Last week I had the honor to speak at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. The conference had a great group of both speakers and attendees. Representatives from Mozilla, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, and (of course) my company AnchorFree, were all present. The conference focused on how technology helps enable freedom and human rights around the world. Everyone on the stage with me had interesting insights to share about human rights issues and technology.
In the last year, global disruptions like the Arab Spring, London Riots, and even the comparatively small BART protests here in the Bay Area have brought attention to the power of social media and mobile communication when it comes to organizing a movement. More importantly, the subject has also come up of how integrated these technologies are in our daily lives, and how devastating the effects can be when we suddenly lose access to them.
“Freedom” and “human rights” are words that are often used in the technology community, and you hear the general counsel from all major Internet firms talking about the importance of technologies that can advance these causes. Yes, building technology that can enable people to organize and build free and open communication and community is important. The question is whether human rights will always be something handled by lawyers, or will spreading human rights and freedom become an opportunity for businesses. I posed these questions to the audience when I was on stage at the panel: can human rights and freedom be more than a charity? What if these concepts were profitable? Perhaps then, global internet companies would send their CEOs and business development personnel to such conferences, instead of their lawyers.
I run a company whose mission is to spread security, privacy, and freedom. Building technology and human rights is not a charity for us. Consumer privacy, freedom, and human rights are our business. I think it is key to think about sustainable ways for technology to change the world. So I’d like to pose the question once again: can human rights and freedom be a business? I don’t see why not. Consumers have a demand for their human rights and freedom, and companies need to provide a supply.
Out of many great speakers at the conference, Mitchell Baker, the Chairman of Mozilla, seemed to agree that doing good can be beneficial for impacting both the world and business. Their business seems to also be based on doing good as the main objective.
I would like to invite more fellow entrepreneurs to focus on creating technology that can enable a real fundamental change in the world — change that can create a more fair world, where basic human rights and freedoms are available for all. I hope that technology will continue to be a powerful tool to spearhead innovation, positive change, Internet freedom, and human rights.