News & Comment: Twitter, Facebook hearings: Congress grills Dorsey and Sandberg, slams Google

COMMENT:

By Ambuj Kumar, CEO and co-founder, Fortanix

“Technology companies have long built their businesses by collecting behemoth of user data and extracting values out of them. Now, we are just waking up to the potential problems with this. Is data susceptible to misuse by algorithms that invade user privacy by finding personal biases? Do the technology companies treat us differently based on our political views? Do they even know our political leanings? It’s too early to demand an algorithmic fairness to all the users, because we don’t even have a clear framework of fairness. It’s encouraging to see both Mr. Dorsey and Ms. Sandberg making case for third parties reviewers to vet their platforms. Social networking is based on trust and the certificate for trust must come from an unbiased source, not the social networking platform itself. As a digital society, we need to standardize on what is considered fair and true, and then develop an open source framework to assess the software stack of these companies on that standard. A silver lining is that these companies know how to solve extremely hard problems. Now, if they apply same techniques and innovation to ensure the positive impact on the society, we have some hope. But, it will require these firms to be more transparent and accountable to people other than their shareholders.”