Building trust can be more important than technology

Do you trust the companies you share data with every day?

What does it mean to trust those companies we rely on every day to get on with our lives? From a purely logical perspective, we instinctively assess the probabilities of gain and loss, calculate the expected utility based on prior experience and conclude that the company providing the product or service will behave predictably. However, trust has another dimension; it is an emotional act where we expose ourselves in a way that someone or something could take advantage of our vulnerabilities.

In society, we often rely on the threat of retribution to counteract a company’s temptation to abuse our exposed secrets. Regulations and laws get passed to protect our privacy and rights as citizens, while the GDPR and other new laws go part way to protecting us, there is a call for companies to act more ethically. My colleague Pradeep Ganesha summed this up perfectly in his article “Getting AI To Behave”. Even with the right governance, ethics are continually playing catch-up to technology, companies may succumb to the temptations of higher profit and decide to sell private information to a third party, unaware of the damage inflicted on its customers in the future. For transactions to succeed, we must be able to trust that such agonies will not come to pass.

Why would a company sell information about its customers without carefully considering the consequences or first anonymising the data to protect our privacy? Maybe they had to sell the data to survive, consider the possibilities if Uber had to find a new source of revenue. Last year shareholders paid an average of 58 cents on every ride to keep the company alive. Things aren't looking rosy when you consider the recent IPO and what the broader market thinks of their plans for the future. Josh Barro wrote an article recently on "Uber's Plan to Lose Money on Each Transaction and Make It Up in Volume, Annotated".

Would shareholders object if Uber decided to sell information about its customers to turn a profit? The value of the data-mine must be immense, to know where every one of us has been travelling these last few years, where we live, our routine, where we work, holiday, shop and how we play.

We all trust Uber today, if we didn't they wouldn't exist, but will they keep up their end of the agreement. Trust based on delayed reciprocity is the type that makes societies and companies thrive; it is a value exchange where something is given now, but the return is paid back sometime in the future. The advantage of this type of trust relationship is that we can enjoy a more flexible environment, and we get what we need when we need it. The delay in the reciprocal arrangement brings with it a high level of uncertainty, which we mitigate through trust.

It feels like we may be approaching a critical turning point in the relationships we started with the companies born in this new digital era. Does our exchange with these new digital companies, become one of dependency where we put up with them because they are necessary to go about our daily lives. Maybe we begin to question what their intentions are and start to build a genuine relationship based on trust. I want to trust that Uber and all the companies I share my private data with, have good intentions and will do the right thing even if it’s in a dire situation and trying to survive in a highly competitive and rapidly changing environment.

Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber, had the worst start to his job when on his first day it was announced that Uber had covered up a data breach a year earlier in which personal information from 57 million customers was compromised. How was this extreme breach of trust allowed to occur and worse be covered up without a single customer being alerted to the violation of privacy; at the time an unhealthy culture inside the company pervaded with a take-no-prisoners approach flowing down from the top. The behaviour of companies is often a reflection of the people and the internal culture.

For companies to thrive and build healthy trust relationships with their customers, it is the culture and ethics that lay at the heart of these organisations that must be examined and discussed.

As someone who has worked for over 20 years in the technology space as a product engineer, we have all become extremely proficient at collecting data and building technical solutions in weeks instead of years. The next generation of successful companies will be digitally focused but increasingly more evolved from an ethical, social and environmental perspective. I chose Publicis Sapient as my new employer because of the strong stance it takes on realising human potential and the focus it places on delivering real value to its customers. I believe if we work together with a sense of purpose and continue to build trust, we can enjoy a future of infinite possibilities.

Ben Moir, Director of Product Engineering

Publicis Sapient Australia