Zalando publishes first Corporate Digital Responsibility Report in partnership with the German government
Zalando publishes first Corporate Digital Responsibility Report in partnership with the German government
Darija Braeuniger, Senior Lead Public Affairs DACH at Zalando, explains how German companies and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) are working together to share best practices in the digital world when it comes to areas such as Data Privacy, Sustainability and Diversity & Inclusion
Darija Braeuniger, Senior Lead Public Affairs DACH at Zalando, explains how German companies and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) are working together to share best practices in the digital world when it comes to areas such as Data Privacy, Sustainability and Diversity & Inclusion
BERLIN, JULY 19, 2022 // Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) — a term that describes any measures to take responsibility in the digital realm that go beyond what is legally necessary — is the focus of a new Zalando report, released as part of an initiative with the BMUV. The Corporate Digital Responsibility Initiative was founded in 2018, with Zalando joining a cross section of German companies in 2019 to help create a Code of Corporate Digital Responsibility. The code covers 15 promises across the five pillars of Data Handling, Education, Climate and Resources Protection, Inclusion and Employee Involvement. Zalando is one of the first five companies to publish their report as a signatory of the code. Teams from across the company contributed to this effort with more than 50 colleagues who came together to draft, check and finalise the report. Senior Public Affairs Lead Darija Braeuniger expands on what the report covers and why it is important for the industry.
How has Zalando worked with the German government and industry leaders to create the CDR Code?
The CDR code was created with the German Federal Ministry for Consumer Protection and 15-20 companies of different sizes across a variety of industries (the CDR initiative). We were one of the few digital native companies at the table. This mindset heavily shaped our input.
One important theme of the code and the report is addressing bias, how does this manifest in the digital world?
Bias manifests itself in computer systems in various ways, which are commonly categorized as pre-existing, technical, and emergent bias. Pre-existing bias exists prior to the system and has its origins in society. Most often, it appears as discriminatory patterns in data, either directly through sensitive features, such as ethnicity, gender or religion, or indirectly through their proxies. Technical bias occurs through practical constraints of the system, such as screen reader compatibility, or through mathematical models that can never fully capture complex human concepts such as joy, or trustworthiness. Emergent bias results from cultural shifts and through systems that were built with a different set of users in mind. Addressing these types of bias requires sophisticated knowledge of possible countermeasures from various domains, be it machine learning, UX design, data labelling, or others. Our Algorithmic Privacy & Fairness team conducts research in all these areas. Additionally we perform regular system audits to ensure that our technology is inclusive and non-discriminatory.
The CDR code has a section that focuses on making sure data is used in a way that customers expect and are aware of, how is Zalando doing this?
Internet users sometimes fear that they are being tracked and their data is being used, but they don’t know how and what for exactly. For Zalando it is very important to offer an experience of trust. We process customer data in accordance with all applicable data protection laws on national and EU level.
A very visible way in which we try to mitigate the fear of data misuse is our size recommendations. Size is very personal — it can be related to your health, mental wellbeing and physical goals — so somebody telling you what is and is not your size can be quite intrusive. When we give size recommendations, they are accompanied by a little info icon that simply tells you what data we used to make this recommendation: learnings from your returns or feedback from other customers who have purchased the brand. By informing the customer very plainly with a simple sentence they know where the data comes from and there is no uncomfortable speculation. The Privacy Principles that enable this are: “We use data to serve our customers better products and experiences.” and “We are transparent about how we handle customer data.”
What does “privacy by Design” mean?
This means that privacy is a must from the beginning when creating a service, application or anything else. Most important questions here are: how can privacy benefit customers and how is the digital product that we are developing serving the purpose of protecting privacy, maybe even better than in the last iteration.
Beyond privacy, what areas does the CDR code cover?
A lot of times when we think about digital, we think first about data and machine learning. While most of the goals in the CDR code are centred around this, Corporate Digital Responsibility touches upon digital solutions in many more areas, like Diversity & Inclusion and Sustainability. For instance, customers can register on the Zalando online shop without inputting their binary gender information, instead, they can manually choose which assortments they would like to shop in. We also stopped using gender pronouns in the titles of our promotional emails and now use customers’ names instead. Internally, Zalando is working to make it possible for employees to input their preferred name, gender and pronouns in our central workplace software to be used across all systems, instead of just their legal name and gender. This is important because it is not always possible for employees to change official documents with their preferred name, gender and pronouns. Our ultimate goal is to have the information from this input system document transferred to all employee platforms so that no one has to be called by their dead name or referred to with a pronoun that they don’t identify with.
In terms of Sustainability, we have a reforestation collaboration that is technology driven to a surprising extent. Zalando has committed to planting 300,000 trees in Spain with Land Life Company, but through smart reforestation. This means that the company we work with is using drones to map the landscape in order to figure out how to plant trees where they will have the most positive environmental impact. Additionally, we have a Care & Repair pilot in Berlin that leverages our digital platform to connect people with local tailors, cobblers and sneaker cleaners. While repairing clothes to make them last longer is not a new idea, we are using our digital reach and logistics capabilities to make it more accessible.
Beyond the CDR code, why is the topic of Corporate Digital Responsibility important to Zalando?
CDR is part of Zalando’s DNA.When we think about things that we want to do, we think about how to do them digitally because the company was founded on a digital business model, so a lot of times the solutions we find are technology and data driven. Moresoe, at Zalando there is no one person that has CDR in their title; there are many people across a variety of projects that all work with CDR and deal with questions of how we take responsibility.
The process of creating the report made it clear once again that CDR is an important topic for us. Furthermore, in our exchanges with other companies that want to design their digital processes just as responsibly, it has become clear that the approach will remain important in the industry.