Mr. Roger McNamee:

At the end of the day, when we think about the current model and the end point, in the United States there are 220 million registered voters. In principle, there could be 220 million campaigns, each completely isolated from the next. The metaphor I use is imagine going to the doctor with a broken arm. Imagine if the doctor repaired the arm and then said, "I own your arm now." That is what happens with data. Any corporation that touches a piece of data claims ownership and the ability to do whatever it wants with it. Because there is a free market, they can create what Tristan Harris calls a data voodoo doll, a complete representation of a person's life in all respects. It is effectively part of one's body.

The notion that they are allowed to unilaterally exploit it to predict and manipulate a person's behaviour strikes me as being profoundly inappropriate. We can attack this by going after symptoms or we can attack the problem. In my mind I would like to reset and go all the way back to where we were 25 years ago and say data cannot be used in any way. There would be no models or anything else. We could then have a reasonable conversation about what uses of data were appropriate and which were not. That is instead of starting with the assumption that all things are good and trying to subtract from it. Such a process has brought us to a bad place. The implication is very simple. In the short run both Google and Facebook would lose profoundly in their earnings, but they would both have massive opportunities to rebuild them. To my mind, their profits should not be the first consideration of society. As somebody who has been involved with that world my whole life, I look at this issue while knowing the creative forces around the world will replace those functions instantaneously. It would be only a matter of weeks before one would have a global standard for alternatives based on good business models if they were willing to do it.