Tomorrow, the White House will host a summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection at Stanford University, but three of Silicon Valley's top tech CEOs will not be joining President Barack Obama at the event,
reports Bloomberg News.
Invitations were extended to Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt but the companies have confirmed they will not attend the conference.
The heads of
Facebook and Google were two of the top three names on Forbes' 13 Most Powerful People in Tech list last year.
Obama will address the conference and also try to generate support for a legislative proposal he announced on Jan. 13 to promote better cybersecurity information sharing between the private sector and government.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook will appear at the event to discuss hacking, which is an issue that has led to criticism of the company after well-publicized breaches last year, including the illegal publication of celebrities' nude photos that were stolen from their iCloud accounts.
The company also has been criticized for having a lack of transparency and for failing to promptly inform consumers when their accounts are vulnerable,
according to CNN Money.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation last year chastised Apple for introducing encrypted messages on its new operating system, the iOS8, which prevents law enforcement from accessing information,
according to The Washington Post.
The administration has been critical of the tech industry's use of encryption, while Silicon Valley continues to hold suspicions of the motives of the government in light of the revelations made by Edward Snowden about the extent to which the National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on private companies and citizens,
according to The Financial Times.
"Encryption is one of our most important cyber security tools. We can't allow the short-sighted worries of some law enforcement officials to undermine the longer-term goal of creating a truly secure internet," told the paper.
The legislative proposal unveiled by Obama last month is seen by some in the industry as nothing more than a re-tread of past efforts to combat cyber hacking.
"We are simply recycling some preliminary steps that date back to the Clinton administration. Apart from increasing slightly the amount of information being passed around, the 'new role' that's being proposed for the federal government consists mostly of doing things the government is already supposed to be doing," contends Scott Borg, director of the US Cyber Consequences Unit, an independent non-profit research institute.
The frayed relationship between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley may be having a broader impact, including a shift in campaign contributions from Democrats to Republicans.
While Facebook has historically divided its political contributions between Republican and Democrat candidates, in 2014 that started to change.
In 2012, Facebook's PAC contributed $54,000 among Democrat House candidates and $78,500 among Republicans, and $71,000 to Democrats and $65,000 to Republicans in the Senate.
"Though it's almost too early to tell, Facebook's 2014 contributions appear to be skewing increasingly rightward — so far, the PAC has given $12,000 to Democrats and $23,000 to Republicans in the House, and $18,500 to Democrats and $24,000 to Republicans in the Senate," reports the
Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group.
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