Clear and True: Ethical Boundaries

Sitting down with colleagues at lunch the other day the conversation wandered into some dangerous territory. The topic, you see, was to recount and, in a small way, sit in judgment of some of the most outlandish ethical violations we’ve seen online, on television, or in our business.

It started out with the usual subject. Poor Mr. Trump. I’m sure he didn’t mean to rough up the ambassador from Montenegro when he pushed himself into the front of the picture at the G-7 conference, or for that matter, throw General McMaster, James Comey, Sean Spicer, and then some other guy under the bus. Although somewhat juvenile behavior, these were pretty obvious examples where folks had the bad luck of being in his way…

Then there are the ever-unfolding foibles of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, the ever-growing shadows of WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the daily reports of security data leaking, email hacks, and social trolling.

Yes, I am from Massachusetts — and before you assume that this is a liberal venting exercise, we will pivot to the ethical challenges behind the abuse of digital identities, the 1,000 spam emails we get every day, and my personal favorite: competitors who attack your brand in public forums and on crowdsourcing sites while they hide behind blind voting with fake digital IDs. Like the purveyors of the now infamous fake news stories, these so-called competitors are like the juvenile delinquents Mom warned you about. They lack the ethical back bone and the intellectual persistence necessary to create real value on their own, so they take to the shadows in a vain attempt to defame those they can not beat.

It seems to me that we’ve made all this just too easy. Armed with our real-time feeds, we weigh in equally on the most important issues of our time, as well as on matters about which we have no knowledge or business commenting on. We leverage our two-dimensional Twitter persona to rant — not on this or that — but on everything. Other people, family members, colleagues, corporate competitors, and customers, catch your rants in emails, on Facebook, and on crowdsourced sites, and no one is surprised when the response escalates. At that point it can only spiral out of control leaving friends and customers to get hurt.

In a culture that is increasingly being defined by claims, rather than proof, we should take a moment to remind the public, politicians, and business leaders to keep in mind the importance of ethical boundaries. We need to take the higher ground and be certain that our public statements are clear and true if we are to claim the respect of our colleagues and our customers.

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Semcasting has been an industry leader in audience building, onboarding, and qualification since 2009. We built our own robust database of consumers and businesses, supported by a patented predictive modeling technology. Our IP onboarding and qualification technology — Smart Zones — is backed by an initial patent granted in 2014 and a continuation patent granted in 2016 for device analytics and attribution in support of the Internet of Things. Smart Zones is unique in that it allows for far more granular onboarding and targeting when compared to other IP-Geo services — being several thousand times more accurate than a zip-code on average. Our mobile targeting technology, Mobile Footprints, covers 125+ million mobile devices with the ability to map every identified device back to any other location visited over the last 7 to 90 days.