How government should approach tech giants, and how we should use their services

In new book, Roger McNamee offers ideas on how to solve the big problems created by Big Tech

Roger McNamee, a longtime tech investor and one of the early backers of Facebook Inc., was a very early voice warning about privacy and data collection problems on the world’s largest social network that eventually erupted in the public eye.

Now, he is trying to help carve out some solutions.

McNamee released a book last week called, “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe” (Penguin Press, 336 pp.) in which he tells of being alarmed during the 2016 U.S. presidential election about Facebook’s role in politics. His book recounts his journey, from first noticing activity on FacebookFB, -0.88%  that was inciting nasty political fights among friends, to eventually meeting with Facebook executives who listened but ignored him, to ultimately becoming an advocate for much-needed change in big tech.

“The truth is that at the beginning of this process three years ago, I had no idea where this was going to go,” McNamee told MarketWatch in an interview. At first, he said, “I thought Facebook was a victim. What we know now is that this is much more complicated than that.”

McNamee is not a typical tech critic. In the early chapters, he outlines his credentials to show that if anything, he is one of tech’s biggest evangelists. Early in his career, McNamee managed the biggest tech portfolio at T. Rowe Price, which also coincided with the early days of the PC industry, where the musician befriended some tech executives playing music. What McNamee makes clear is that he has made a career from researching and investing in tech, and as a big tech cheerleader, he was an early Facebook fan. He used the platform to publicize his band, Moon Alice, connect with friends and business associates, and read news.

McNamee’s change of tune might seem surprising, given his close ties to the company in its youth, when he became an early investor. Before Facebook was mainstream, McNamee had a meeting with the then-22-year-old Zuckerberg in 2006, requested by Facebook’s chief privacy officer who told McNamee his boss was having an existential crisis. At the meeting, McNamee predicted that Zuckerberg would get offers from Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -0.22%  and/or Yahoo to buy Facebook for $1 billion and he advised him not to sell, telling him he was building the most important company since Google. GOOGL, -0.85%GOOG, -0.72%  Zuck soon admitted that he had just received such an offer from one of those two giants. A few years later, McNamee advised Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg, then at Google, whom he knew from her work as his no. 2 at the U.S. Treasury Department.

But McNamee became disenchanted with Facebook and its business model when he realized that Facebook and other internet giants, like Google, were “harvesting data on its users” to manipulate them in ways that would be advantageous to their platforms.

“It’s the opposite of what Henry Ford did,” McNamee said, adding that even though Ford was fundamentally flawed, he understood that if he also made his employees customers, they would want to build better cars for the rest of America. “These two companies are running extracting businesses. … Instead of using that data to serve the interest of the people on the platform, they use the data to serve the company’s own needs.”

As he grew more disillusioned, he joined with Tristan Harris, a former Stanford University student, entrepreneur and former Google engineer who taught him about persuasive technology that these companies were deploying, and the addictive aspects of social networks, which became even worse in the age of the smartphone. Harris is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Together, McNamee and Harris went to Washington, D.C., where meetings included FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeney and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.). Harris and McNamee warned about the possibility of Russian interference in the U.S. election, hypothesizing that they could impersonate Americans and seed Facebook Groups with divisive issues and content.

Two months later, Facebook disclosed that it had uncovered Russian spending on ads, connected to Facebook accounts deemed “inauthentic.” In October 2017, estimates of the number of consumers on Facebook, Google and Twitter reached via Russian-backed manipulative content grew to 126 million users. In March 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal blew open, and Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill a month later, leading to no real regulatory changes.

McNamee believes that regulation and possible some antitrust intervention is now necessary to fix big tech, and that past antitrust actions in tech — such as the breakup of AT&T T, +2.28%  and the case against IBM Corp. IBM, +1.14% — all ultimately lead to more innovation.

However, he added that just restructuring the industry with antitrust litigation “won’t fix what’s wrong with the business model.” Data privacy regulation, such as what the European Union has embarked on with General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is now necessary. He also believes that consumers can play a role in exerting pressure on these companies, and has advice in the book on ways we can alter our behavior.

“I still use Facebook and Twitter but I have changed my behavior, especially on Facebook,” McNamee writes. “I no longer allow Facebook to press my emotional buttons. I wish it were no longer necessary but I no longer post anything political or react to any political posts. It took six months, but my feed is now dominated by the music side of my life, birthdays and puppies.”

McNamee said he erased most of his Facebook history, and does not use Facebook Connect to log onto other websites or press “like” buttons found elsewhere on the web. He also does not use Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp, and he avoids using Google as much as possible, because of its data-collection policies. He uses DuckGoGo as his search engine (which he said is really inconvenient at times), Signal for texting, and avoids Gmail and Google Maps.

“I am far from invisible on the web, but my shadow is smaller,” he wrote.

He also recommends avoiding…

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