Journal of the Association for Information Systems (2021) 22(3), 571-578
doi: 10.17705/1jais.00672
ISSN 1536-9323
Policy for Ethical Digital Services
Richard O. Mason1
1
Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University, USA, rmason@mail.cox.smu.edu
John L. King was the accepting senior editor. This editorial was accepted on February 27, 2021.
Our values, our institutions, democracy, human
rights, in my view are being challenged right now
because of the emergence of new technologies. 1
– Casper Klynge, Denmark’s foreign ambassador
to the technology industry.
1 On Policy Making and Human
Values
How does information technology affect human
values? There is much contemporary discussion on this
question in accounts of “surveillance capitalism” in a
sociotechnical context, (Zuboff, 2019) 2 as well as in
research on concepts of dignity regarding personal data
(PD), sometimes called personal attribute data (PAD)
in the process of digitalization (Leidner & Tona, 2021).
This paper discusses policy for PD as an overarching
framework in a sociotechnical system. Such policy
makes the system more acceptable to stakeholders,
some of whom carry more power and influence than
others. 3 Policy is political, as well as technical and
analytical. Changes in science, technology, social
mores, and unanticipated disruptions like the COVID-
19 pandemic dislocate sociotechnical systems and
sometimes require new policy. Policy must be guided
by values,4 either consciously or unconsciously. Policy
1The New York Times, Sept 4, 2019, B1.
2“Sociotechnical” implies the interrelatedness of the social
and the technical aspects of a system as a whole.
Sociotechnical systems are interlinked, a mixture of human
beings, knowledge, technology, and the environment. Each
works together to reach a condition of joint optimization (see
Trist & Bamforth, 1951, p. 14).
3 Stakeholders are claimants inside and outside the
sociotechnical system who have a vested interest in the
POLICY EDITORIAL
“assumes, expresses, and helps create a system of
human ‘values,’” such as “respect for persons and the
maintenance of individual dignity” (Vickers, 1965, p.
29).
2 Respect for Persons or Individual
Dignity
A key value for policy is respect for persons or
individual dignity. This concept is emergent, gaining
meaning over time. By the 19th century, it had evolved
to mean that human beings have an “unconditional
moral worth and should always be treated as if there is
nothing of greater value than they are.”5 This is from
the second formulation of Immanuel Kant’s
categorical imperative: “act as to treat humanity,
whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in
every case as an end withal, never as a means only”
(emphasis added, Kant, 1964, p. 96). Kant places no
time limit on this imperative. It works irrespective of
disruptions. People should be treated with respect and
individual dignity, even after death. This seems
especially relevant in an age of pandemic, when some
hold economic values above respect for persons and
individual dignity.6
policy issues facing the system (see Mason & Mitroff, 1981,
p. 43).
4
Values are good, desirable and important to stakeholders.
Value must be the object of a preference, or a judgment of
importance for any state of a system, or thing, attitude, ideal,
purpose, or goal (see Reese, 1980, p. 604)
5 https://rhchp.regis.edu/HCE/EthicsAtAGlance/RespectFor
Persons
6 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-do-you-choose-
between-economic-deaths-of-despair-and-coronavirus-
571

Respect for persons and individual dignity should be
applied to PD that describe a quality or feature of an
individual person or an inherent part or characteristic
of that person. When PD include data about attributes
and behavioral data that attach to given individuals, it
becomes personally identifiable information (PII).7 In
online marketing, behavioral data (information
produced as a result of actions, typically commercial
behavior using a range of devices connected to the
internet, such as a PC, tablet, or smartphone) can track
sites visited, apps downloaded, and games played.8 An
individual’s PD might not provide exclusive identifiers
like PII, but each additional element of PD can
describe more about who the person is or might
become. Behavioral data reflects a user’s past behavior
and can be used to predict and influence subsequent
behavior. Issues of respect for persons and individual
dignity can arise with PII or PD because they are
extensions of the person. This is an emerging concept,
as the case of Henrietta Lacks suggests.
