because something is GDPR-compliant doesn’t mean it’s ethical. Industries and businesses operate within regulations to enforce ethical standards, but the subjective nature of ethics means that even perfectly legal business practices can be scrutinised as unethical behaviour.
A data privacy example might be using a tool like Hotjar or Crazy Egg and the many other alternatives; data protection regulations require businesses to declare privacy policies that these kinds of tools are implemented on their site/app.
A common use of Hotjar is to capture real-life e-commerce journeys to see where people struggle in the checkout. Hotjar, for example, automatically obscures things like email addresses, home addresses, and credit card numbers to protect the users’ data. But what if you are using Hotjar less typically? Where personal data fields may not be automatically obscured?
An example could be an alternative healthcare provider implementing such tools in a digital form, where people submit highly sensitive health and medical information. The intention of recording this data is good; the team wants to see ‘in real life’ where people struggle with the form to make it easier to use. However, the medical data fields aren’t automatically obscured, so anyone viewing the recordings can see the user’s name and this very sensitive information. The alternative healthcare provider state in its privacy statement that this tool is used on its site. So it’s legal, but is this an ethical use of such tools? Should the organisation collect this data, even if stored securely and used appropriately? Could they do the same work without collecting this highly sensitive data? The answer is not necessarily obvious.
The ethics in research and design workshop explores frameworks to work through such ethical dilemmas, to help us come to our decisions. Hope to see you there :)
https://www.linkedin.com/company/uxpainternational/ #UXPA2023
References:
How good people make tough choices. Resolving the dilemmas of ethical living. Rushworth Kidder. Harper. (2003)
https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/examples-legal-but-unethical-situations-business-21719.htm
