It would be an understatement to say that Big Tech had a very bad 2018. This was the year of Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai raising their right hands before Congress. It was the year that Cambridge Analytica became a household name, and the year that social media was implicated not only in data misuse and election interference, but ethnic cleansing. Perhaps above all, this was the year that Big Tech lost its luster, when Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others finally came under widespread scrutiny—from the press, politicians, and the broader public alike.

And 2018 isn’t even over yet, much to Facebook’s chagrin. The New York Times delivered another shock on Tuesday, reporting that the company gave Microsoft, Spotify, Netflix, Yahoo, and some of the other biggest tech companies in the world “more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules.” Facebook even allowed Netflix and Spotify to read its users’ private messages. On Wednesday, news broke that D.C.’s attorney general is suing Facebook over Cambridge Analytica scandal.



Despite all this, 2018 could have been an even worse year for Big Tech. The idea of reining in the Silicon Valley giants has only slowly gained momentum in Washington, and signs point to modest regulations. No one on Capitol Hill is really talking about breaking up Facebook or Google or Amazon, who are spending millions on lobbying to ensure that they have significant input in whatever Congress cooks up. And although tech companies are taking election interference more seriously, it’s believed that most of the major players—principally Russia—sat out the 2018 midterms. The post-2016 electoral system remains largely untested.



That’s fortunate, because it has become increasingly clear that the U.S. is at least as vulnerable today as it was then. While Congress and tech companies have been busy conducting autopsies of the 2016 election, they have been slow to address the problems exposed by foreign interference. Meanwhile, intelligence operatives in Russia and other countries have been developing new influence tactics. And America’s voting infrastructure remains just as antiquated as it was two years ago.

So perhaps it’s an understatement to say that the U.S. is equally vulnerable today. As bad as things were in 2016—as bad as they are now—it looks like they will only get worse.