3 Lessons from Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks was a poor, 30-year-old African
American mother of five who moved from Clover,
Virginia, “a land of wooden slave quarters, faith
healings, and voodoo,” to Baltimore. 9 She was
diagnosed at Johns Hopkins Hospital with aggressive
cervical cancer and died on October 4, 1951. Hers was
more than a biological case: it was a data case. After
her death, physicians found that Lack’s cells carried
the data to divide repeatedly and survive indefinitely in
culture. Her “immortal” cells, labeled “HeLa,” (an
acronym comprised of the initial letters of her first and
last names) were the first “immortal” human cells
grown in culture. They live today and are used
worldwide to study the effects of nuclear radiation, for
research on cancer, and to develop techniques of in-
vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping. HeLa
was also used to develop COVID-19 vaccines. HeLa
launched a medical revolution and a multimillion-
dollar industry. Yet neither Lacks nor anyone in her
family benefited financially. Aside from the fact that
her cells (and most cells, for that matter) can be thought
of as data processing entities, Henrietta Lacks’s case
shows how closely PD can be connected to the person,
and how our understanding of these issues is evolving.
victims-economists-lawmakers-grapple-with-a-moral-
conundrum-2020-03-26
7 Tech writer and linguist Margaret Rouse, defines PII as
“any data that could potentially identify a specific
“individual.” She adds it could be any” information that can
be used to distinguish one person from another and can be
used for de-anonymizing anonymous data.”
https://searchfinancialsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/per
sonally-identifiable-information
572
Policy for Ethical Digital Services
Ethical digital service policy often has its origins in
biomedicine. It is akin to IS because it involves the
systematic use of information. Biomedicine also
embodies respect for persons and individual dignity. A
good example of this is the “common rule” that gave rise
to institutional review boards (IRBs) that oversee
human-subjects research (King, 2015). IRBs arose in
part from the US Public Health Service (USPHS)
Tuskegee syphilis study in the 1930s in which Black
males in Macon County, Alabama were promised
treatment for “bad blood” but in fact received no
treatment even if diagnosed with syphilis. A similar
USPHS study in Central America in the 1940s
deliberately infected people with diseases to study them.
These cases dovetailed with the horrific biomedical
experiments performed during WWII that came to light
during the Nuremberg trials. Some argued that data
collected in such barbaric studies should never be
published. Others argued that the data were
contributions from the victims and should be published.
There is seldom closure on such issues but respect for
persons and individual dignity guidelines help guide the
discussion.
In August 2013—over 60 years after Henrietta Lacks
died—the Lacks family and the National Institutes of
Health reached an “understanding.” Biomedical
researchers could use all genome information derived
from Henrietta Lacks’s cells, and the family would
receive accolades but no financial remuneration. The
NIH announced it would begin “exploring fundamental
reforms to human subject protections— actions that are
driven in part by the fact that technological advances,
especially in genomics and computing, have made the
notion of ‘de-identifying’ a research participant’s
biological sample virtually impossible.”10
For purposes of this paper, researchers used Henrietta
Lacks’s data (found in her cells) without consent. To the
extent that they considered her a patient, not a person,
respect for the person was easy to ignore. Her cells were
an “object,” not part of the person. But Henrietta Lacks
was a person. A young lab assistant, Mary Kubicek,
witnessed Lacks’s autopsy. She looked at Lacks’s arms
and legs to avoid her lifeless eyes, but then gazed at
Lacks’s toenails, covered in chipped bright red polish.
She said: “When I saw those toenails, I nearly fainted. I
thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining
her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and
it hit me for the first time that those cells, we’d been
8
https://digitopoly.org/2015/05/14/behind-the-buzz-of-behavioral-
data/
9 Quoted from the dust jacket of The Immortal Life of
Henrietta Lacks (Skloot, 2010).
