5 lessons Salesforce learned crafting responsible technology guidelines during COVID-19

5 lessons Salesforce learned crafting responsible technology guidelines during COVID-19

COVID-19 has underscored the need for human rights and privacy to be taken into account during tech development.

A dynamic set of ethical guidelines can help teams build responsible technology solutions.



The rush to develop technological solutions to fight the pandemic has brought a wave of data privacy and ethical considerations “” especially regarding the many ways marginalized communities have been impacted disproportionately.

For tech to be trusted in the long term, human rights and privacy must be taken into account. In fact, demonstrating and earning employee trust is one of the most important issues businesses face today.

Ethics by design is a framework that infuses ethical guardrails into design, development and deployment. This approach is core to building responsible technology solutions, especially during the rush of a crisis.

This spring, as Salesforce approached new technology solutions for the COVID-19 crisis, we developed a set of values-based guidelines to bring ethical use into the technology we were building. The process of creating those guidelines taught us important lessons about how to build technology in a time of crisis and how ethics can be leveraged to spur innovation. Here are some of the lessons we have learned so far.