From. Hello, everyone. Thank you for being here and sharing your time with me whether whether that's live or if you're catching this recording.My name is Kim Chandler McDonald, and I must say that I am truly honored to be a part of the Women in Tech Global Conference. We're exploring not just what technology can do, but what kind of future we want it to create. So perhaps before I be before I begin, I'm going to attempt to do this without my glasses. I'm gonna explain how someone who started life as a storyteller essentially ended up cofounding Three Steps Data, a data privacy and governance software company, and became global vice president of Cyan, the cybersecurity advisors network, because, honestly, it was not an obvious path.

Over the years, my work has taken me through theater, media, writing, innovation, and eventually into cybersecurity, trust and safety, and digital governance. The consistent thread through all of this was advocacy, people, stories, power, safety. Whose voices get heard, who gets protected, who gets excluded, and increasingly, how technology was influencing all of it. So more and more people were being asked to surrender dignity, privacy, and control as the price of participating in modern digital life, and that never sat comfortably with me. So when my husband, Michael, and I cofounded three steps data, one of the core ideas behind it was surprisingly simple. People should not have to trade away control and dignity simply to participate in modern digital life.

We wanted to build systems around restraint instead of extraction, around governance instead of surveillance, and around trust instead of data hunger. And the more time I spend in cybersecurity and trust and safety, the more convinced I become that this is not just a technical issue. It is a human one. And with that, I wanna share a slightly uncomfortable thought with you. Some of the most dangerous decisions in technology are made by people who never intended to hurt anyone. Not cartoon villains, not hackers in hoodies, and not shadowy figures in dark rooms. Often, they are smart, well meaning teams trying to optimize engagement, improve convenience, reduce friction, increase visibility, personalized experiences, or capture valuable insights. And somewhere along the way, harm quietly becomes normalized. Not dramatic harm at first, tiny harms. A little too much data collected. A little too much access granted.

A little too much visibility into people's lives, until eventually, we wake up in a world where people are being tracked by abusive partners through consumer technology. Children are manipulated by engagement systems designed to maximize compulsion. Workers lose autonomy to algorithmic management systems they cannot challenge or understand, And entire populations become vulnerable because convenience quietly outranked resilience. And then we call in cybersecurity people to clean up the mess. But what if we thought about this differently? What if cybersecurity was not just about defending systems? What if it was also about defending people? Because cybersecurity at its core is really about power. Who has access? Who has visibility? Who has control? Who gets to revoke access? And who gets to leave safely? And once you start looking at technology through that lens, you begin to realize something important.

Architecture is never neutral. Every design design decision embeds assumptions about trust, risk, power, and human behavior. Now I spend a lot of my time working in cybersecurity, governance, trust and safety, and technology facilitated abuse prevention. And one of the things I've become increasingly concerned about is how often we treat harmful outcomes as edge cases instead of design considerations. We build systems assuming everyone involved is acting in good faith. But the reality is that people break up, people stock, people coerce, people misuse access, people exploit defaults, people weaponize data. And systems need to survive contact with that real life. That doesn't mean building from paranoia. It means building from responsibility because technology does not just shape behavior.

Technology shapes power, and power shapes safety. One of the biggest myths in tech is that collecting more data automatically creates better experiences. Sometimes it does, but sometimes it simply creates bigger blast radiuses, more things to leak, more things to exploit, more things to weaponize, more things to lose control over. And increasingly, we are seeing the consequences of systems built around extraction instead of restraint, which is why I believe one of the most important design principles of the next decade is this. Just because you can collect data does not mean you should. In cybersecurity, we have long understood principles like least privilege access. Give access only to what people genuinely need, reduce unnecessary exposure, and minimize attack surfaces. But I think we need to start applying that philosophy far more broadly across technology itself.

Minimal data collection, revocable consent, clear visibility, human understandable permissions, and systems that degrade safely instead of catastrophically. Technology assumes that people deserve dignity, not surveillance. That's what we need. And to be clear, this is not anti technology. I believe deeply in innovation. I cofounded a technology company because I believe technology can genuinely improve lives. This is about asking a better question. Not what can we build, but what kind of world does this build? Because every platform, every workflow, every AI system, every data architecture quietly shapes human behavior and human relationships. And right now, many of our systems are optimized for extraction. More engagement, more visibility, more data, and more dependence. But trust works differently. Trust is built through restraint, through transparency, through accountability, through giving people meaningful control over their own information and experiences.

And, honestly, I think this is where women bring something profoundly important to technology. Many women move through the world already thinking about safety layers constantly. Who has access to me? Who can see this? Who can misuse this? How do I leave safely? How do I protect myself while participating? That contextual awareness is not weakness. It is systems thinking, and technology desperately needs more of it. Because the future does not just need more AI, it needs more wisdom, more foresight, more ethical imagination, more people willing to ask, who could this hurt before deployment instead of after the scathing headlines. So when I talk about designing technology that doesn't hurt people, I'm not talking about perfection. Humans are imperfect. Systems are imperfect. But I am talking about intentionality, about moving from reactive ethics to proactive responsibility, about recognizing that cybersecurity is not merely a technical discipline, it is a human one.

And perhaps most importantly, that dignity should never be treated as a premium feature. Thank you. I'm loving these notes. Thank you so much. I completely agree, Gemma. It's not just people now or or just bad actors. It's it is a a full ecosystem of potential risks, and so we have to build with that in mind. Thank you so much for coming, Gemma, Adrian, Isabelle, Valerie. Really appreciate you being here, and I wish you a wonderful conference. Take good care. Bye.