Do Data Companies Need Chief Ethics Officers?
Sometimes it takes a billion-dollar mistake to bring the murkier side of data ethics into sharp focus. Equifax found this out to their own cost in 2017 when they failed to protect the data of almost 150 million users globally. The catastrophic breach was bad enough on its own — but Equifax waited three months to go public with the news. As the public furore rose to a crescendo, the credit organization dragged its feet on disclosing exactly what kind of information had been leaked.