No matter how you phrase it, Californians are increasingly convinced that the tech industry needs government intervention.

Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer survey, portions of which were released Wednesday, found that 58 percent of Californians think the tech industry should be “more regulated,” up from 46 percent in 2018. An even larger group, 68 percent think the tech industry has been “under-regulated” rather than “over-regulated,” up from 62 percent in 2018 and about 59 percent in 2017.

One clear sign of how far some sectors of tech have fallen is that more respondents said they had a high level of trust in marijuana dispensaries and growers---44 percent and 43 percent, respectively---than in social media---33 percent. For “tech” as a whole, 61 percent of respondents said they had a high level of trust that the industry would do what’s right. For “startup companies” and “the sharing economy,” the figures were similar to the pot industry---47 percent of respondents said they trusted companies in those sectors to do the right thing.

Edelman

For the first time, Edelman, a public relations firm, also polled roughly 400 Bay Area tech workers, who shared the same concerns as 1,500 California residents who participated in the general survey.

Roughly 69 percent of tech workers in the Bay Area said that their industry had been under-regulated rather than over-regulated. Among employees, privacy and security were the top worries. Of 11 possible concerns about the tech industry—from increasing housing costs and income inequality to a possible tech bubble collapse—57 percent of workers said their primary concern was “failure to protect from data security threats,” tied with “lack of privacy/my data is shared too much.”

Apprehensions aside, however, the results seemed to indicate that tech employees still had faith in their leaders, especially compared with other industries. Seventy-eight percent of tech workers listed their employer as a highly trusted institution, whereas 55 percent of tech workers had the same level of trust in media and 48 percent of techies had the same trust in government.

The Bay Area tech workers also reported an overwhelming faith in the industry’s promise, with 92 percent agreeing that the tech industry is good at what it does, while 74 percent agreed that in the long run, technology will create more jobs than it kills. Based on the results, Edelman advised companies to empower their workers as ambassadors for the industry.