Long before I was elected to Congress, when I was starting my career in the tech industry, I believed we had boundless opportunities to improve the lives of millions, if not billions, of people.
New breakthroughs were being achieved with each passing day. First, we could send emails outside our organisations, then we could send attachments. We added hyperlinks. The potential for inventing novel ways to communicate seemed endless, and it was. We are now more interconnected than at any time in human history, thanks in large part to social media.
Through all of these advances, average people assumed that the big technology companies were acting responsibly and protecting user privacy — to the extent that people thought about privacy at all. We know better now. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica revelations have woken many consumers up to new privacy concerns.