Frances Haugen, a transparency and accountability advocate known for blowing the whistle on Facebook, believes the tech industry needs to find a North Star to navigate through ethical and privacy risks.

Speaking at the DataGrail Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, Haugen drew a metaphorical parallel between the moral drift seen at technology companies and the frequent shipwrecks that occurred from the 16th century until around 1736 when John Harrison developed the first reliable maritime timekeeper for the measurement of longitude.

Haugen knows well that the North Star can be used to calculate latitude and not longitude. Her point is that steering an economy based on intangible things like software and financial services requires a different set of guiding principles and safety practices than those that evolved from the tangible risks of the industrial era.

"The reason why one in five ships was disappearing on the way to India [from 1550 to 1650] was because when we drift, the consequences are really serious," said Haugen. "The intangible economy opens up another opportunity for us to drift off course because when we stop having absolute references, we end up in a very similar situation."

As an example, Haugen cited her experience at Facebook.

"Over the two years I spent on Facebook, I realized that over and over again, Facebook was facing trade-offs," she said with regard to content moderation.

These trade-offs "were invisible to me," and Facebook staff "had learned to...

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