10 “NIH, Lacks family reach understanding to share genomic
data of HeLa cells” (https://www.nih.gov/news-events/
news-releases/nih-lacks-family-reach-understanding-share-
genomic-data-hela-cells).
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
working with all this time and sending all over the
world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought
of it that way” (Skloot, 2010, pp. 90-91).11
4 Stressing Human Values
Respect for persons and individual dignity applies to
digital service platforms (DSPs) 12 such as Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. DSPs
employ PD in much the same way that researchers
have been using the HeLa cell line. They pay little if
any respect to the originators. They use data freely to
drive multimillion-dollar businesses in a huge
sociotechnical system where data flow plays a central
role. The term “big data” 13 was coined in 2005 to
describe this. 14 New York Times technology reporter
Steve Lohr, after attending the World Economic
Forum, wrote in February 2012:
The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at
Google and now Facebook, are masters at
harnessing the data of the Web—online
searches, posts and messages—with
Internet advertising. At the World economic
forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big
Data was a marquee topic. A Forum report,
‘Big Data, Big Impact,’ declared data a new
economic asset class like currency or gold.
Lohr goes on to say: “policymakers are beginning to
realize the potential for channeling these torrents of
data into actionable information that can be used to
identify needs & provide services for the benefit of
low-income populations.” The report serves as a call to
action for stakeholders to take “concerted action to
ensure that this data helps the individuals and
communities who create it” (WEF, 2012).
Big data has become an economic driver, with data
characterized as “currency or gold,” a kind of capital.
A significant portion of data is PD. Respect for persons
and individual dignity requires entities acquiring PD to
handle it according to ethical principles similar to those
defined in the General Data Protection Regulations
(GDPR), Europe’s law embodying the right to be
forgotten, or the right to erasure. 15 In fact, the GDPR
provides a useful definition of PD. 16 Under GDPR,
11 Chapter 26 of this book, “Breach of Privacy,” describes
some of the abuses made in using HeLa cells for research and
other purposes.
12 A platform refers to a coordinated group of technologies
that is used as a base upon which various applications are
developed, implemented, and delivered. Digital services
refer to the electronic delivery, usually web-based, of
information (see McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2017).
13 Roger Mougalas from O'Reilly Media coined the term
“Big Data” for the first time in 2005 (https://datafloq.com/
read/big-data-history).
14 According to Forbes, in 2019 Americans used nearly 4.5
GB [giga bites] of internet data, exchanged nearly 200
individuals can ask organizations to delete personal
data. No such regulations govern the United States as
a whole, but the California Consumer Privacy Act
(CCPA) tries to do something similar.17
5 A New Type of Capitalism
DSPs employ a new business model (Zuboff, 2019).
The story of Henrietta Lacks informs DSPs in two
ways. First, it shows that PD are an extension of the
person, and thus subject to respect for persons and
individual dignity. Second, it shows that the
application of the concept changes over time. It is not
now settled. The DSP business model needs to engage
these points. This model can be summarized as five
steps, of which the third, fourth, and fifth are key:
1. Offer users an online service, essentially for free.
2. Acquire and use PD to deliver the service
efficiently and effectively.
3. Use powerful computers, typically at “server
farms” located strategically around the world, to
augment the PD with behavioral information
through AI, machine learning, deep learning, etc.
Within microseconds, match demographic
information like name, gender, age, location, and
previous behavior to reveal almost anything.
Digital tracking or digital fingerprinting enables
following, recording, storing, and repackaging a
user’s internet history. DSPs specializing in PD
know what users read or skip, what videos they
watch all the way through or stop watching after
a few seconds, what promotional emails they
read or toss in the Trash without opening, what
they do on social media (e.g., “Like” on
Facebook, retweet on Twitter, “heart” on
Instagram). Taken together, such clues can
identify users and capture behavior, correlating
to deduce each user’s online fingerprint and
personal traits, likes and dislikes, idiosyncrasies
and perhaps neuroses (Chen, 2019).
