Ethics and Trust

Ghostwriting: If you hire someone else to take your brilliance, your insights, your experiences, and create written work that you then take sole credit for, that's ok. The writer simply gave you a voice. If you hire someone to do all the research, develop all the insight, use their own experiences, and you still take sole credit, that's not ok. You're lying. More to the point, people won't trust you when you get caught.

User tracking: When users opt-in to your services and you clearly explain that you will track their information for some type of use, that's ok. If you hide it in fine print, sneakily load cookies on their systems, or otherwise avoid asking for explicit permission, it's wrong. More to the point, when the user finds out they won't trust you anymore (if they ever did).

Advertising: There's absolutely nothing wrong with advertising, unless you use nefarious user tracking to better target the ads, intentionally disrupt the user's experience with the ads, or otherwise try to trick the user into being more receptive. When you do any of those things, you lose trust.

Selling to kids: Don't. Sell to their parents. There are laws about this stuff for a reason; don't try to find the loop holes. Seriously. It's wrong and, you guessed it, you'll lose trust.

I could go on, but I'm sure you see the pattern. In everything you do as a business, in every touch point you make with your customers and prospects, ask yourself: Am I earning trust, or abusing it? You can't get away with abusing trust anymore. You might win the law suits, but you'll lose the sales.