Seung Lee

As smartphones become ubiquitous, app makers are becoming more brazen about collecting personal data, say experts and privacy advocates. And while iPhones and Android devices have limited privacy settings, most consumers remain in the dark about what companies are collecting and how they are using that information. "With business models focused on advertisements and sharing information of others, we've seen massive amounts of tracking," says Norman Sadeh, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "There's been erosion of privacy over the past few years." Claire Gartland, a consumer privacy attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), compared the smartphone app marketplaces to "the Wild West" when it comes to privacy regulations and says consumers are left on their own to protect their own personal data.

Silicon Valley has long been an apolitical bastion of brainy engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists more concerned about the next hot social media startup than what's happening in Washington. That began changing as internet access spread and companies such as Facebook and Apple become indelibly linked to daily life – and to politics. As a result, Apple, Google, and Facebook hired lobbyists in Washington and boosted political spending. Technologists have become more socially active as encryption, online censorship, internet surveillance, and digital security have become politicized. Now, as Trump is set to take office after an election in which Russian hackers, internet trolls, and fake news all played a role, Silicon Valley is reassessing its place in the national political conversation and pockets of tech workers are beginning to speak out with a more forceful – and unified – voice.