4. The DSP serves the user personalized
advertisements or propaganda each time the user
accesses the account.
million emails and nearly 20 million text messages and
perfomed nearly five billion Google searches per minute
(https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/08/07/ho
w-much-data-is-collected-every-minute-of-the-
day/#62f37f353d66). In addition, International Data
Corporation (IDC) predicts that the world’s data will be in
hundreds of zettabytes by 2025 (a zettabyte is one sextillion,
1021 or 270 bytes. The pandemic might affect this, but the
trend is clear.
15 https://gdpr.eu/
16 https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_
Act
573

5. The DSP “monetizes” by selling user data to
marketers, propagandists, etc.
Users expect Steps 1 and 2. These raise few ethical
issues. Users seldom see Steps 3, 4, and 5 that raise
challenging ethical issues. In Data and Goliath: The
Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your
World, security expert Bruce Schneier describes how
much and how easily PD can be collected:
Your cell phone tracks where you live and
where you work. It tracks where you like to
spend your weekends and evenings. It
tracks how often you go to church (and
which church), how much time you spend in
bars, and whether you speed when you
drive. Since it knows about all the other
phones in your area it tracks with whom you
spend your days, with whom you have
lunch, and with whom you sleep. The
accumulated data can probably paint a
better picture of how you spend your time
than you can, because it doesn’t have to rely
on human memory. In 2012, researchers
were able to use this data to predict where
people would be 24 hours later, to within 20
meters. (Schneier, 2015, emphasis in
original)
Schneier (2015, p. 1) refers to this as “a very intimate
form of surveillance.” It describes much of the
personal data that social media companies are
currently collecting. In The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff
shows how digital service platforms have benefited
from “surveillance capitalism,” the process of
capturing and utilizing PD. One reviewer referred to
her far-reaching and thought-provoking book as “the
information industry’s Silent Spring.” 18 She writes:
Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims
human experience as free raw material for
translation into behavioral data. Although
some of these data are applied to product or
service improvement, the rest are declared
as proprietary behavioral surplus, and
fabricated into prediction products that
anticipate what you will do now, soon, and
later … Surveillance capitalists have grown
immensely wealthy from these trading
18The review is from Chris Hoofnagle, a law professor at
University of California, Berkeley who studies information
privacy, and appears on the dust jacket of Zuboff’s book.
Silent Spring is a book by Rachel Carlson published in the
1950’s that raised the public’s awareness of the damage that
the large-scale use of pesticides (and human activities more
broadly) was doing to the environment.
574
Policy for Ethical Digital Services
operations for many companies are eager to
lay bets on our future behavior. (Zuboff,
2019, p. 8 emphasis in original) 19
The behavioral surplus is created in Steps 3, 4, and 5
noted above. Zuboff, references Marx’s theory of
labor, 20 calling this an exploitation of a user unless
conducted under conditions of informed consent.
6 The Model is Highly Successful
Several DSPs dominate. Google (a division of
Alphabet that includes YouTube) helps people find
information via search. Facebook (including Instagram
and WhatsApp) informs and connects people via social
media. Amazon helps people purchase goods via
digital commerce. Apple, among its other services,
allows people to listen to music via iPod and iTunes.
Microsoft owns the professional networking site
LinkedIn along with other services and offers public
cloud and other software services. Firms like these are
among those that Zuboff calls “surveillance
capitalists.” “Surveillance” implies some acquisition
of personal data done clandestinely, and many users
are not aware or fully informed about the behavioral
data or PII being collected about them or how it is used.
Some DSPs enjoy power over users by controlling user
PD. Many users care more about participating with a
DSP than about protecting their personal data. Many
don’t know which of their PD are collected and how
they are used. Many are not aware of the extent to
which user PD fuels corporate enterprises and
undergirds successful and wealthy DSPs. Some DSPs
have prospered immensely, with billions of users
signing on daily and interacting for work,
entertainment, or education. Each user is a source of
PD to be monetized by a DSP.
