It’s Time for Tech Standards to Catch Up to the Digital Age
By Ayed Abdulhadi Al-Ruwaili, IT Consultant, Saudi Aramco
Published July 8, 2025, World Economic Forum
As digital technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and smart systems advance at an unprecedented pace, the absence of comprehensive, global tech standards poses significant risks to safety, ethics, and societal trust. The rapid acceleration of the digital age has exposed critical systemic vulnerabilities such as massive data breaches, highlighting the urgent need for unified, ethical standards that keep pace with innovation.
The Urgency of Developing Ethical Tech Standards
Digital technologies are no longer peripheral tools; they fundamentally shape how economies function, public services operate, and individual rights are preserved. From AI-driven recruitment processes to smart cities monitoring movement, the pivotal question today is not whether digital technology influences our lives but how responsibly it does so.
Unfortunately, the digital landscape has evolved without a shared global blueprint ensuring fairness, security, and long-term societal well-being. The result has been a fragmentation in governance approaches, often dominated by perspectives from the Global North, leaving important voices from emerging economies marginalized.
A Growing Crisis in Digital Security
The stakes could not be higher. Data breaches are soaring worldwide:
- In 2024, the US Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 3,205 data breaches exposing nearly 12 billion records—a 312% increase in affected victims compared to 2023.
- Globally, breached accounts jumped from approximately 730 million in 2023 to over 5.5 billion in 2024, averaging about 180 accounts compromised every second.
- Notable incidents include the National Public Data Broker breach in April 2024, which exposed 2.9 billion records, and the "Mother of All Breaches," leaking a staggering 26 billion records.
These figures underscore a fundamental failure to embed ethical design and resilience into digital systems, transforming technical issues into structural problems with far-reaching consequences.
Why Tech Standards Matter
Standards are foundational to trust. Just as society demands rigor in food safety, construction, and aviation, it should hold digital tech to equally high standards. Effective standards provide:
- A common framework to ensure safety, transparency, and accountability, especially when technology transcends borders.
- Market confidence by aligning governments, investors, and businesses around shared expectations.
However, the current landscape is fragmented and reactive. According to the OECD, less than 10% of emerging technologies have international norms covering ethical and social risks. Some promising moves towards regulation, such as the European Union’s AI Act—which adopts a risk-based regulatory model—are steps in the right direction. Additionally, World Economic Forum initiatives like the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution are piloting governance sandboxes with global partners, and non-profits are promoting engineering standards that incorporate ethics early in development.
Yet without global coordination, companies face a disjointed patchwork of rules or, worse, regulatory voids that favor speed and innovation over integrity and safety.
The Need for Inclusive and Agile Governance
Digital technologies do not develop in a vacuum; they are shaped by values—and the current dominant voices largely reflect the Global North. This raises concerns of "digital colonialism," where standards may not resonate with the cultural, economic, or political realities of emerging and developing nations.
Furthermore, traditional standards-setting processes often take years—a mismatch in a world where AI models evolve in weeks. Agile governance models, characterized by open-source ethical tools, dynamic testing environments, and iterative stakeholder consultation, offer a promising approach to keep pace with technological change.
Three Priorities for a Safer Digital Future
To build a responsible digital future, stakeholders must take concrete steps:
-
Make ethics a design input, not an afterthought
Ethical considerations—covering human rights, social impact, and long-term risks—should be integral from a technology’s inception. Methodologies like value-sensitive design and ethical impact assessments should guide development. This requires collaboration among product teams, ethicists, civil society, and affected communities early on. While industry-led standards exist, scaling and enforcement remain challenges. -
Link standards to incentives
Aligning digital ethics with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria can empower investors to reward responsible companies. Governments can incentivize compliance through procurement policies, R&D grants, and regulatory approvals tied to adherence to recognized standards, protecting both the public and companies. -
Use multistakeholder platforms for global coordination
No single entity can manage digital risks independently. Organizations like the World Economic Forum, OECD, and UNESCO are uniquely positioned to foster multi-country and multi-sector cooperation. Initiatives such as the Forum’s Global Future Councils and AI Governance Alliance create promising platforms to harmonize approaches—though decision-makers must adopt their recommendations widely.
The Road Ahead: Standards as a Public Good
Digital technologies will shape much more than search results; they will govern economic activities, public services, and civil rights. To navigate this complex landscape responsibly, tech standards must be ethically grounded, globally recognized, and adaptive for the future.
Ethical design should no longer be seen as a competitive disadvantage but as the baseline for innovation. The choice is clear: Build digital technologies intentionally and inclusively to safeguard public trust and social cohesion, or risk undermining the very fabric of digital society.
The time to act is now.
This article is part of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution program and reflects the author’s views alone.
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Related Reading:
- “EU Sets Global Standards with First Major AI Regulations: What You Need to Know”
- “How Data Standards, Ethical AI, and Diaspora Are Key to ASEAN’s Digital Economy”
- “New Standards for AI and the Metaverse: Top Tech Stories”
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