Ethics and Digital Identity

This article describes how identity professionals can relate their work to ethics and how imperative it is to ensure that ethical discussions and value conversations are conducted in the field of identity and access management. By providing a general introduction to ethics and what ethical theories are, this article lays the foundation for an understanding and clear perspective on the topic of ethics that can seem so far away from technology. But technology, although not good or bad, is never neutral and most often value-laden. And when we assign identity we assign power. Identity and access impact various values and these are described in this article as well, again building the bridge between ethics and technology. The article concludes with methods to apply ethics in everyday work as an identity professional.