In the beginning, the Internet was for porn.
Back in the early days of the wild, wild web, around 1995, the biggest concern of parents and policy makers was the easy access to adult content by kids. The highly flawed Rimm study of that year launched not only an infamous Time Magazine cover, but also a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the subject (at which I testified) and the drafting of the Communications Decency Act (CDA). The issue of Internet safety was front and center.
Once the CDA was overturned in the Supreme Court, lawmakers got to work on the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) which, in turn, was enjoined and finally overturned, though not before a congressionally appointed COPA Commission convened in 2000 to look at ways to keep kids safe online. Even the White House got into the act and held annual Internet Safety Summits from 1997 onwards. Products, companies, NGOs and think tanks were created to address the safety issue. The position of Chief Safety Officer began to appear on the list of top executives of burgeoning web-based firms.
And then everything changed with 9/11. Following that traumatic day, the chief concern of the new Administration was security and cyber threats. The government led the way with the creation of the massive Department of Homeland Security and the Internet industry followed suit with a myriad of offerings all geared toward a new kind of protection -- this time from bots, scams, hacks and denial of service attacks. Not surprisingly the role of Chief Security Officer rose in prominence and spread from national and state governments to industry and beyond.
With the advent of Web 2.0 and the emergence of social networking sites, a whole new worry hit the web: privacy. Companies fell over themselves to produce and prominently post privacy policies, TRUSTe marks and so on. While organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center had formed some years before around this issue, the dominance of sites such as MySpace and then Facebook brought a new sense of urgency to the protection of private data. The ongoing controversies over location-based services, do not track proposals, "right to be forgotten" concepts and the ever changing landscape of privacy settings has kept this topic front and center.
Being a Chief Privacy Officer of an IT company carries with it great responsibilities, status and expectations. A perceived lack of trust can send a product or company's standing plummeting in the eyes of users and legislators alike. The CPO must navigate a minefield of competing interests, not least advertisers, who seek more and more granular data on users in order to serve up relevant and timely ads.
What is interesting is that the issue of safety is making a comeback and has been re-thought and expanded to embrace notions of media literacy and, even, digital citizenship and has come to mean more than just parental controls. This is particularly true given that kids are now producing the kind of content we used to try and keep them away from.
Online safety is also incorporating the findings of psychologists and brain researchers on the impact of all this digital stimulation on our brains, particularly the forming brains of our kids and teens. And while we have left the techno-panic era of "To Catch a Predator" behind, we now have cyberbullying, sexting and addiction issues to contend with. And then there's the challenge of the mobile internet with kids walking around with the web in their pockets.
Put bluntly, safety impacts a company's bottom line. Where there's more safety and trust, there will be more users willing to spend time and money. When safety and trust break down, users flee and governments are apt to move in and create legislation to protect consumers, sometimes with unintended consequences. The European Union is taking a hard look at the safety of social networking sites and the major operating systems. The FTC is looking again at COPPA while sites like Facebook struggle to deal with a multitude of under-13s on their site.
So 2011 may well become the year of the Chief Safety Officer, whose role would be to oversee and "bake in" safety at every level of a company and its products. This person would be the safety lead and conscience of a company, making sure the engineers consider the safety implications of their brilliant designs, not just their cool functions. The CSO would work on a par with the Chief Privacy and Chief Security Officers in creating a dynamic and coherent sense of trust within the company and to the outside world.
And, with a little encouragement, the White House would lead the way by creating such a post within the office of the Chief Technology Officer. Just such a proposal was made to the Obama transition team as far back as 2008. Now would be a good time for such a bold and forward-thinking appointment.