The goal is to automate us.
January 29, 2021 12:17 PM Subscribe
The Other Coup - NYT today.
We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
Two years ago Shoshana Zuboff published a The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - previous thread - Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.
An Interview: Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy.
Twitter @shoshanazuboff.
We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
Two years ago Shoshana Zuboff published a The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - previous thread - Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.
An Interview: Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy.
Twitter @shoshanazuboff.
we have come to realize that government plays a vital role in regulating the internet, like any other sphere of life.
I mean, I think people have always known that, it's rather we haven't had people making rational laws in regards to computers/internet for decades. The CFAA and DMCA are mostly terrible, despite having some good aspects and ideas in there. Of course it's important, but if that's the best our lawmakers can come up with, we need more knowledgeable lawmakers period.
The recent episode of Zuckerberg being grilled by congress helped hammer that home with how many of these congresspeople barely understand the technology they are tasked with regulating.
---
These are amazing articles, and as she points out, it started with advertising, and if you didn't think having an adblocker was a political act, perhaps now you should at least consider viewing it as such.
Advertising is important, sure, but what started as ads have gone down a deep dark path of surveillance capitalism and the only way (currently) to fight back is taking control of your data and your communications.
That's why things like Signal, Element.io, Mastadon, uBlock Origin, Pi-Hole and so on continue to be so important, because they're the only places where you can choose to be (mostly) free of surveillance capitalism (either through outright network blocking/disabling javascript or by choosing to self-host your own network).
These are all imperfect solutions that are mostly needed because we don't have good digital privacy legislation.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:50 PM on January 29, 2021 [14 favorites]
I mean, I think people have always known that, it's rather we haven't had people making rational laws in regards to computers/internet for decades. The CFAA and DMCA are mostly terrible, despite having some good aspects and ideas in there. Of course it's important, but if that's the best our lawmakers can come up with, we need more knowledgeable lawmakers period.
The recent episode of Zuckerberg being grilled by congress helped hammer that home with how many of these congresspeople barely understand the technology they are tasked with regulating.
---
These are amazing articles, and as she points out, it started with advertising, and if you didn't think having an adblocker was a political act, perhaps now you should at least consider viewing it as such.
Advertising is important, sure, but what started as ads have gone down a deep dark path of surveillance capitalism and the only way (currently) to fight back is taking control of your data and your communications.
That's why things like Signal, Element.io, Mastadon, uBlock Origin, Pi-Hole and so on continue to be so important, because they're the only places where you can choose to be (mostly) free of surveillance capitalism (either through outright network blocking/disabling javascript or by choosing to self-host your own network).
These are all imperfect solutions that are mostly needed because we don't have good digital privacy legislation.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:50 PM on January 29, 2021 [14 favorites]
EFF's Privacy Badger is another one. EFF has a bunch of other tools. The only other user-friendly one for your browser is https everywhere, though.
Like, they've got one showing that your digital fingerprint is unique, (I am literally running a browser off a live usb (just got a new used computer) and my browser already has a unique fingerprint), but what you're supposed to do about it is basically jibberish as far as I'm concerned.
When I moved back to California, I started seeing "do not track me" buttons on websites. Neat! And some websites make it a simple process. But a lot of websites still don't. Makes me want a VPN so I'm virtually browsing from Europe and have European privacy laws. But that costs money.
So yeah, let's get some good digital privacy legislation going!
posted by aniola at 1:41 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
Like, they've got one showing that your digital fingerprint is unique, (I am literally running a browser off a live usb (just got a new used computer) and my browser already has a unique fingerprint), but what you're supposed to do about it is basically jibberish as far as I'm concerned.
When I moved back to California, I started seeing "do not track me" buttons on websites. Neat! And some websites make it a simple process. But a lot of websites still don't. Makes me want a VPN so I'm virtually browsing from Europe and have European privacy laws. But that costs money.
So yeah, let's get some good digital privacy legislation going!
posted by aniola at 1:41 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
When I moved back to California, I started seeing "do not track me" buttons on websites. Neat! And some websites make it a simple process. But a lot of websites still don't. Makes me want a VPN so I'm virtually browsing from Europe and have European privacy laws. But that costs money.
Do Not Track is actually being phased out because so few people used it that it ended up just being another tracking marker that advertisers were using to categorize people. "These people don't want to be tracked."
The W3C working group on Do Not Track was closed in 2019. Apple dropped support shortly after.
We need actual legislation so badly.
posted by deadaluspark at 1:46 PM on January 29, 2021 [7 favorites]
Do Not Track is actually being phased out because so few people used it that it ended up just being another tracking marker that advertisers were using to categorize people. "These people don't want to be tracked."
The W3C working group on Do Not Track was closed in 2019. Apple dropped support shortly after.
