Our Commitment to Data Ethics

30/03/2021

Here at Carnego our systems are continually collecting data about the performance of buildings in actual use.

We fully recognise that we have a responsibility to manage this data properly as it not only provides insights in the performance of physical buildings but also information about how people live and work in them.

So much of the activity around data is focussed on compliance - making sure the rules are being followed and legal requirements like GDPR are being met.

But being legally-compliant and having all of your regulatory ducks in row doesn’t mean that you are doing the right thing.

Not everything that is legal is ethical.

So as part of our commitment to being ‘good about data’, our founder William Box recently attended a short course on Data Ethics run by the Open Data Institute (ODI).

The ODI course has helped us as an organisation to progress in this area and provided a useful tool - the Data Ethics Canvas - as a way to structure some self-examination about what we do and why we do it.

It’s something we plan to keep doing on a regular basis as we try to find ways to provide more value from the data we manage without falling into ‘the dark side’.