Nice values. Shame about the software.
You have ethics. You care about privacy, sustainability, human rights and maybe more. Your organisation might even have a page on its site saying exactly this.
Ethics don’t stop at what you say or sell, though. They’re also linked to where your money goes.
Every one of your software subscriptions is a financial relationship. You’re not only paying for the tool, you’re also funding a company, its business model, it’s lobbying, and everything else it uses money for.
Take Salesforce. Heaps of organisations use it as their CRM. In January, they signed a $5.6 billion contract with the US Army to “accelerate military modernisation and Department of War readiness” (their words). Interestingly, the contract was awarded via a subsidiary called Computable Insights, so it doesn’t sound anything like Salesforce.
By the way, Salesforce also owns Slack. So that Slack subscription is also financing military tools.
Obviously, I’m not saying every organisation has to audit the entire supply chain of every single tool they use. That way madness lies…
But you should be aware. If your website says you care about ethical technology and your CRM provider is building AI tools for the military through some deliberately obscure subsidiary, that’s worth taking into account.
More ethical alternatives usually exist, you just need to dig a little deeper to find ones that agree with what you stand for.
So, next time you’re tool shopping, look at what else the company does with its cash.
Colin
PS: Salesforce is just one example. Spotify invests in AI weapons, Google and other Silicon Valley giants have juicy Pentagon contracts, Substack platforms hate speech, it just goes on…