Law and Ethics
Put simply, laws are structured rules that are used to govern society. Ethics are generally considered as moral values that an individual may establish as their own personal rules to live by.
Organisations may also produce their own internal ethics and guidelines that they expect employees to adhere to. Though there may be no legal consequences for choosing not to follow them, ignoring them could result in the loss of employment.
Responsible Disclosures
In 2018, Zoetop - holding company behind Shein and Romwe suffered a data breach that saw the names, emails and hashed passwords of a combined customer base around 46 million people, stolen. You would think that was bad enough!
Zoetop did not adequately inform their affected customers and tried to keep the impact of the data breach quiet, which has resulted in a fine this year to the tune of $1.9 million dollars.
How would you feel if your personal information was stolen? Now… how would you feel if the company that allowed your personal information to be stolen lied about it too?
Honesty is always the best policy when it comes to these sorts of things. The sooner a data breach is disclosed to the relevant customers and authorities, the sooner a business can begin fixing their issues and repairing reputational damage. According to a Kaspersky report ‘How businesses can minimize the cost of a data breach’, small and medium sized business that voluntarily disclose breaches to their stakeholders and the public, are likely to lose 40% less financially than their peers that saw the incident leaked to the media. A similar trend has been found among enterprise cases too.