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When we decided to publicly share our data ethics principles in 2021, we did it as a commitment to live by them. Sharing them was our way of showing that we see data ethics as a key part of our product journey. We don’t think we’ve figured it all out – we’ve shared the principles as an invitation to give us feedback, and as a way of keeping ourselves accountable to grow and evolve this part of our work as we go. We’ve had great feedback about that post so we wanted to share an update on how our principles are evolving.
We recently reviewed our original principles of Autonomy, Reciprocity, Collective Benefit, Context, and Accountability. We review new features against these principles on a regular basis, as part of our roadmap development, so we reflected on how we’ve implemented these principles in practice and if the five listed here were a true reflection of that.
We realized that one of the principles we’ve been following, Transparency, wasn’t reflected in our original list. And we also realized that Reciprocity was related to – and a higher bar for – our Collective Benefit principle.
With that in mind, we’ve updated our principles to reflect how we’re living them in practice. The changes are:
A core belief of ours has always been about reciprocity – any data that we collect about you needs to give positive value back to you. We also had a principle around collective benefit, meaning that the data we collect needs to have a positive impact in the world.
As we’ve put these principles into practice, we’ve realized that not only are these values closely related, but the concept of reciprocity actually holds us to a higher standard than collective benefit. That’s because it would be possible to use someone’s data to create positive benefit for others without that data being valuable for the person it’s about. Add to that the inherent power differences in an organization, and it’s even more important that we hold ourselves to the standard of giving value back to team members, not just creating value for managers or executives.
For that reason, we’ve merged the two principles under the umbrella of Reciprocity, and we updated the description of reciprocity on our website to ensure the part about having a broader positive impact is reflected within that.
We have always held transparency centrally in our work at Multitudes — it’s why we’ve defaulted to giving everyone access to the same views across the app. And the only place where we lock off access is in our insights for 1:1s, since those are best shared by a team member and their manager. But even in that case, the team member and the manager get the same data and the same view.
We believe that you need transparency for our other principles to be effective. Autonomy works better if you can see what’s being collected and how it’s used. To give context and to make sure we’re being reciprocal in how we use the data, you need to be able to see the data yourself so you can make up your own judgment call. And if you think that a manager or Multitudes as a tool has missed something, seeing what the app shows about you means you can better hold us accountable.
To read in more detail about what these principles mean, check out this blog post.
We’ll continue to revisit these principles to ensure they reflect our practices and hold us to a high bar. If you have any feedback or thoughts on the changes we’ve made, please get in touch.
