The Uber files lit up the darkness of big tech, and showed why we need whistleblowers

theguardian.com:

This week, more than 124,000 documents disclosed by the whistleblower Mark MacGann, Uber’s former chief lobbyist for Europe, detailedhow Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments in order to aggressively build its global empire.

Last year, I disclosed thousands of documents to the US governmentrevealing Facebook’s negligence about the harm its products were doing. As with the documents supplied by MacGann, the public would have never known this information even existed had a whistleblower not tipped them off.

The Uber files clearly illustrate the critical importance of whistleblowers. They also present choices for governments and the citizens they represent. Technology has always outpaced its regulators. It takes time for a culture of accountability to grow around any nascent technology or industry, and for governments to understand how they work and what costs are being passed on to the public.

The most critical technologies that will drive and define our economy in years to come are radically less transparent than those that drove our economy a hundred years ago. As the motor industry became more complicated and prominent in society, the public were able to walk alongside it. People could buy a car and crash it, buy a car, and take it apart, buy a car and put sensors on to verify that the claims of its manufacturers were true. Accountability grew alongside the industry.

For most digital technologies, this cannot occur. Critical design choices are hidden behind our screens, where the public cannot access them. The functioning of a system such as Facebook is impossible to inspect from the outside. Academics and journalists spend millions of dollars building