What’s driving Silicon Valley to become ‘radicalized’

In Silicon Valley (CA), there’s a new emphasis on putting up barriers to government requests for data. The Apple-FBI case and its aftermath have tech firms racing to employ a variety of tools that would place customer information beyond the reach of a government-ordered search. The trend is a striking reversal of a long-standing article of faith in the data-hungry tech industry, where companies including Google and the latest start-ups have predicated success on the ability to hoover up as much information as possible about consumers. Now, some large tech firms are increasingly offering services to consumers that rely far less on collecting data.

The sea change is even becoming evident among early-stage companies that see holding so much data as more of a liability than an asset, given the risk that cybercriminals or government investigators might come knocking. Start-ups that once hesitated to invest in security are now repurposing limited resources to build technical systems to shed data, even if it hinders immediate growth. "Engineers are not inherently anti-government, but they are becoming radicalized, because they believe that the FBI, in particular, and the US government, more broadly, wants to outlaw encryption,” said prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.