Page 23 - March 2018 Disruption Report

TECHLASH
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“They can create a mortgage company, but the question is can they make it easier — make it less stressful — to ll out the application and get you the documents needed to apply for the mortgage, deliver all the require disclosures along the way?” said David Stevens, president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Can they change the paradigm of what consumers experience today?”
“Everyone in the ecosystem is pretty much suffering with something like this,” said Nouram Instinet analyst Dan Dolev. “Initially, it’s just a risk for whoever touches Amazon in terms of processing
and acquiring. But down the road, if it sparks a trend and people’s usage patterns change
because Amazon is just so present, then that’s a risk.” (Bloomberg Technology, Spencer Soper and Jennifer Surance, 03/09/18; Banking’s Amazon Moment, Gerard du Toit and Aaron Cheris, 03/05/18; Medium, Enrique Dans, 05/07/16)
Social media isn’t free after all
“Launched in 2004, Facebook grew to 1 billion active users in 2012 and to 2 billion active users today. “Facebook owns a torrent of content created by its 2.1 billion monthly active users,” wrote NYU Stern’s Scott Galloway. “Through its site and its apps, the company reaches 66 percent of U. S. adults. Facebook plans to spend $1 billion on original content. It’s the world’s most proli c content machine, dominating the majority of phones worldwide.”
“When 67% of the U.S. population gets its news from social media and from tech companies, [social media platforms] literally are deciding what we see and what we believe is true, and what our sense of reality is,” said Tristan Harris, founder of Center for Humane Technology. “And we’re now seeing that a couple of bad actors like Cambridge Analytica have used the ability of these platforms as they were designed to be used, which is to say to sell product to in uence people— which is not so much different from selling an ideology. So like Capt. Renault in Casablanca, are we shocked, shocked that this is happening, when this was in fact part of the business model all along?”
“People are upset that their data may have been used to secretly in uence 2016 voters,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “If your personal information can help sway elections, which affects everyone’s life and societal well-being, maybe privacy does matter after all.”
In interviews, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg appeared to accept the possibility of increased privacy regulation—something that would have been unlikely only a few months ago. However, some trade group executives warned that any attempt to curb the use of consumer data would put at risk the business model of the ad-supported Internet.
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