Silicon Valley has long been the Wild West of capitalism, but we may finally be reaching a point where Congress feels both entitled and justified in starting to regulate monopolistic tech giants. Exhibit A: The announcement Wednesday that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be testifying before Congress on April 11.
Privacy concerns have swirled around Facebook for years, but the proximate cause of Zuck’s trip to D.C. is expressly political: the supposed scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a data firm employed for a time by the Trump campaign, that siphoned information from 50 million Facebook profiles to help with voter targeting. Of course, it’s what Cambridge Analytica might have done wrong is up for debate. When the Obama campaign bragged about being able name every one of the 65 million voters who voted for him, this was merely savvy campaigning. As National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty has pointed out, what we’re really witnessing with the Cambridge Analytica scandal is more akin to a “moral panic” on the left that they will not be able to control technology sufficiently well enough to keep them in power.
Moral panic or not, there are good reasons to be fearful of what Silicon Valley is doing, and has been doing for years. (For what it’s worth, in 2012, I wrote this piece, “Democracy is Not a Psychology Experiment,” about the ominous aspects Obama campaign’s technologically sophisticated voter manipulation‐‐which included, among other things, an geolocation app that would allow people to identify what political party their neighbors belong to.) For too long, Silicon Valley has been so impressed with its technological accomplishments that companies have asked only whether they could do something rather than whether they should.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Amazon and Google have filed numerous patents for using their popular voice-activated Echo and Home devices to listen in on what you do and say in your own home and monetize it. Facebook was all set to enter the voice activated speaker market in May. That’s on hold while Facebook deals addresses the scandal du jour, but they still plan to do a product launch later this year, according to Bloomberg.
But none of that is as overtly dangerous as some of the tech Silicon Valley is now flirting with. By now, the subject of “deep fakes” has garnered quite a few headlines. Essentially, a message board on Reddit started to use publicly available deep learning artificial intelligence algorithms to make startlingly realistic looking videos where they map celebrities faces onto porn stars’s bodies.
But the next logical step is already here as well: Frightening accurate voice mimicry, pioneered by tech giant Adobe. Go ahead and watch this presentation of the software with comedian and director Jordan Peele. This technology has truly frightening implications for national security a host of other things, and yet it’s played for laughs:
Adobe and other tech giants don’t even seem aware that what they’re doing is cause for concern. Take for example, the NYT’s account of a leaked 2106 memo from a Facebook executive. Here’s the money quote: “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
The memo caused enough consternation within Facebook and more widely in Silicon Valley to demonstrate that even a modicum of concern would go a long way.
Because there is peril in Zuckerberg’s and Silicon Valley’s cluelessness about the possibility that Congress could rein them in with new regulations. That is that Congress cannot be counted on on to act sensibly to protect our privacy and cybersecurity. In fact, there are few problems Congress can’t be counted on to make worse. If our tech overlords don’t want to keep being called before Congress, their last best hope is to start acting more responsibly on their own.
