Ethics Owners: A New Model of Organizational Responsibility in Data-Driven Technology Companies

Abstract

T he world has moved in remarkable ways since this research was first initiated in late 2018 and the analysis was finalized in early-2020.Since then, we have seen the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement following the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and all too many others.Given these critical events, we as researchers and as members of a research organization paused to reflect on how our work speaks to the urgent injustices laid bare today.These events have dramatically foregrounded existing calls for justice at the intersections of technology, unjust social and political structures, digital privacy, surveillance, and the values and purpose of technology corporations.Many of the defining events that have shaped ethics in the tech sector in recent years-including tech worker organization, walkouts and resignations over military contracts, continued contestations over racial and sexual harassment inside of tech companies, legislation and regulations, and critical audits-have been and continue to be the contentious background to the research conducted for this report.Our research takes place amidst, but is not primarily about, these tectonic changes that have repeatedly reframed the broader tech ethics conversation.It is instead about the ways those inside of tech companies have begun reshaping corporate practices against this background-how they understand the problems their industry faces, the means at their disposal to address these problems, and the lines of thought that shape those understandings.Public debates about social justice remain in the background of this research.Ethics practices, as they have been institutionalized in Silicon Valley tech companies, are often focused on addressing corporate values, legal risk, and compliance while bracketing out broader understandings of what is meant by "ethics."These broader understandings include questions of moral, social, and racial justice that corporate ethics practices are more likely to address in incremental, and not structural or systematic, ways.As we have

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