We need actual legislation so badly.
posted by deadaluspark at 1:46 PM on January 29, 2021 [7 favorites]
deadaluspark, in the paragraph you quoted, I was actually referring to public legislation without teeth.
posted by aniola at 1:50 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 1:50 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
The recent episode of Zuckerberg being grilled by congress helped hammer that home with how many of these congresspeople barely understand the technology they are tasked with regulating.
Sorry, but this is the argument that continues to get abused to argue that the only people who should be involved in the regulation of the the tech industry are those who "understand" the technology - which seems to wind up meaning "is generally in tune with mindset of the tech industry in general", which is the heart of the problem. If the only people who can regulate an industry are those aligned with it, then you're arguing for meaningless oversight. I also don't buy the "they barely understand" argument - in an earlier thread on the hearings, I had posted this piece, which showed how techies use tech minutiae to dodge actual substantial questions.
As for the EFF, I've pointed out in other threads that they're part of the problem - not surprising given that they receive a good portion of their funding from the very companies involved in all this. Again, Privacy Badger is reminiscent of how industry shifted the view of recycling and reducing packaging waste from a communal issue needing a communal response to an individual issue with individual response. As a former EFF insider pointed out, the EFF has shown the capability to mobilize communal action, so their lack of effort in the area of corporate data collection has been noticeable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:52 PM on January 29, 2021 [7 favorites]
Sorry, but this is the argument that continues to get abused to argue that the only people who should be involved in the regulation of the the tech industry are those who "understand" the technology - which seems to wind up meaning "is generally in tune with mindset of the tech industry in general", which is the heart of the problem. If the only people who can regulate an industry are those aligned with it, then you're arguing for meaningless oversight. I also don't buy the "they barely understand" argument - in an earlier thread on the hearings, I had posted this piece, which showed how techies use tech minutiae to dodge actual substantial questions.
As for the EFF, I've pointed out in other threads that they're part of the problem - not surprising given that they receive a good portion of their funding from the very companies involved in all this. Again, Privacy Badger is reminiscent of how industry shifted the view of recycling and reducing packaging waste from a communal issue needing a communal response to an individual issue with individual response. As a former EFF insider pointed out, the EFF has shown the capability to mobilize communal action, so their lack of effort in the area of corporate data collection has been noticeable.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:52 PM on January 29, 2021 [7 favorites]
@NoxAeternum,
I do hope you understand that I did not intend to say that "only those who know how to code can legislate code." Obviously anyone sufficiently familiar with math (and I don't mean high level math as much as I just mean like conceptual visualization of math) can probably suss out the sort of things happening here (so, probably anyone with a secondary four-year education), and tech executives absolutely do use language obfuscation to ignore easily answered questions from those in congress who do understand the philosophical nature of these technologies (Ron Wyden is a good example of someone who seems adept at understanding them, for example.). Far too much time is given to those who don't ask good questions, and those who do ask good questions, there needs to be more recourse to force tech executives to answer the question in layman's terms.
Also, it's fair to argue that a lot of the Republicans who come with crappy questions do understand how it works but pretend that they don't so they don't have to regulate their own terrible behavior that is enabled by the status quo in this regard.
But it would be hard to say that the 1980's/1990's wasn't replete with atrocious computer/internet laws/bills which gave a lot of us growing up with technology in that time period (like myself, a child of the 80's) a bad taste in our mouth that didn't exactly make us trust our representatives on these issues. Like, you don't forget shit like the Clipper Chip, which the Clinton administration fought hard for. Our government makes terrible, surveillance-oriented decisions all the time. You can't tell me with how large our house and senate are that none of that is abject ignorance. I mean, our FBI still wants communication backdoors and more than a handful of congresspeople agree with that. Throwing security to the wind and hoping foreign nation hackers never find your backdoor sure sounds like ignorance and lack of understanding to me. I would like to think these people cared about self-preservation enough that they would think that national security would be more important than spying on their own citizens more easily through a backdoor, so using Occam's razor, ignorance seems more likely.
Which, (while still not saying we need techbros as congresspeople) reasonably leads me to believe that we need people with a better understanding of these issues if they're going to effectively legislate on them. You don't need to be a coder or an engineer, but you do need to be able to functionally understand the concepts you're working with and it's painfully obvious when you don't.
posted by deadaluspark at 2:22 PM on January 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
I do hope you understand that I did not intend to say that "only those who know how to code can legislate code." Obviously anyone sufficiently familiar with math (and I don't mean high level math as much as I just mean like conceptual visualization of math) can probably suss out the sort of things happening here (so, probably anyone with a secondary four-year education), and tech executives absolutely do use language obfuscation to ignore easily answered questions from those in congress who do understand the philosophical nature of these technologies (Ron Wyden is a good example of someone who seems adept at understanding them, for example.). Far too much time is given to those who don't ask good questions, and those who do ask good questions, there needs to be more recourse to force tech executives to answer the question in layman's terms.
