The digital world is not designed to keep women safe, evidenced by the endless harassment and abuse, and any new regulation needs to keep this in mind
The digital world is not designed to keep women safe. New regulations should be. — Ms. Chang, an anchor at Bloomberg TV, is the author of “Brotopia.” Tweets: @emilychangtv , @imeluny , @themoko , @annehelen , @privacyproject , @shiraovide , @webfoundation , @lessthanliz , and @maragay Tweets: Emily Chang / @emilychangtv : I wrote an op-ed for the @nytimes — we don't think of digital privacy as a women's issue, but we should http://www.nytimes.com/... Melanie Ensign / @imeluny : “The law, of course, will never be as fast as tech companies. They should build products and services that respect privacy by design. To do that, these companies need to hire and consult more women.” http://twitter.com/... Jessica Powell / @themoko : Worth a RT 1) bc it's a good piece and resonates, and 2) bc every comment that I've seen so far has been some dude attacking @emilychangtv for writing this, pretty much making her point http://twitter.com/... Anne Helen Petersen / @annehelen : “Digital privacy is a women's issue. We just don't think about it that way, or discuss it that way. Of course, privacy is a concern for everyone, but this is also an issue, like health care, on which women have a particular view.” http://www.nytimes.com/... @privacyproject : Tech companies are already lobbying to get what they want from new privacy regulations. Women should be, too, writes @emilychangtv. http://www.nytimes.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : Not surprisingly, Emily is excellent here. The online world, like the real world, is a scarier place for women. http://twitter.com/... @webfoundation : “...the reality that women experience the internet differently, just as the experience of walking down a dark alley, or even a busy street, is different for women than it is for men.” @emilychangtv on why #internet regulations must work for women. https://www.nytimes.com/... Less Than Liz / @lessthanliz : Also, I want to share @emilychangtv's article. McNealy has a luxury of not having weird dudes troll through your personal history if they don't like you. This is a major gap that undermines risk taking disproportionately for underrepresented populations. https://www.nytimes.com/... Mara Gay / @maragay : 75% of the victims of stalking and cyberstalking are women. @PrivacyProject http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Emily Chang's op-ed lands mid-argument over what US privacy law should look like: tech firms spent 2018 bracing for GDPR-like rules and lobbying to shape them, with safety treated as a security-breach problem rather than a harassment one (GDPR-like privacy protections were already flagged as a top 2019 challenge)]. Chang reframes privacy itself as a women's issue — PrivacyProject's figure that 75% of stalking and cyberstalking victims are women is her evidentiary anchor.
The op-ed extends a documented pattern rather than opening a new front: abusers had already turned consumer smart-home devices into stalking tools (smart locks, cameras, and lighting repurposed by domestic abusers), and closed, moderated spaces like Facebook groups were identified as engines of coordinated harassment of women. Chang's claim is that product design and the coming regulatory wave both inherit this blind spot.
First-order effects
- Tech companies lobbying to shape new privacy rules now face a specific demand they can't meet with consent banners: build products that respect users' safety from abuse, since legislation will never move as fast as their release cycles.
- Regulators drafting GDPR-style frameworks must decide whether harassment and stalking fall inside 'privacy harm' at all — Chang's argument pushes them to treat it as core scope, not content moderation.
Second-order effects
- Device makers of smart locks, cameras, and lighting face pressure to add anti-abuse safeguards — shared-access controls, visible indicators — because the same hardware keeps showing up in domestic-abuse reporting.
- Platforms running closed moderated spaces like Facebook groups come under scrutiny as harassment vectors, forcing moderation investment where enforcement was thinnest precisely because the spaces are private.
Third-order effects
- If privacy regulation absorbs physical-safety harms, compliance becomes a design requirement across product categories rather than a legal afterthought — and firms whose cultures long excluded the affected users (Silicon Valley's historically homogeneous corporate culture) start from furthest behind.
- The longer-term shift is definitional: 'privacy' evolving from data protection toward personal safety infrastructure, which would widen who counts as a regulator-relevant stakeholder and raise the cost of shipping features without abuse modeling.
The trend: Privacy regulation is expanding from a data-protection frame toward a personal-safety frame, with women's exposure to harassment and stalking becoming the test case for whether new rules protect people or just data.