IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020 - 16

relationships to get the population to
vote against you. Taking an example from finance, there was a lot of
debate about the introduction of rules
for best execution, which refers to the
duty of an investment services firm
to ensure the most beneficial order
execution on behalf of customers
even if that means sending orders to
competitors, before the rules came

regulatory organizations and the
businesses that need regulating,
and few individuals would risk their
careers to start a movement. Differences among research disciplines,
practices, and gatekeepers mean
that societal impact is often not
considered by academics holistically along with technical challenges. The government research
funding gap in this area is
often plugged by technolog y companies, fur ther
exacerbating the privatiAI has been a topic of interest to
zation of invention. Much
investment goes into apps
researchers for decades, but only
as they give prospective
funders the impression
recently has the funding caught
that there will be an output
up, matching the motivation.
that is both tangible and
sophisticated, and the fragmentation in research and
into force. Best execution rules have
development funding leads to apps
been incorporated into MiFID [4], as
being viewed as a panacea by nonwell as the policy of the U.S. Securitechnical researchers. A particular
ties and Exchange Commission [5].
problem with the privatization (and
In the case of the U.S., although prolack of appropriate regulation) of
ponents existed since the 1980s [6],
app platforms is that in the long
some market makers and exchange
term apps and their platforms have
member firms worked against it,
the potential to build dossiers of
throughout the 1990s and 2000s [7],
individual persons through track[8] because it opened an opportunity
ing and link ing their behaviors
for smaller exchanges to exist and
and attributes, as data harvesting
threatened their market position. The
has become the de facto business
NYSE and other incumbents didn't
model for such platforms.
want it to go through. You get the idea,
The Trend of Building
this is a slog, with moneyed interests
Dossiers of Individual's Data
spending years fighting the change,
is a Concerning One. It's Also
which was ultimately implemented in
Become Increasingly Topical,
2005. Government regulators really
it Seems Like More and More
struggle to make decisions that would
People are Concerned About
negatively impact large companies. It
How their Personal Data is
is a hard sell for taxpayers that short
Collected and Stored. Do you
term financial loss will be outweighed
Think this Can be Prevented?
by the long term social good.
GG: The ideal solution would be
What About Individuals? Do
for technical experts to work with
You Think There's Any Way for
governments to create regulations,
Them to Enact Change at a
with the acknowledgement that poliGrassroots Level?
cymakers do not have a monopoly
GG: There is a revolving door for
on ethical judgement in the design
the employment of individuals in
of systems. The problem is that both

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

technical experts and policymakers
are routinely courted by interested parties, so finding a solution in
the public interest can be difficult.
One possible approach is that parts
of government that aren't often
exposed to such courting could be
involved with the consideration of
new system design at early stages to
create a groundswell to consider the
system change before regulation is
formally considered. Overall the difficulty lies at the institutional level.
Even if you want to make changes
it's difficult to implement them
unless you know that other groups
will support you. Robert Jackall [8],
[9] makes a great point that above
all, managers in bureaucracy seek to
avoid blame, so our task is to offer
regulators safety and confidence
to support positive change. Faruk
Eczacibasi, a Turkish entrepreneur,
defined " disruption " as " a successful attack on gatekeepers " [10].

How Do You Think this
" Disruption of Gatekeepers "
can be Enacted in an
Institutional Context?
GG: Banks creating data platforms
is particularly worrisome. They are
attracted to the possibility of monetizing their data, but ultimately
this will not help them since data
brokerage is not really their key
business. Attempting to work with
banks to prevent the proliferation of
platforms to collect data could be a
solution, but we need them to recognize and appreciate the systemlevel need before we can expect
them to drive for this change. " Challenger banks " similar to Monzo and
Starling are often subsidized by
data collection, and the surveillance
capitalism that data collection facilitates [11] ideally should be legislated out. It is important for people
to be able to interact in the world
without every transaction becoming
part of their permanent records. If
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DECEMBER 2020

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2020

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