Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

Some say that data has become the oil of the twenty-first century. But that understates the reality. A century ago, automobiles, airplanes, and many trains ran on oil. Today, every aspect of human life is fueled by data. When it comes to modern civilization, data is more like the air we breathe than the oil we burn.

This decade will end with almost 25 times as much digital data as when it began.

How do we strike the right balance between public safety, individual convenience, and personal privacy in this new era?

Even a broom can be used to sweep the floor or hit someone over the head.

the world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon.

We learned that we needed to look in the mirror and see what others saw in us and not just what we wanted to see in ourselves.

When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.

The tech sector cannot address these challenges by itself. The world needs a mixture of self-regulation and government action.

He would say until the day he died that it was that day, that case, that courtroom, and that issue that set the United States on a course toward independence.

Over the centuries, the courts looked at whether people had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” and considered what it meant when you stored your information with someone else. Put simply, if it was in something like a locked storage container and the key was inaccessible to others, then judges concluded that there was such an expectation and the Fourth Amendment applied.

Today’s fortified data centers with redundant layers of physical and digital security seem to adequately qualify for a locked storage container.

Just as public officials concluded in the 1930s that banks had become too important to the economy to be left unregulated, tech companies have become too important to be left to a laissez-faire policy approach today.

The public depends on law enforcement to keep it safe. But you can’t catch criminals or terrorists if you can’t find them—and this requires effective access to information.

“cloud commitments”: privacy, security, compliance, and transparency.

“It’s important that, as we operate around the world, we remember that governments can change over time. Look what happened here. Data collected about people—their political, religious, and social views—can fall into the wrong hands and cause all sorts of problems.”

Privacy wasn’t just a regulation that we had to abide by, but a fundamental human right that we had an obligation to protect.