Don’t trust the tech giants? You likely rely on them anyway
If technology giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon face a common threat to their dominance, it probably lies in a single word: trust.
In some respects, these companies are riding high. They have woven themselves into the fabric of our daily lives, making their services indispensable for daily tasks like keeping in touch with family and friends, watching TV and buying cat food. Revenues are up and profits are soaring.
But they’ve also drawn the attention of regulators in Europe and the U.S. thanks to carelessness with consumer data and other problems. Facebook’s leaky data controls, for instance, let Cambridge Analytica mine the profiles of up to 87 million people in an attempt to swing elections. The social network has also had to beef up manual oversight to clamp down on the spread of fake news.
Google’s YouTube has likewise been implicated in the spread of political conspiracy theories. Not long ago, Amazon’s always-listening Echo speaker inadvertently recorded a family’s conversation at home — and then sent the recording to someone else.
Some of these issues are systemic; others may be little more than the growing pains of new technologies. What they all fuel, though, is a sense that technology may not always warrant the implicit faith we place in it.
Companies have to realize “that trust isn’t digital,” says Gerd Leonhard, a futurist and author of “Technology vs. Humanity.” ‘’Trust is not something that you download. Trust is a feeling. It’s a perception.”
Trust looms large in modern life. We still get on airplanes even though they sometimes come apart in flight. We go to hospitals even though medical errors sometimes kill patients. These services are too important to live without, despite the occasional disastrous error.
But those industries are also heavily regulated because of the risks involved. Technology companies, by comparison, are largely unconstrained.
Trust issues could be especially acute for technology companies, since their services are effectively omnipresent yet largely inscrutable. You can’t audit Google’s algorithm to see why it’s giving you certain search results the way you can watch your bank balance. You just have to trust that the company is upholding its promises.
Yet so far, such concerns don’t loom large for most consumers. “That trust is eroded, but the uncomfortable thing is no one really cares,” says Scott Galloway, a New York University marketing professor. “As long as they trust that technology will improve their lives, they don’t appear to care about the other stuff.”