Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

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.

As this next generation comes fully into adulthood, with digital documentation of every irresponsible thing they did during adolescence, it’s hard to believe that some politicians won’t champion the cause of sealing virtual juvenile records. Everything an individual shares before the age of eighteen might then become unusable, sealed and not for public disclosure on pain of fines or even prison. Laws would make it illegal for any employer, court, housing authority or university to take that content into account. Of course, these laws would be difficult to enforce, but their very presence would lend a hand in changing norms, so that most adolescent mishaps caught online may ultimately be viewed by society with the same lens as experimental drug and alcohol use.

Other laws may emerge as attempts to safeguard privacy and increase the liability for those releasing confidential information. Stealing someone’s cell phone could be considered on a par with identity theft, and online intrusions (stolen passwords, hijacking accounts) could well carry the same charge as breaking and entering. 7Each country will determine its own cultural threshold for what type of information is permissible to be shared, and what type is inappropriate or just too personal. What the Indian government considers obscene or perhaps pornographic, the French might let pass without a second thought. Consider the case of a society that is deeply concerned about privacy but is also saturated with camera-equipped smart phones and inexpensive camera drones that can be purchased at any toy store. The categories that exist for paparazzi photographers (“public” versus “private” space) could be extended and applied to everyone, with certain designated “safe zones” where photography requires a subject’s consent (or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, consent from a female subject’s male guardian). People would use specific apps on their phones to get permission, and because digital photos generate a time stamp and digital watermark, determining if someone took an illegal picture would be simple work. Digital watermarking refers to the insertion of bits into a digital image, audio or video file that contains copyright information about the file’s owner—name, date, rights and so on. Watermarks act as protection against manipulation because, while they are invisible, they can be extracted and read with special software, so when tampering is suspected, technical experts can determine whether a file is indeed an unadulterated copy or not.

For the third type of coping strategy, at the societal level, we need to ask how non-state actors (such as communities and nonprofit organizations) will respond to the consequences of the data revolution. We think a wave of civil-society organizations will emerge in the next decade designed to shield connected citizens from their governments and from themselves. Powerful lobbying groups will advocate content and privacy laws. Rights organizations that document repressive surveillance tactics will call for better citizen protection. There will be support groups to help different demographics deal with the consequences of undeletable data. Educational organizations will try to reach school-age children to avoid over-sharing. (“Never give your data to a stranger.”) The recent campaign in the United States against cyber-bullying is truly a harbinger of what is to come: broad public acknowledgment, grassroots social campaigns to promote awareness, and tepid political attempts to contain it. Within schools, we expect that teachers and administrators will treat cyber-bullying with the same weight and penalties as physical altercations, only instead of a child’s being sent to the principal’s office after recess, he will be sent there when he arrives in the morning for something he wrote online the previous night at home.