Tuesday, August 21, 2018

BadTech Is the Next New Thing

Forget about Martech, Adtech, or even Madtech. The next big thing is BadTech.

I’m referring to is the backlash against big tech firms – Google, Amazon, Apple, and above all Facebook – that have relentlessly expanded their influence on everyday life. Until recently, these firms were mostly seen as positive, or at least benignly neutral, forces that made consumers’ lives easier.  But something snapped after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last March.  Scattered concerns became a flood of hostility.  Enthusiasm curdled into skepticism and fear.  The world recognized a new avatar of evil: BadTech.

As a long-standing skeptic (see this from 2016), I’m generally pleased with this development. The past month alone offers plenty of news to alarm consumers:
There's more bad news for marketers and other business people:
Not surprisingly, consumers, businesses, and governments have reacted with new skepticism, concern, and even some action:
But all is not perfect.
  • BadTech firms still plunge ahead with dangerous projects. For example, despite the clear and increasing dangers from poorly controlled AI, it’s being distributed more broadly by Ebay, Salesforce, Google, and Oracle
  • Other institutions merrily pursue their own questionable ideas. Here we have General Motors and Shell opening new risks by connecting cars to gas pumps.  Here – this is not a joke – a university is putting school-controlled Amazon Echo listening devices in every dorm room
  • The press continues to get it wrong. This New York Times Magazine piece presents California’s privacy law as a triumph for its citizen-activist sponsor, when he in fact traded a nearly-impossible-to change referendum for a law that will surely be gutted before it takes effect in 2020.
  • Proponents will overreach. This opinion piece argues the term “privacy policy” should be banned because consumers think the label means a company keeps their data private. This is a side issue at best; at worst, it tries to protect people from being lazy. Balancing privacy against other legitimate concerns will be hard enough without silly distractions.
So welcome to our latest brave new world, where BadTech is one more villain to fear   It's progress that people recognize the issues but we can't let emotion overwhelm considered solutions.  Let’s use the moment to address the real problems without creating new ones or throwing away what’s genuinely good.  We can't afford to fail.

No comments:

Post a Comment