Americans’ addiction to low-cost consumer products, particularly connected (or “smart”) devices, has led to a world where data security takes a back seat to affordability. Consumer products have razor-thin profit margins, making everything from smart watches to baby monitors a potential source of data exploitation. Since firms with significant operations in China face intensive pressure to share consumer data with China’s government, affordability directly works against the safety and security of consumer data. Such pressure enables what I term “data trafficking,” or the extraction of consumer data without explicit consent to achieve an international political advantage. But this is the last thing anyone wants to think about when they are hungry.
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