But it wasn't only the technology that failed. A human operator was in the car at the time as a failsafe. He was looking down in the vital moments and failed to act. It turns out he has a criminal history for armed robbery and a number of driving offences including driving without a licence, according to The Wall Street Journal. Uber was fined $US8.9 million ($11.5 million) last year by another US state, Colorado, for having several dozen convicted criminals as drivers, a breach of the state's laws for ride-hailing companies. At the time, Uber called it a "process error". Illustration: John Shakespeare Uber's founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick had said that getting rid of drivers was an "existential" business priority for Uber. The company has spent billions on the program because, by making humans redundant, the company could cut the costs of an Uber ride by three-quarters. It might be existential for Uber; it's unquestionably existential for Herzberg. Uber has halted its driverless car testing temporarily.

In the other notable breach of trust, the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users was misused by a political consultancy to help Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign target voters. The consultancy, now notorious, is called Cambridge Analytica. Facebook shrugged off the scandal and stonewalled the public and the US Congress for the first five days. It responded not to its angry customers or concerned Congress members but only to its falling share price. Facebook founder and major shareholder Mark Zuckerberg decided that it was serious only after he had lost $US9 billion in personal wealth. "So this was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," were Zuckerberg's first words in a CNN interview this week. "So our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesn't happen again." A self-driving Uber. Uber has suspended its trials of self-drive cars. Credit:Gene J. Puskar Which sounds good until you recall that it has already happened again, and again. One of the reasons that this is a problem for Facebook is that the company gave a formal undertaking to the US Federal Trade Commission in 2011 that it would not.

"Users had no idea that Cambridge Analytica was accessing this data. It's a clear violation of the 2011 consent order," Sam Lester of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre told CBS News. A former mentor of Zuckerberg's and one of his earliest investors, Roger McNamee, pointed out: "Potentially it could cost them $US40,000 for every offence, times 50 million." That comes out at a possible maximum $US2 trillion, a bankrupting bill even for a company the size of Facebook. McNamee says he's been trying to persuade Zuckerberg to tend to the ethics of his business for years, in vain. Zuckerberg eventually cut off contact. Facebook users are "finally starting to recognise that this is not the fun and games, innocent place they thought it was," says McNamee, still a shareholder in the business. "There's been an increasing understanding that when you're using Facebook, a lot of bad things are going to happen to you, as a user."

A tech writer for Slate, Will Oremus, says that it was inevitable: "The real scandal is that this wasn’t a data breach or some egregious isolated error on Facebook’s part. What Cambridge Analytica did was, in many ways, what Facebook was optimised for - collating personal information about vast numbers of people in handy packets that could then be used to try to sell them something." Facebook CEO has said the company will make changes. Yet it took a long time and multiple scandals for the political and regulatory system to turn serious attention to the firm. The firm has shown indifference to systematic abuse when Daesh, or Islamic State, terrorists were having a field day recruiting and propagandising on Facebook, and when Russian operatives used it to manipulate the US presidential election. The US Congress is investigating the Facebook data breach and has called Zuckerberg to appear. The US Fair Trade Commission is investigating. The European Parliament has passed new laws effective in May to require companies to protect users' personal data online under pain of a penalty of up to 4 per cent of a company's global revenue. If applied to Facebook last year, for instance, that would equate to a $US1.6 billion fine. And the frustrated tax authorities of the European Union are getting serious about Big Tech's record of tax avoidance. This week the European Commission proposed a tax of 3 per cent on all payments to digital companies, even where they have no physical presence. That would raise some 5 billion euros ($8 billion) a year.

The commission says this would be only an interim measure till it can get a proper grip on the slipperiness of Big Tech's tax doings. Italy and India already apply a similar transaction tax on the ad revenues collected from their countries by companies like Facebook and Google. By abusing initial trust and exploiting its wow factor to the hilt, Big Tech's cool image has finally started to fade. Its soft power is now yielding to the hard power of the state as parliaments and regulators start to apply normal standards to the sector. Australia is a world leader in some of its approaches to the so-called digital economy, and is still finding its way on others. Canberra has pioneered taxing the industry, and it has led on protecting citizens from some of the most harmful effects of its reach. The Tax Office under former policeman Chris Jordan has taken a tough line on multinational tax avoidance, with a special interest in Big Tech. His tax avoidance taskforce collected $5 billion in extra revenue in back taxes from digital multinationals last year. A permanent extra $7 billion a year has been added to Australia's tax base through a more rigorous approach to the affairs of multinationals including Big Tech. Other countries are studying the Australian experience.

Australia created the Office of the eSafety Commissioner three years ago, another world first. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, formerly with Twitter and Microsoft, is now empowered to protect against serious cases of cyber bullying and revenge porn. The office has helped remove harmful online bullying material in 720 cases under threat of a fine of up to $18,000 a day. It has a success rate of about 80 per cent in removing revenge porn used against Australian citizens.

But the core of the Big Tech challenge to societies is a kind of extreme libertarianism. It's in the water in the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem. If unchallenged, the firms that spring from this culture will not just disrupt industries. They will strip nations of their tax bases and societies of their labour markets. The Amazon founder and chief Jeff Bezos routinely demands that governments start paying universal basic incomes to all citizens, enough to keep people above the poverty line. A professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, argues that this is simply a tech sector preparing to renounce all social responsibility, lumping governments with responsibility to make up for the deficiency at the centre of its vision: "What's clear," Galloway writes in his book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, "is that we need business leaders who envision and enact a future with more jobs - not billionaires who want the government to fund, with taxes they avoid, social programs for people to sit on their couches and watch Netflix all day." "Jeff," he chides the Amazon founder, "show some real f---ing visions." The ACTU's Sally McManus employed a lot of hyperbole this week in her demands for a new labour market regulation, but one of her agenda items is highly relevant - governments need to address the rise of the "gig economy" where work is done not by employees but as piecework by contractors without adequate pay or conditions. Like Uber drivers.

Much of this agenda will be addressed through Australia's Fair Work Commission, which has a number of cases before it brought by Uber drivers unhappy with Uber. Fair Work, a creation of the previous Labor government, will rule on these, making, through case law, a new set of standards for the gig economy. This will happen without the need for legislation. But more will be needed. The digital economy need not be jobless and abusive. A landmark Australian agreement struck last year by one new tech firm in the digital economy, Airtasker, is a showcase. Airtasker posts jobs online and workers can bid to do them. The company was attacked for allowing these "gigs" to be paid at exploitative pay rates. Rather than shut out the critics and claim a special exemption for being "cool", the company sat down with Unions NSW and worked out a deal to protect workers' pay and conditions. Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey praised the firm for establishing "an important beachhead for regulating the gig economy. Others should follow Airtasker's example and consider the ethical dimension of their impact". Inevitably, further intelligent policy responses will be needed and the political winner will not be the party that dismisses it all as fun, cool, tech, nor the party that responds with a regulatory sledgehammer, but thoughtfully and creatively balances economic creativity with worker rights. Thoughtful and creative are not adjectives often applied to Australian political parties. But this is a whole new agenda. Opportunity awaits. We live in hope.