We need accountability in unregulated digital age

There is an abiding dream in the tech world that when all the planet’s people and data are connected it will be a better place. That may prove true. But getting there is turning into a nightmare — a world where billions of people are connected but without sufficient legal structures, security protections or moral muscles to handle all these connections without abuse.

Lately, it feels as if we’re all connected but no one’s in charge.

Equifax, the credit reporting bureau, became brilliant at vacuuming up personal credit data — without your permission — and selling it. But it was so lax that it left a hole for hackers to get the personal information of some 146 million Americans, or nearly half the country.

But don’t worry, Equifax ousted CEO Richard Smith, with “a payday worth as much as $90 million — or roughly 63 cents for every customer whose data was potentially exposed in its recent security breach,” Fortune reported. That will teach him!

Smith and his board should be in jail. I’m with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who told CNBC, “So long as there is no personal responsibility when these big companies breach consumers’ trust, let their data get stolen, cheat their consumers ... then nothing is going to change.”

Facebook, Google and Twitter are different animals in my mind. They’ve all connected more people than they can manage and they’ve been naive about how many bad guys were abusing their platforms.

As Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, put it to me, “Up to now, these companies have not taken the threat that Russia and other foreign agents pose to our system seriously enough or invested enough or to really reveal what happened in 2016 — or what is still happening now.”

One reason Facebook was slow to respond is that its business model was to absorb all of the readers of the mainstream media and to absorb all their advertisers — but as few of their editors as possible. An editor is a human being you have to pay to bring editorial judgment to your content, to make sure things are accurate and to correct them if they’re not. Social networks preferred to use algorithms instead, but these are easily gamed.

Our democracy is built on two principles: truth and trust. We trust that our elections are fair and that enables our peaceful rotations of power. And we trust that the news we get is true and that it is corrected if it is not.

And we expect our president to defend both. But our president is a liar who refuses to hold Russia to account for anything. It’s a terrible combination.

These companies make billions selling our data, but they’re ambivalent about taking responsibility “for the uses, and abuses, of their platforms,” argued Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel. “They can’t have it both ways. If they claim they are neutral pipes and wires, like the phone company or the electric company, they should be regulated as public utilities. But if, on the other hand, they want to claim the freedoms associated with news media, they can’t deny responsibility for promulgating fake news.”

“A century ago, we found ways to rein in the unaccountable power associated with the Industrial Revolution,” Sandel concluded. “Today, we need to figure out how to rein in the unaccountable power associated with the digital revolution.”