Yes, we have to look at their business models and at their past behaviour. It wasn't until the major three technology companies were hauled to Congress in November 2017 that we even got the honest numbers about how many people, for example, had been influenced in the U.S. elections. They had claimed it was only a few million people. Claire and I both know many researchers who did lots of late work until three in the morning, analyzing datasets and saying it had to be way more people than that. Again, we didn't get the honest number that more than 126 million Americans, 90% of the U.S. voting population, were affected until after we brought them to testify.
That's actually one of the key things that caused them to be honest. I say this because they're in a very tough spot. Their fiduciary responsibility is to their shareholders, and until there's an obvious notion that they will be threatened by not being honest, we need that public pressure.
There are different issues here, but when I was at Google I tried to raise the issue of addiction. It was not taken as seriously as I would have liked, which is why I left, and it wasn't until there was more public pressure on each of these topics that they actually started to move forward.
One last thing I will say is that we can look to the model of a fiduciary. We're very worried about privacy, but we just need to break it down. I want to hand over more information to my lawyer or doctor because with more information, they can help me more. However, if I am going to do that, we have to be bound into a contract where I know for sure that you are a fiduciary to my interests. Right now, the entire business model of all the data companies is to take as much of that information as possible and then to enable some other third party to manipulate you.
Imagine a priest in a confession booth, except instead of listening carefully and compassionately and caring about keeping that information private, the only way the priest gets paid for listening to two billion people's confessions is when they allow third parties, even foreign state actors, to manipulate those people based on the information gathered in the confession booth. It's worse, because they have a supercomputer next to them calculating two billion people's confessions so when you walk in, they know the confessions you're going to make before you make them.
It's not that we don't want priests in confession booths; it's just that we don't want priests with the business model of basically having an adversarial interest manipulating your vulnerable information.