The day after a session in my Advertising and Public Relations Ethics and Law class in which we discussed digital media, one student emailed me a link to a web site. She said it was an unusual example of a company showing an ethical respect for customers by allowing customers and other site visitors to customize their cookies, or the way in which they are tracked.
It wasn’t a major brand that I was aware of before my student shared it with me. It’s Levoit Air Purifiers, and they allow people to accept all, reject all, or select to turn on or off six categories of cookies, from necessary to functional, analytics to performance and more. I’d encourage you to go to the site and see for yourself.
in class we had talked about legal changes with regard to cookies and other aspects of online privacy. But there are still annoying pop-ups that you must disable to see content, and some still only give you the option to accept, not reject. Certainly very few offer this level of customization and control for the user.
Here are just a few reasons why this extreme number of options is ethical:
- it is a demonstration of a relationship metric called “control mutuality,” in which all parties in a relationship have equal control of topics, opportunity to speak, and in this case digital tracking settings;
- it demonstrates good discourse ethics, similar to above, meaning that the user is not at the mercy of an organization;
- it demonstrates a unique form of utilitarianism, not in the classic sense of “greatest good for the greatest number,” but it explains cookies to the user in terms of how they might benefit them and not just the organization;
- it’s the old fashioned “golden rule”–follks at the air purifier company have considered how they would like to be treated when a customer on someone else’s website.
For these and other reasons, respecting the rights of others and giving them agency over how they are tracked and communicated to is good ethics. It’s also smart for the company in terms of building positive, long-term relationships and reputation.
In other words, as I tell my students all the time: ethics = strategy.
