Big brands have to reestablish trust with consumers on data safety, futurist Chris Riddell told CNBC at Credit Suisse's annual Asian Investment Conference on Tuesday.
Riddell, who describes his job title as "fundamentally seeing how technology is changing humanity," said the world is currently experiencing a severe "trust crisis."
"People now are more willing to share data than ever before" but data breaches at major companies break "trust and confidence," he stated.
Social media platform Facebook is currently under fire amid allegations that private data firm Cambridge Analytica lied about deleting user data it had improperly obtained from a Russian-American researcher in 2015.
"We're in an era of category killers, where one organization is dominating in an industry," Riddell said, pointing to Facebook and Google as examples.
The challenge for those businesses is to rebuild trust and use technology to create transparency, he continued.