The Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEC) and TiarCenter, in partnership with Microsoft, prepared an overview of the issues pertaining to the sustainability of the digital transformation. When considering the digital transformation’s impact on sustainable development, most analysts and researchers focus on two key subjects: the tangible contribution to achieving sustainable development and the impact of tech companies on climate and other environmental indicators, and the ways to minimize this footprint.

New challenges arising when the digital transformation meets sustainable development and humanity may, to a significant extent, determine our future. These new challenges may be grouped for analysis as follows:

• deterioration of psychological comfort in an online environment caused by the increasing volume of information and the hostility of fellow users;
• sensitive decisions being relegated to algorithms with unreliable programming of human norms;
• citizens’ loss of control over their privacy;
• increasing costs from security breaches and outages of digital infrastructures amid the increased connectivity;
• digital divide in accessibility to the internet and digital illiteracy;
• a growing ecological footprint of digital technologies.

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