Also, it's fair to argue that a lot of the Republicans who come with crappy questions do understand how it works but pretend that they don't so they don't have to regulate their own terrible behavior that is enabled by the status quo in this regard.
But it would be hard to say that the 1980's/1990's wasn't replete with atrocious computer/internet laws/bills which gave a lot of us growing up with technology in that time period (like myself, a child of the 80's) a bad taste in our mouth that didn't exactly make us trust our representatives on these issues. Like, you don't forget shit like the Clipper Chip, which the Clinton administration fought hard for. Our government makes terrible, surveillance-oriented decisions all the time. You can't tell me with how large our house and senate are that none of that is abject ignorance. I mean, our FBI still wants communication backdoors and more than a handful of congresspeople agree with that. Throwing security to the wind and hoping foreign nation hackers never find your backdoor sure sounds like ignorance and lack of understanding to me. I would like to think these people cared about self-preservation enough that they would think that national security would be more important than spying on their own citizens more easily through a backdoor, so using Occam's razor, ignorance seems more likely.
Which, (while still not saying we need techbros as congresspeople) reasonably leads me to believe that we need people with a better understanding of these issues if they're going to effectively legislate on them. You don't need to be a coder or an engineer, but you do need to be able to functionally understand the concepts you're working with and it's painfully obvious when you don't.
posted by deadaluspark at 2:22 PM on January 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
The behavioral data being collected on kids in their developmental years is going to be data mined all to hell for predictive accuracy towards financially/politically significant outcomes.
posted by anthill at 3:05 PM on January 29, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by anthill at 3:05 PM on January 29, 2021 [4 favorites]
Just an aside for people worried about browser fingerprinting: there is a Firefox extension called Chameleon that spoofs most of your browser data used for fingerprinting. You'll still end up with a unique profile, but it won't match the you from last time you visited the site. Be aware that it might break some sites in subtle and unpredictable ways, though.
posted by ropeladder at 4:06 PM on January 29, 2021
posted by ropeladder at 4:06 PM on January 29, 2021
Hi google. Hi facebook. Hi amazon.
posted by eagles123 at 4:16 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by eagles123 at 4:16 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I know someone who does that when he walks into a new place where he's never been before. Greets Google, Alexa, and Siri. I would do it, too, if I remembered.
posted by aniola at 5:26 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by aniola at 5:26 PM on January 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I had a couple of issues with Zuboff's book. One is that she appeared to think capitalism was fine until the surveillance came along. (I disagree.) The other is that she seems to think these systems actually work at controlling our behavior. My sense is that the ability of these platforms to make us want or do things is much less refined and powerful than they claim and that, in fact, the entire scheme of selling ads based on personal information is vulnerable to advertisers realizing ... their ads could do just as well without personalization. When the New York Times dropped programmatic advertising in Europe to comply with the GDPR, they discovered they didn't lose much if anything. And while it shouldn't be on individuals to defend themselves, the more people use ad blockers, the less effective are the claims to be able to control us through personalized persuasion. Tim Hwang thinks the whole scheme could collapse with enormous implications.
I'm more concerned about automated data-driven systems that *don't* work but are foisted on us and screw with people's lives. When the state (or giant corporations) replace human decision-making with black box corporate "solutions" people get hurt. And so do the state institutions that might lose their legitimacy by giving away their authority.
posted by zenzenobia at 5:29 PM on January 29, 2021 [8 favorites]
I'm more concerned about automated data-driven systems that *don't* work but are foisted on us and screw with people's lives. When the state (or giant corporations) replace human decision-making with black box corporate "solutions" people get hurt. And so do the state institutions that might lose their legitimacy by giving away their authority.
posted by zenzenobia at 5:29 PM on January 29, 2021 [8 favorites]
The government regulates other very complicated things, like pharmaceuticals and drug devices. There was quite a while before a lot of those industries were regulated. Eventually the government realized they needed entire departments and agencies to do so and populated those agencies with knowledgeable trained people. I mean, fda and cdc and usda are nowhere near perfect but it's better to have fda in charge of inspections and sending out 483s than having congress person so and so hold a hearing everytime someone tries to do something illegal in those industries. Is the internet just too new for analogous agencies to regulate it to have been formed and or properly staffed?
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:29 PM on January 29, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by Tandem Affinity at 6:29 PM on January 29, 2021 [5 favorites]
Do Not Track is actually being phased out because so few people used it that it ended up just being another tracking marker that advertisers were using to categorize people.
