In power vacuums, though, opportunists take control, and in these cases connectivity will be an equally powerful weapon in their hands. Newly connected citizens in failed states will have all the vulnerabilities of undeletable data, but none of the security that could insulate them from those risks. Warlords, extortionists, pirates and criminals will—if they’re smart enough—find ways to consolidate their own power at the expense of other people’s data. This could mean targeting specific populations, such as wealthier subclans or influential religious leaders, with more precision and virtually no accountability. If the online data (say, transfer records for a mobile money platform) showed that a particular extended family received a comparatively large sum of money from relatives in the diaspora, local thugs could stop by and demand tribute—paid, probably, over a mobile money system as well. Today’s warlords grow rich by acting as the requisite pass-through for all sorts of valuable resources, and in the future, while drugs, minerals and money will all still matter, so too will valuable personal data. Warlords of the future may not even use the data they have, instead selling it to outside parties willing to pay a premium. And, most important, these opportunists will be able to appear even more anonymous and elusive than they do today, because they’ll unfortunately have the resources and incentive to get anonymity in ways ordinary people do not.
Power vacuums, warlords and collapsed states may sound like a foreign and unrelated world to many in Silicon Valley, but this will soon change. Today, technology companies constantly underscore their focus on, and responsibility to, the virtual world’s version of citizenry. But as five billion new people come online, companies will find that the attributes of these users and their problems are much more complex than those of the first two billion. Many of the next five billion people live in impoverished, censored and unsafe conditions. As the providers of access, tools and platforms, technology companies will have to shoulder some of the physical world’s burdens as they play out online if they want to stay true to the doctrine of responsibility to all users.
Technology companies will need to exceed the expectations of their customers in both privacy and security protections. It is unsurprising that the companies responsible for the architecture of the virtual world will shoulder much of the blame for the less welcome developments in our future. Some of the anger directed toward technology firms will be justified—after all, these businesses will be profiting from expanding their networks quickly—but much will be misplaced. It is, after all, much easier to blame a single product or company for a particularly evil application of technology than to acknowledge the limitations of personal responsibility. And of course there will always be some companies that allow their desire for profit to supersede their responsibility to users, though such companies will have a harder time achieving success in the future.
In truth, some technology companies are more acutely aware than others of the responsibility they bear toward their own users and the online community around the world; this is in part why nearly all online products and services today require users to accept terms and conditions and abide by those contractual guidelines. People have a responsibility as consumers and individuals to read a company’s policies and positions on privacy and security before they willingly share information. As the proliferation of companies continues, citizens will have more options and thus due diligence will be more important than ever. A smart consumer will look not just at the quality of a product, but also at how easy that product makes it for you to control your privacy and security. Still, in the court of public opinion and environments where the rule of law is shaky, these preexisting stipulations count for little, and we can expect more attention to be focused on the makers and purveyors of such tools in the coming decades.
This trend will certainly affect how technology companies form, grow and navigate in what will certainly be a tumultuous period. Certain subsections of the technology industry that receive particularly negative attention will have trouble recruiting engineers or attracting users to and monetizing their products, despite the fact that such atrophying will not solve the problem (and will only hurt the community of users in the end, by denying them the full benefits of innovation). Thick skin will be a necessity for technology companies in the coming years of the digital age, because they will find themselves beset by public concerns over privacy, security and user protections. It simply won’t be possible to avoid these discussions, nor will companies be able to avoid taking a position on the issues.
They’ll also have to hire more lawyers. Litigation will always outpace genuine legal reform, as any of the technology giants fighting perpetual legal battles over intellectual property, patents, privacy and other issues would attest. Google encounters lawsuits from governments around the world with some frequency over alleged breaches of copyright or national laws, and it works hard to assure its users that Google serves their interests first and foremost, while staying within the boundaries of the laws itself. But if Google stopped all product development whenever it found itself faced with a government suit, it would never build anything.
Companies will have to learn how to manage public expectations of the possibilities and limits of their products. When formulating policies, technology companies will, like governments, increasingly have to factor in all sorts of domestic and international dynamics, such as the political risk environment, diplomatic relationships between states, and the rules that govern citizens’ lives. The central truth of the technology industry—that technology is neutral but people are not—will periodically be lost amid all the noise. But our collective progress as citizens in the digital age will hinge on our not forgetting it.
Coping Strategies
People and institutions around the world will rise to meet the new challenges they face with innovative private- and public-sector coping strategies. We can loosely group them into four categories: corporate, legal, societal and personal.
Technology corporations will have to more than live up to their privacy and security responsibilities if they want to avoid unwanted government regulation that could stifle industry dynamism. Companies are already taking proactive steps, such as offering a digital “eject button” that allows users to liberate all of their data from a given platform; adding a preferences manager; and not selling personally identifying information to third parties or advertisers. But given today’s widespread privacy and security concerns, there is still a great deal of work to be done. Perhaps a group of companies will make a pledge not to sell data to third parties, in a corporate treaty of sorts.
The second coping strategy will focus on the legal options. As the impact of the data revolution settles in, states will come under increasing pressure to protect their citizens from the permanence of what appears on the Internet and from their own newly exposed vulnerabilities. In democracies, this means new laws. They will be imperfect, overly idealistic and probably often quite rushed, but they will generally represent societies’ best attempts to react effectively to the chaotic and unpredictable changes that connectivity produces.
As discussed above, the trail of information that will shape our online identities in the future begins well before any citizen has the judgment to understand it. The scrutiny that young people will face in the next decade will be unlike anything we’ve seen. If you think it is hard to get past a co-op board today, just imagine when it has the equivalent of your life story at hand. Because this development will affect a large portion of the population, there will be sufficient public pressure and political will to generate a range of new laws for the digital age.