Our general guidelines foster digital trust and ethical values, specifically for AI-powered online commerce.
around digital trust and data ethics beyond legal compliance. Inform, lead, and accompany individuals, retail businesses, and institutions to embrace practices safeguarding privacy, security, and consent.It’s a fact that we, as humans, don’t trust digital commerce anymore. We’re increasingly conscious of whether businesses protect our personal data and respect our online privacy. We don’t want to share our personal data without knowing what and why our private information is being collected, processed, and shared.We, as online retailers, need to adapt to a quickly changing technical landscape and adjust to the ever growing economic demands, all the while keeping the customers’ online privacy at the heart of operations. International regulatory bodies are taking necessary steps to meet the need for a more robust data protection legislation and policies. This is a good starting point, but still a long way to go to ensure the safety and protection of personal data in an AI-empowered world.The ECA, in collaboration with its founding partner Empathy.co, conducted this year’s Retail Trust Index. This industry study embraces a new approach to recover shoppers’ trust by analysing online tracking practices, cookie usage, and data breaches among the UK’s top retail brands.
for the way we interact with technology and act responsibly in the online world. Understand your actions and the impact they can have on others.Brands must evaluate whether more necessarily means better. Consider what valuable information is fair to obtain from your shoppers, modulate your conversation with them, and think about when is the right time and context to ask them for consent.
by acting honestly and responsibly as a retail business. Connect with your customers by displaying competency and reliability. Trust is earned by giving trust, built upon transparency and respect.Brands that are transparent with their data collection and AI-powered product practices are more likely to be trustworthy. Moreover, giving customers control over the data they share establishes a loyal relationship and encourages them to shop with you again.
in your workflows and algorithms. We’re all humans and we make mistakes. Monitoring, reflecting, and adjusting is a process that helps stay up to date with measures needed to protect individuals’ human rights.Data privacy, security, and control are things that concern us all as individuals in a digital world that is increasingly captured by AI technologies. At the ECA, we provide an open space for dialogue to explore opportunities from different perspectives and to reveal potential risks and biases that can be improved.Even though the pillar of AI-powered products and features usually are foundational models, trained with an astronomical number of customers’ data, you can still embrace a privacy-minding approach in your processes, work structure, and culture with ethics-compliance foundational models. These models are built on collective non-personal data and their outcome is not applied differently to individuals. However, even when foundational models are trained exclusively with anonymised data, biases and further ethical considerations should be taken into account. The AI data used on your business can be fine-tuned with domain-specific datasets that help you minimise the impact biases can have on your online shop.
beyond legal compliance. Personal data needs an extra layer of protection, even more so now that AI-based products are the axis of innovation in the tech industry. Privacy policies should contain clear language that is easily understood and context-related. This process gives people control while maintaining transparency.Being ethical by design means that brands care about individuals’ data privacy in the first place, not as an afterthought when a data leak becomes a breach and a privacy violation, resulting in fines and reputational discredit. This approach excels in minimising personal data use while maximising data security, integrating safeguards to protect human’s private information.One way to implement this is by correctly applying cookies, which must be readable and crystal clear to users, with equal possibilities to accept or reject them, and what that entails for the use of data is a good example of how privacy by design practices can be implemented to improve the customers’ experience.
in your work structure and culture. Foster an environment open to discussions, knowledge sharing, and accountability.Boost people’s confidence to speak out.
