Trust and safety – the most important tech job you’ve never heard of

RECENTLY I was at a conference full of tech nerds and policy wonks, when I saw an old colleague wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a unicorn and a dinosaur. A banner beneath the two beasts read “Trust & Safety”, as if these basic values were mythological and extinct. It was the kind of cute-but-bitter meme that only makes sense if you are deeply enmeshed in one of the tech industry’s latest backroom roles: an amalgamation of security, privacy and user experience design, all crammed into one job called trust and safety.

Though people in tech companies have been doing trust and…