In a negotiation over a software solution, someone told me: We take data privacy very seriously. But this statement didn’t come from the legal department, it came from sales. That made it part of the pitch.
The argument that followed is standard everywhere by now: transparency creates trust and trust keeps customers. But this logic is also the problem.
Because when ethics becomes a competitive advantage, it applies as long as it’s profitable. As soon as data privacy costs more than it brings in, it’s no longer a feature but an optimizable cost item. In that moment I asked myself whether the company would still talk about ethics if nobody asked. I’ll give the answer up front: with software providers, ethics is part of the marketing.
Real ethics isn’t cheap. It costs not only money but development time. And in a vast grey zone, sticking to the rules consistently isn’t easy. Whoever doesn’t comply gets punished. That can get expensive. And yet companies that are transparent earn trust. The real question isn’t the cost of transparency. It’s what a lack of trust costs.
The GDPR brought something interesting to light. Companies that hadn’t cared about data privacy for years built comprehensive systems within a few months. Not because their values had changed. But because the penalties were high enough. Ethics followed economics, not the other way around.
Then companies recognized the value of data privacy and made it a selling point. That sounds better than the truth really is: companies recognize that customers demand data privacy and adapt as long as it pays off.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to use data privacy as an advantage. But values that only apply when they’re profitable aren’t values. There are companies that act out of genuine conviction and there are few of them. They absorb the costs of ethics or turn down business that others would take. They grow a little more slowly than the ones who don’t keep ethics at the top of their agenda, and that deserves more credit than it actually gets. The ones out front are those who use ethics for marketing. And a good marketing strategy is hard to attack. But what happens to values that only hold as long as they’re profitable or useful for marketing? They’re not crisis-proof, I think. But that’s just my own opinion.