Let’s Make Privacy Easy

Tom Kemp is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur, investor, and policy advisor. He is the author of Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy.  Shutterstock When I was CEO of a mid-size technology company coming out with a new consumer-focused service offering, we spent a fair amount of time doing A/B user interface testing before the product’s release. I had occasional meetings with individual engineering groups, but with our User Experience (UX) team, I emailed and met with them regularly. I knew, like most of my CEO peers in Silicon Valley, that ease of use and the quality of the UX makes or breaks customer adoption. Big Tech firms have always set the bar in the tech industry regarding their UX and making their products easy to use. Steve Jobs was famously quoted as saying, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.” For Big Tech, it is essential to not only have a great UX to get consumers to initially sign up but also utilize persuasive technologies to keep consumers on their platforms. This helps these firms build a network effect and enable more user behavioral data to be mined and more ads to be served. For example, Meta has historically experimented with the colors of buttons and the frequency of notifications to get users to return to its platform. Artificial Intelligence…Let’s Make Privacy Easy