I have always been very proud of my career as a technologist. But lately I’ve noticed that if I’m down the pub and someone asks me what I do for a living, my answer can evoke a bit of a look.  

I’m not quite at the point of telling people I’m an estate agent, so they think better of me – but tech companies are certainly taking an image battering at the moment. That’s no surprise when some of them seem to think “Ethics” is just a funny way of pronouncing the county next to Suffolk, the one I live in.

One of the most recent examples was the totally justified fury surrounding Grok – the AI chatbot feature available to users of the social platform X. Thousands of women and, in some cases, children found non-consensual, sexualised deepfake images had been created of them using this tool. It’s said that three million images were generated in less than two weeks, of which 23,000 depicted children. Shockingly, restrictions were only introduced when countries in Asia and Europe started taking steps to ban it.

There’s a big discussion going on right now about whether legislation supports or gets in the way of tech development. I believe regulation is vital because it creates a level playing field where we all abide by the same rules. 

What’s more, those rules are good for our clients. Think of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), now a decade old, and how that’s improved business travel. Twenty years ago, corporate client information was a bit of a Wild West, with data chucked all over the travel eco-system with little care. Today, it’s much better understood that data belongs to clients and their employees and much more care is taken about where it goes, how it is protected and who has access.

“Regulation is vital because it creates a level playing field where we all abide by the same rules” 

But the big problem is technology evolves so quickly that legislation cannot keep up with it. Which brings me back to that word “ethics”. Developers are coming up with new products that are ahead of the regulators. That’s why they need to use their own moral compass to do the right thing by the public even without being told to. 

That’s certainly the way we work at TripStax. We totally buy into the concept of security by design, meaning we incorporate security into our systems from the outset, not later on if enough people complain about it. 

We practise security by design, not only so we can live with ourselves but also because it’s good for business – being reliable is how we win and retain customers, who are much more knowledgeable about data issues like GDPR than in the past. They understand concepts like data control and the right to be forgotten, so we would be crazy not to take the utmost care – and I’m sure that holds true for the vast majority of tech companies operating in corporate travel.

So please don’t chuck a pint of lager over me if you see me in the pub. The vast majority of techies are good people – and anyway, that would be a terrible waste of good beer.

Scott Wylie is Chief Technology Officer of TripStax.com