Chris Wylie, whistleblower, has no regrets after Facebook scandal

[MUSIC] With Cambridge Analytica, and more broadly with Facebook, I think people started realizing that actually no matter what you do or who you are, you are a targeted And people aren't just spying on you because they're a government agency, they're spying on you because they want to manipulate you for a political ends or they want you to buy things. They want you to become addicted to products. They want to just fracture your senses identity and make you hate the other people. [MUSIC] I'm Chris Wylie, and you might know me as the whistleblower from [UNKNOWN]. Am I a trailblazer or am I a trouble maker? I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. I definitely have an angsty side to me, but I think that, by making trouble Depending on how you're directing this trouble and who's experiencing this trouble, you can make change by making a Ruckus. And I think last year for example I definitely made a Ruckus for some particular companies and that Resulted in a $5 billion bill, which should have been more, but in doing so, you cause a ruckus but that changes people's perceptions and changes people's attitudes towards something. So sometimes you've gotta like, stick it to him a bit. In order to make him react. As a citizen one is expected and has a duty to report unlawful activity. A lot of people have asked me why is it taking you so long? What they don't see is actually I've been working on this with the Guardian and then later The New York Times and Channel [UNKNOWN] for a year. [MUSIC] How is the past year been? It's been a bit of a blur I'm not gonna lie. So many things happens in high frequency and very intense going from year of planning and undercover sting of Cambridge Analytica with the Guardian New York Times Channel Four. Keeping everything secret being obscure to on the front page of every major global newspaper and then very quickly, being threatens and banned by a giant tech company Facebook, I don't know how to describe it being the constant center of attention in a really intense way. For months on ends, wise, yeah, I don't even know how to explain it. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. [MUSIC] I feel like in my own I think, in a way, I contributed [UNKNOWN] igniting a conversation and igniting a bit more public consciousness about what's now being called surveillance capitalism. After the [UNKNOWN] happened and I got all this attention, I got [UNKNOWN] Companies and essentially a couple executives at H&M so they had already invested in building a team an AI ethics team so I was immediately interested because I'm like okay cool your fashion company, I'm I love fashion I love And forecasting and looking at why people wear clothes. But you're a fashion company that's already invested in an artificial intelligence ethics unit. They showed me what they were doing. They showed me how they think about AI. The fact that they have debates about potential ethical implications. At the beginning of any sort of tech builds We're the developers and data scientists really sit in a room and take sides and argue what could happen. And I was just like this is so this is such a enlightened way of doing tech development that I kind of was like yeah, I kind of want to work with you guys are sort of benchmark is that we want to build products. Where if we stops the product and we stops taking people's data, then people would be disappointed that we've stopped it. So that's looking at things like how can we make our clothing more inclusive and more accessible for people? Which requires us to better understand like, what are the shapes of people? How do they wear it? How do they [UNKNOWN]? All that kind of stuff. And what's really cool about it is we now have other big companies like talking to us about what is it that we're doing. And so it was really cool, it was like being able to work with a company, and then actually start working with other companies and building a network, and I don't know what it would turn into. Like it would be cool if If the tech industry isn't going to take a lead on this, it might be up a fashion company to take a lead, it might be up to creative sector, it might be up to other fortune 500 companies to band together and say you know what it doesn't matter whether you're a lot we're not we're not gonna do it. [MUSIC] I hope that in three years I can look back at whatever i've done and be satisfied that i've done something that's cool and that helps people. So I don't know what that is yet, that's the delightful thing about life is that just random things come at you and leads you down a path So I have no idea. But I hope that in three years time I'm looking back and going, that was a cool three years. [MUSIC]