Voices: The dark side of the year in tech

SAN FRANCISCO — In George Orwell's disturbing 1949

novel 1984, a paranoid society copes with the intrusive reach of an all-knowing governmental overlord known as Big Brother.

Well, 30 years on Orwell's fictional world has become fact — with an asterisk. Big Brother is us.

Anno domini 2014 will be known as the year technology morphed from being largely a source of useful-to-trivial apps, gadgets and services into a cultural force with dark sides that may require everything from vigilant monitoring to new lawmaking.

Let's start with the obvious: hacking.

A day doesn't seem to go by without news of yet another company having its servers invaded. While you might not care profoundly about the fate of Sony's employees or its movies, you would if your own employer's systems were targeted and seemingly mundane e-mails were suddenly revealed for all the world to see.

And the stakes aren't just personal, they're financial: The Ponemon Institute estimates that the cost of being hacked per company ranges from $12 million to $20 million. In the past year, some half a billion people — with a B — have had their identities stolen and roughly one in two Americans have had to replace their credit cards, according to Symantec and Ponemon.

A high ranking U.S. official urged the nation to be prepared for a "cyber Pearl Harbor" that could be "as destructive as the terrorist attack on 9/11" and "virtually paralyze the nation." That was then-secretary of Defense Leon Panetta in 2012. Our sense of urgency should only increase.

Another matter of concern is cloaked by how vibrant and critical to the U.S. growth the tech sector became in 2014. But not all American workers appear to have access to this economic freight train.

The past year saw an unprecedented release of employment documents from a range of brand-name tech firms that all confirmed what many suspected: Women, blacks and Hispanics are seriously underrepresented in the work forces of Silicon Valley and its offspring.

Activists such as Jesse Jackson and media outlets such as Paste BN — which hosted a first-ever roundtable discussion on the topic of diversity in tech at Stanford University this fall — have helped push the issue to the foreground. Beyond being a moral imperative to share the wealth, there are documented financial advantages for companies to see that their workforce mirrors the national workforce.

While there remains huge ground to cover — around 1% of tech employees are African American or Hispanic, compared with 12% and 17% of the national population — the new willingness of companies such as Google and Twitter to acknowledge the problem and staff positions focused on diversity and inclusion bode well for 2015.

Lastly, there's something I'll call the Tech Ick Factor. This is when companies on the gleaming surface appear to have a great product but manage to sully that image with questionable personal or corporate behavior.

Just last month, Sean Rad, CEO of dating site Tinder, was demoted after a former exec, Whitney Wolf, sued the company for repeated instances of alleged sexual harassment. Rad, 27, told Forbes magazine "we're looking for an Eric Schmidt type," a reference to Schmidt's hiring in 2001 to mind the Google shop for its young founders.

Ride-sharing behemoth Uber also got in hot water this year. One its senior people threatened to have a reporter stalked by private investigators, which in turn renewed a spotlight both on sexist comments by its CEO Travis Kalanick (he called Uber "boober" for the dates it scored him) and on God View, the company's internal system for tracking customer rides.

Neither the exec, Emil Michael, nor God View has been dumped, which simply reminds anyone using sharing-economy services of any kind that while the upside may be convenience the potential downside is a loss of privacy.

Which brings us back to 1984. There's a line in the novel where the all-powerful ruling party notes that it "seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power."

We may be a far cry from Orwell's dystopian future, but it's up to us — as consumers, as lawmakers, as citizens — to ensure that the economic and cultural bounty tech provides remains anchored to the "good of others." Not a bad mission for 2015.

Della Cava covers technology and culture for Paste BN out of San Francisco.

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