The use of PD has been economically effective.
Writing in Digital Information World on May 8, 2019,
Aqsa Rasool states:
A few years back [in the 20th century], oil
and gas companies have been ruling the list
of valuable companies. However, tech
companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook,
Apple and Microsoft [The Big Five], took
them over and have been leading in the
market capitalization. 21
19 An important precursor to Zuboff’s book is Schneier’s
(2015) Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your
Data and Control Your World.
20 “Karl Marx held that human labor was the source of
economic value. The capitalist pays his workers less than the
value their labor has added to the goods, usually only enough
to maintain the worker at a subsistence level”
(https://www.britannica.com/topic/surplus-value).
21 https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2019/05/top-five-us-
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
Recent data suggest that Rasool’s observation is right.
In 2019, Microsoft’s market capitalization was over
one trillion dollars. The market capitalization of
individual companies like Amazon, Apple, Alphabet
(including Google and YouTube), and Facebook
(including Instagram and WhatsApp) was also very
large. The total market capitalization of these
companies was between four and five trillion dollars.22
This was about 15% of the US economy’s total market
capitalization at the time, according to the Russell
3000 Index of the 3000 companies that collectively
account for over 98% of the US’s market capitalization
($30 trillion in January 2018). 23 Penetration rates 24
suggest the majority of the global human population of
seven to eight billion are active or potential customers
of DSPs. Mobile phone use has been estimated at over
two thirds of the global population; more than half use
the internet, and nearly half actively use social media.
More than 40% are mobile social media users.25
Major DSP owners are wealthy. The net worth of the
top ten richest Americans includes five owners of DSP
companies and others who own high-tech information
companies. 26 The smallest fortunes among these
people were around $50 billion; the highest were over
$150 billion. If money is power, and as Lord Acton
remarked, power tends to corrupt, the concentration of
wealth in few hands could be a threat to the respect of
persons. Making money is no sin, and Acton stated
only that power tends to corrupt. Nevertheless, this
raises significant concerns.
7 Policy to Be Resolved
DSP concentration of wealth has accumulated in part
by the uncompensated use of users’ PD. The purpose
of this paper is to point out the fundamental issue of
respect for persons in the guiding generation of policy,
not to create policy for given circumstances. However,
two issues can be seen in the challenge to develop
effective policy: informed consent and antitrust
actions.
7.1 Informed Consent
An ethical relationship between a user and a DSP
requires that the user is sufficiently aware of the
personal and behavioral information that the DSP is
collecting, as well as what is inferred about the use of
this information. This is embodied in the concept of
informed consent. Informed consent is morally
required before releasing personal information to
others. Informed consent enables users to decide
tech-companies-total-market-capitalization.html
22 https://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/market_cap
23 https://www.barrons.com/articles/the-u-s-stock-market-is-now-
worth-30-trillion-1516285704
24 Penetration rates are the percentage of a target market that
a service reaches during a period of time.
whether to provide information to a DSP based on
knowledge of the purposes, procedures, risks, benefits.
and alternatives premised on well-established ethical
principles, such as respect for persons, beneficence,
and justice (see Beauchamp & Childress, 1981).
Bioethics has dealt extensively with informed consent.
According to Faden and Beauchamp (1986), five
components are required for ethical informed consent:
disclosure, comprehension, voluntariness, competence
and, consent. A DSP employing a user’s personal data
for purposes other than those required to provide a
direct service meets the demanding criteria of
informed consent if and only if:
1. The user receives a thorough disclosure
regarding the additional applications for which
personal information can be used.
2. The user comprehends the disclosure.
3. The user acts voluntarily in releasing personal
information.
4. The user is competent and understands what is
being agreed to if releasing or authorizing the
release of the information.
5. The user consents to—i.e., gives permission
for—the actions being taken involving the use of
personal information. (This condition suggests
that young children and those judged to be
incompetent do not satisfy the requirement.)
