My pile of books and articles tackling the dangers and challenges we collectively face from the tech industry seems to be growing far more quickly than I can ever consume it.
Whether the focus is ono the insidious growth of surveillance capitalism, the overreach of governments growing fat on the glut of data they can now gorge upon or simply the explosion in slick products that provide convenience with one hand whilst also stripping an individual’s privacy, the world is moving fast.
There’s no doubt that awareness is growing. The question is whether or not it will be both fast and good enough.
A group of activists have taken their thoughts to one of the key annual tech conference meccas – the SXSW Festival in Austen, Texas – this year to launch a campaign (‘You Are Not Alone’) to encourage whistleblowers who become aware of malfeasance within Big Tech companies, specifically in Silicon Valley, to step forward and take action.
Work in big tech? Is your company acting in an unethical way? You have the opportunity – and an important responsibility – to speak out | You Are Not Alone https://t.co/1nl7TJiljL #Whistleblower #privacy #Security #SurveillanceCapitalism #SiliconValley
— Dug Campbell (@DugCampbell) March 13, 2019
They urge everyone to ask the following questions:-
– Is your company living up to its values?
– When you raise concerns about the things you’re building, are they addressed?
– Does this product have features that could put people in harm’s way?
– If anything unintended happened with a feature or if data were leaked, who could get hurt?
– Is building this tech the right thing to do or are we just doing it because other companies are doing it?
A campaign that, I hope, everyone can get behind.