The Surveillence Era: 2018
2018
March 2018. Surveillance. Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Christopher Wylie Goes Public. Christopher Wylie works with The Guardian and New York Times to expose Cambridge Analytica’s role in harvesting the Facebook data of 87 million people without consent, using it to build psychological voter profiles for the Trump 2016 campaign. The scandal establishes public understanding of how behavioral data can be weaponized at an electoral scale. Facebook is ultimately fined $5 billion by the FTC.
March 23, 2018. Law. CLOUD Act Signed into Law. The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act was signed as part of the omnibus spending bill, allowing U.S. law enforcement to compel American technology companies to provide data stored on servers abroad and establishing a framework for bilateral data-sharing agreements between governments. The legal architecture that makes cross-border government access to data on American-run platforms a matter of statute rather than treaty negotiation.
April 2018. Surveillance. 4,000 Google Workers Sign Petition Against Project Maven. After details of Google’s AI contract with the Pentagon leaked internally, more than 4,000 Google employees signed an open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai demanding the company cancel Project Maven and commit to never building warfare technology. A dozen employees resign. Google announced in June 2018 that it would not renew the contract. The moment that establishes employee dissent as a meaningful force in AI governance, and that Palantir subsequently uses to position itself as the defense contractor AI companies refused to be.
February 2018. China. PBOC Revokes Private Credit Scoring Licenses. The People’s Bank of China revokes the personal credit-scoring licenses of Alibaba’s Sesame Credit and Tencent Credit, preventing them from becoming standalone national scoring systems. The PBOC establishes Baihang Credit as a state-supervised unified platform, making the eight fintech companies shareholders. Alibaba and Tencent resist sharing data. China draws a legal boundary between private behavioral scoring and government compliance enforcement at the precise moment the United States is building equivalent private behavioral scoring infrastructure without an equivalent constraint.
May 25, 2018. Law. GDPR Takes Effect. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation takes effect, establishing the world’s most comprehensive framework for individual data rights, consent requirements, and corporate accountability for the use of personal data. The regulatory model that the United States explicitly declined to replicate at the federal level, leaving a gap that the GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act are now filling with a framework designed by the financial industry rather than consumer advocates.
September 2018. Money. Circle and Coinbase Launch USDC. Circle and Coinbase jointly form the CENTRE Consortium and launch USD Coin, a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin backed 1:1 by cash and cash-equivalent assets. The first regulated, audited, U.S.-based stablecoin. The instrument that, in 2025, becomes the primary settlement currency for Visa’s interbank obligations, and that the GENIUS Act subsequently provides a federal regulatory framework for.