Informed consent is key but challenging. Many
companies do not know the potential uses data of when
they collect them, so it is hard for individuals to give
consent for what might happen. The GDPR and the
CCPA address secondary use but there are loopholes
that make the concept of informed consent awkward.
This might be an example of the pains of “growing
into” this new era in which it is difficult to reconcile
technology benefits with respect for persons.
7.2 Antitrust Actions
On a different matter than privacy or informed consent,
DSPs have been accused of employing exploitive,
anticompetitive practices: there are too few
competitors and substantial entry barriers. A suggested
solution is to break up large DSPs into smaller, less
powerful units. On July 24, 2019, the Associated Press
reported that:
25https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-global-
digital-overview
26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_
net_worth
575

The U.S. Justice Department has
announced a major antitrust investigation
into unnamed tech giants, while the House
Judiciary Committee has begun an
unprecedented antitrust probe into Google,
Facebook, Amazon and Apple over their
aggressive business practices, and
promises “a top-to-bottom review of the
market power held by giant tech
platforms.”27
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, is a
surprising proponent of breaking up Facebook and
other DSCs. In a The New York Times opinion on May
9, 2019, entitled “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook,” he
argues that Mark Zuckerberg is “too personally
powerful,” and that the
vibrant marketplace that once drove
Facebook and other social media
companies to compete to come up with
better products has virtually disappeared.
This means there’s less chance of start-ups
developing healthier less exploitative social
media platforms. It also means less
accountability on issues like privacy.
(emphasis added)28
Whether or not it would change anything regarding
respect for persons, breaking up is hard to do. For one
thing, there are different kinds of technologies in use.
DSCs use mediating technologies that link clients with
the external environment in comparison to more
conventional and decomposable long-length
technologies used in mass production where tasks can
be broken down (Thompson, 1967, pp. 15-16).
27
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/07/24/facebook-
google-amazon-apple-face-antitrust-probe-big-tech-
breakup/1814480001/
28 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-
hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html
576
Policy for Ethical Digital Services
8 Conclusion
Most humans hold sacrosanct knowledge and
information about themselves. Respect for persons
means individuals have a right to share it or not share
it with others.29 If they do share it they must decide to
do so as autonomous, conscious, and uncoerced actors.
An individual’s dignity must be honored, penetrated
only by that person’s agreement through informed
consent. Henrietta Lacks’s dignity was violated
without her consent or that of her family. That
violation generated substantial economic benefits for
others. Many suffer the same “predatory practices” as
DSP online users or subjects of surveillance.
“Predation” in biology refers to an organism feeding
on prey.30 Part of antitrust law is intended to protect
consumers from predatory business practices. A major
policy challenge is how best to develop and implement
effective policy for informed consent prior to the
collection and use of personal data. Another is to
employ antitrust measures to remediate excessive
power imbalance enjoyed by some DSPs.
Research issues also arise. One concerns secondary use
of what originates as PD. For example, PD (or
inadequately anonymized PD) might appear on a
screen and be “scraped” by a screen-scraper.
Researchers should consider when the use of data
disrespects a person or robs a person of individual
dignity. The challenge lies within. Researchers
should treat the data of other persons with respect and
dignity.
Acknowledgments
The author acknowledges the help of reviewers and
editors with this paper.
29
One philosopher who holds this position is the logical positivist
A. J Ayer (see Ayer, 1963).
30 https://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Predator
Journal of the Association for Information Systems
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 Policy for Ethical Digital Services

About the Authors

Richard Mason is the Carr P. Collins Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern
Methodist University, Dallas, TX, and was the director of SMU’s Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility.
He is an Association of Information Systems Fellow and Leo Awardee and a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy
of Natural Sciences in Informatics and Cybernetics. He is a community member of the Mercy Regional Medical Center
Ethics Committee in Durango, CO, and an advisor to Fort Lewis College.

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