What issues do voters care about that hackers can address & solve?

A variety of large tech firms constantly collect data about many aspects of our lives, often without our full understanding, consent, or knowledge of how it is used and shared. That data can be used in a variety of ways that do not benefit us and, in fact, can directly harm individuals. In the absence of national privacy legislation, a patchwork of state laws try to fill the gaps. We can and should elect people who will pledge to end intrusive data collection practices and put control back in the hands of individuals.

What effect does social media have on the cohesion of our society? Large, mostly unaccountable companies influence our beliefs and understanding of the world in both subtle and overt ways, changing the dynamics of how people interact with one another and even conducting experiments on us. Addressing how social media perpetuates and fails to address threats, manipulation, fraud, scams, hate speech, and other acts of harm should be a top priority.

Our increasingly disposable technology purchases waste vast amounts of resources that never can be recovered. Hackers fix broken things. Should manufacturers give consumers the ability to service, repair, or easily recycle products they use, or lock the owners out of a pipeline to spare parts that would keep toxic e-waste out of landfills? We should not allow our world to become one where we transition from ownership to rental of the objects and tools we use every day.

As ever-larger companies hold onto and control vast amounts of our personal data, photographs, emails, blog content, social media posts, and more, what happens when those companies suffer a major breach and that data ends up in the hands of criminals? The pace and scale of data breaches continues to grow, with neither the criminals nor the companies responsible for protecting that information being held to account.

While the largest tech companies in the world race headlong in a competition to introduce generative AI tools and services into everything we use, individuals lack even basic protections against the malicious abuse of these tools. Whether it’s a scammer sending well-crafted phishing emails or a stalker creating nonconsensual deepfake porn depicting unwilling people, we have very few protections, and fewer elected officials who even understand the problem.

Those datacenters busily crunching out the latest generative AI graphics are now consuming more power than ever. In a world where we face an impending climate catastrophe, massive power consuming datacenters should be fully carbon neutral. Cryptocurrency, the blockchain, and AI draw more power than some entire countries, burning through fossil fuels building things of little value that nobody asked for.

One of the major reasons behind the 2023 film and television strikes was a concern that generative AI would be able to supplant the creative output of writers, artists, directors, actors, and others who spend a lifetime honing a craft. Should we just allow a handful of large technology firms to freely scrape the entire creative output of all of humanity’s recorded history in order to make a buck, throwing millions of people out of work?

A small number of rogue nations harbor most of the criminal gangs who engage in ransomware attacks, mainly against the United States and other western countries. The drain on our economy as a result of criminal intrusions costs us billions of dollars a year and increases the prices of everything for everyone. We need updated standards for security measures, reform of the cyberinsurance industry, accountability for those who host and protect criminals, and infosec workforce development.

From nearly their first day in Kindergarten, children in school are introduced to technologies and expected to use them for virtually all schoolwork, and yet we rarely teach kids in school how to protect their privacy; recognize scams, fraud, and malware; or understand how information online can be manipulated in ways that affect their understanding of the world. A comprehensive cybersecurity curriculum for all grade levels is essential to ending the cycle of cybercrime victimization in our changing world.