Most harmful technology is not built by villains.

It is built by ordinary teams optimizing reasonable goals: engagement, conversion, personalization, retention, growth, and reduced friction.

But product decisions do not stay inside the interface. Recommendation systems shape attention. Targeting systems identify vulnerability. Growth mechanics reward compulsion. Frictionless workflows can make fraud, manipulation, surveillance, and exploitation easier to scale.

This session examines how normal product choices become infrastructure for harm, even when no one on the team intended that outcome.

We will look at how data collection, behavioral prediction, AI-generated content, persuasive design, and automated decision-making can create leverage over users. Attendees will learn how to identify misuse pathways before launch, evaluate who benefits from a feature and who absorbs the risk, and pressure-test product decisions against adversarial use.

The goal is not to stop innovation.

It is to help builders recognize when they are creating a useful feature, and when they are quietly giving someone else a weapon.

This is a vendor-neutral session for developers, product managers, designers, founders, security professionals, data practitioners, and technology leaders.

The talk introduces a practical Product Harm Review built around five questions:

• What new capability does this feature create?
• Who else can use that capability?
• What data or leverage does it expose?
• Which users carry the most risk?
• What happens when the feature works exactly as designed for the wrong person?

The session is designed for 45 minutes of content followed by 15 minutes of Q&A. I am available to present virtually at 8:30 p.m. Eastern.