Our digital culture needs an overhaul amid watershed moment for Big Tech – The National

Our digital culture needs an overhaul amid watershed moment for Big Tech – The National

Our digital culture needs an overhaul amid watershed moment for Big Tech. The pandemic has accelerated trends in digital culture with privacy and surveillance even more at the fore. For the applications to work, they need buy-in from users.. In China, that wasn't a challenge because users were given no choice but to use the applications.. If there was ever a time for the leading technology companies to demonstrate their commitment to the public good and data privacy it is now.. Given the surge in technology use during the crisis, we appear to be going backward when it comes to some basic issues of data privacy.. We can use the crisis as an opportunity to draft the type of regulations and consumer awareness that are needed to reverse these trends.. The first step is addressing the tradeoff between sensible regulations and a marketplace that encourages innovation.. In the US, the world's most powerful technology companies have been able to grow free from meaningful regulations that specifically safeguard user privacy.. The GDPR forces companies to disclose how they collected certain pieces of user data and what they used the data for.. The Covid-19 crisis might be the perfect catalyst for a