Expert highlights danger of tech companies' power over society

Marietje Schaake is a Dutch politician who served as Member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands between 2009 and 2019. She's also the international policy director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center.

ABC News’ Trevor Ault sat down with Schaake to talk about her new book "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley." She discusses Big Tech's influence on politics and government's responsibility in keeping these companies from harming society.

ABC NEWS: Some experts claim we're currently living in a tech takeover with social media, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency all increasingly prevalent. How does tech impact our daily lives and, furthermore, our democracy?

The former member of the European Parliament and international policy director at the Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake, is out with a new book. It's called "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley." Marietje, thanks so much for being here today.

SCHAAKE: Great to be here.

ABC NEWS: So I think everyone is aware about tech in their daily lives or how it might impact the information that they learn. OK, I get my news from Facebook or YouTube. Democracy is this big, grand thing. So how exactly does Big Tech directly influence democracy at large?

SCHAAKE: Right. So you mentioned social media, but there's also more invisible places in our societies, in our world, where tech companies play an increasingly powerful role in building infrastructure, securing infrastructure, taking key decisions about war and peace, about election outcomes, about whether we can trust information or not, whether people get discriminated against or not.

So they are, there are really companies sitting at critical points in our society, and that is beginning to hurt democracy because the democratically elected and accountable leaders are no longer calling the shots.

ABC NEWS: And one thing that you make a large note of is the fact that a lot of these decisions made by big tech companies have been made with not a lot of regulation behind them, that they've kind of been unchecked. And those decisions then have a massive impact. I mean, how big of a role is that lack of regulation?

SCHAAKE: It's a, it's a big role because these companies are basically taking the space that they've been given. Leaders from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party in the United States have trusted that just leaving these companies to their own devices would lead to the best results. And we now see that that's not true. That there are real harms for real people, and we need to stop that.

ABC NEWS: I know that beyond just your background in government serving in the European Parliament, you talk to a lot of different people for the book, human rights activists, people that work in Silicon Valley, policy makers as well. What were some of those big takeaways or anything that surprised you from these conversations?

SCHAAKE: Well, just where in many, many different places this plays a role. We see parents that are very worried about their kids spending too much time online and not knowing what's really happening there. But it also plays a role in questions of human rights defense, you know activists around the world that are trying to fight the powers that be, but that are subject to being hacked, for example, with commercial spyware, their phones being taken over, their pictures being taken out, their context being read.

And so it's close to home, far away from home, but systematically a problem for human rights, democracy when it comes to the growing role that tech companies now play, who are, of course, in it for the profits. We shouldn't be surprised about that. But society needs something different. The public interest needs careful balancing between different interests. And we just see that those interests -- between what Silicon Valley needs and what we as people need -- are clashing.

ABC NEWS: How do we keep that in check?

SCHAAKE: Well, there's elections in this country in November, so hopefully there will be room for a more ambitious policy agenda when it comes to reining in the outsize power of tech companies. But it's also about investments and about governments that are huge purchasers of software.

Using that as leverage toward greater transparency, greater cybersecurity, more public values that can be baked into the contracts that they already have for hundreds of millions of dollars.

ABC NEWS: What about on a small scale, individual level, the parents that are concerned about their children? Is there anything that they can do on a daily basis to maybe keep Big Tech at an arm's length or at least to regulate it in their own lives?

SCHAAKE: Sure, they can remove the mobile phones from the hands of their children or create more settings that are privacy friendly and that really allow for the choices that you can make to refrain from all the data being scooped up, for example, or prevent the targeting of very young children with ads. That's something that people have in their own hands.

But ultimately, us as individual internet users are just not powerful enough to stand up to these multibillion-dollar companies. We need larger scale interventions through policy, different investments and different kind of procurement by the government.

ABC NEWS: Right. Those large scale changes in the interim invoke the democracy of your own house with your own children . . .

SCHAAKE: That's right.

ABC NEWS: . . . in deciding to make those changes. The book is called "The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley." Marietje Schaake, thank you so much for being here.

SCHAAKE: You're welcome.

ABC NEWS: You can find that book and purchase it wherever books are sold.