A steady stream of new startups pitch their ideas, concepts, products, and services on a daily basis: startups that claim to predict when employees might want to leave for a new job; who think they can detect depression using someone's voice; that experiment using chatbots on patients with depression; that scour the internet for faces to enable police to conduct facial recognition surveillance.
Most of these startups are terrifying.
Much of the current focus is on TikTok, the viral video-sharing app owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, which is facing bans over fears the data it collects could end up in the hands of the Chinese government.
It's not an irrational fear, especially when over a billion users around the world use the app. But TikTok is not the only company capable of sharing data with China. Thousands of US applications and companies they share the information with advertisers and data brokers, who also expose that data to China, largely because nothing exists to stop sharing or selling data to anyone who wants it, from startups to authoritarian regimes.
But while lawmakers and the government endlessly obsess over TikTok and China, they continue to neglect the bigger problem, and that's back home. The terrifying calls are coming from within the United States.
All the startups are vying to be the next generation from Amazon, Uber, Facebook, and Google, and they look up to these American tech giants with dollar signs in their eyes. But if money is the metric to follow, it's worth looking at how Amazons, Ubers, Facebooks and Googles got here. It is through our data that so many tech giants (though not all) made billions. Some call it innovation and disruption; others see it as exploitation.
Just look at the mess that the first generation of tech titans have made. We have seen how companies use our data to consolidate power, such as the market or user participation, to make money. When Amazon isn't oppressing its workers by meticulously tracking their bathroom habits, it's using data to drive out competitors and small businesses to further its own sales. Uber played fast and loose with its security and privacy practices for years, then tried to cover up a massive data breach. Facebook was used to incite literal genocide which in part led to a Complete corporate rebranding. And Google's data practices pretty much keep the US Department of Justice's antitrust division running.
These data-hungry tech companies have compromised our security, eroded our privacy, tracked, sold our data, lost our data, monopolized the competition, pushed out small businesses, and put entire populations at risk.
The paucity of legislation and regulation has allowed American tech companies to thrive and grow, enriched by the personal information and data that is created, including everything from where we go to what we buy, to the people we communicate with and the content we consume. If the adage that data is the new currency is true, it's no wonder tech companies keep getting richer. There are few rules about what companies can do with our information, but there are plenty of profit-making playbooks to work with. Every day a new batch of startups have our data in their sights, but as consumers grappling with today's technology, what hope do we have when the conditions for our security and privacy are worse?
As unlikely as it may be, a nationwide TikTok ban would not prevent Americans' data from ending up in China. Data must be derived from the source, by not allowing American tech companies to collect reams of data from people's devices to begin with.
The United States stands out as one of the few superpowers without a privacy or data protection law. It is this uncontrolled and unregulated environment that allows Americans' data to end up in the hands of China or whoever pays for it. It's not easy to create a federal privacy law that covers the entire country and make it actually work. That is why each state legislates differently.
California was the first state to offer strong consumer and data protections to its residents, granting Californians rights to access, change, and delete the data companies collect about them. California's consumer privacy law is considered one of the strongest in the country, because it worked. Companies in the state, home to Silicon Valley and its tech titans, had to comply and create deep exceptions for millions of Californians in their data collection practices. But that still leaves the remaining millions of Americans without privacy protections.
Only a handful of states have followed in California's footsteps, but few new laws have reached the same level, thanks to corrupt (or lazy) lawmakers who watered down bills in their states to serve the interests of lobbying firms. . Meanwhile, the tech lobby is fervently supporting a federal law with the goal of creating a weaker set of rules in the US to replace the patchwork of state laws, including California's.
Today's start-ups should be scary because of their almost limitless and unbridled ability to do almost anything with our information and face little to no repercussions. Even where tech giants have historically reneged on their own security and privacy promises, regulators are under-resourced and outnumbered, and lack the enforcement powers to meaningfully hold repeat infringers accountable.
Without guardrails to protect our data, the startups of today and tomorrow are doomed to make the same mistakes of yesteryear.