Microsoft effectively killed Do Not Track when they decided to ship IE with it turned on by default. Intuitively that seems sensible, but what really happened was that it made sure the DNT flag was no longer anything you could call an indication of real user intent. This gave the sort of people who want to track you while being seen as respecting opt-outs the fig-leaf excuse they needed to ignore it completely, which they by and large did.
posted by mhoye at 6:45 PM on January 29, 2021 [3 favorites]
Microsoft effectively killed Do Not Track when they decided to ship IE with it turned on by default. Intuitively that seems sensible, but what really happened was that it made sure the DNT flag was no longer anything you could call an indication of real user intent. This gave the sort of people who want to track you while being seen as respecting opt-outs the fig-leaf excuse they needed to ignore it completely, which they by and large did.
posted by mhoye at 6:45 PM on January 29, 2021 [3 favorites]
I feel a bit like I always parachute in here and go "bleeeurrrrrgh" with some huge text dump when invoked by Nox, but just for the record, here's where EFF gets our funding from.
The idea that we're somehow a puppet of Big Tech (and Google especially) is an old saw that, if my recollection of its emergent timing is correct, came out of the copyright battles of the 2000s, and has subsequently got picked up by interested parties from time to time. There was a fun bit recently when we were co-opted into part of the QAnon narrative because of it.
In fact, our core funding comes from individual donations from members who understand the dangers and the potential of technology in the space of civil liberties and human rights. I can confidently say that I listen a lot more to their valuable feedback than I do anyone who yells at us from Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al.
We started Privacy Badger out of our skepticism that DNT was going to go anywhere (as mhoye recalls correctly), and to see if we couldn't implement an effective and similar mechanism for people to use, not because it's some sort of optimal solution, or the equivalent of "recycling" as an alternative to strong laws. Other advocacy groups don't have much opportunity for providing tech solutions to match their activism; we're lucky enough to be able to do that, and see it as part of our mission.
We've consistently called for more, better privacy regulation as a vital part of the solution to many of these problems. It gets tricky because, of course, if you are a powerful, quasi-monopolistic feudal data lord like Google, Facebook, etc, you can also lobby to get the privacy regulation *you* want not the privacy regulation we actually need, so we have to spend a great deal of time trying to fend off proposals that look amazing but would be both ineffective in protecting personal privacy and actually cement the current tech companies in their current roles and current business models. The long-term solution is strong privacy tech, strong privacy regulation, and to break up these tech monopolies, both through robust anti-trust action, and an environment that fosters alternatives.
Here are some of EFF's recent writing on this:
Federal and State Antitrust Suits Challenging Facebook’s Acquisitions are a Welcome Sight, and our take on how to tackle Google's monopoly.
Our take on the EU's digital markets act, probably one of the better proposals to reign in big tech.
How Big Tech is lobbying for a federal privacy law in the US that would pre-empt stronger state laws.
This isn't the full scope of our work here -- I plucked these more or less at random. EFF is big enough that holding everything we write and all of our positions in my head takes a sizeable chunk of my brainpower, but the org isn't as big as I think some people believe. I believe our size is often moderated by not pursuing easy-headline-grabbing policies. We're a public impact law firm, staffed and supported by geeks, and that means some times we have to shut up and study what's really going on, else we'll either lose in court, or else lose through a gazillion of our supporters pointing out how we're technically incorrect (the worst kind of incorrect). So a bunch of our work is shot through with "it depends," and "how about this (wonky proposal with ifs and buts in it)".
I should also say that we are not the only organization working on digital privacy, and there's plenty of room for different tactics. If you'd like your activism with a different mix of anti-corporate consumer privacy versus say government surveillance, should also check out our compadres in the US, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy, both of who have done fantastic work in this space, and really don't get the same level of tech headlines as we get, and they deserve.
In Europe, I always point people to the members of EDRi. There are also groups elsewhere that I'm happy to point people to. Ping me in memail or danny@eff.org if you'd like to know who the right people are in your country, or just if you'd like to continue to chat about EFF, our failings and our glories, because I am really really trying not to derail here. Again.
Anyhoo: in the hopes of wrenching us back on-topic, but at some risk of triggering Mefi's Doctorowitis, here's my colleague Cory writing (independently) on Surveillance Capitalism, the book. It isn't an ex cathedra EFF piece, but I think it reflects a good chunk of our internal debates, in the sense that Cory is not just responding to Zubroff, but our own back and forth as we try to work out how to solve this mess.
posted by ntk at 7:57 PM on January 29, 2021 [21 favorites]
The idea that we're somehow a puppet of Big Tech (and Google especially) is an old saw that, if my recollection of its emergent timing is correct, came out of the copyright battles of the 2000s, and has subsequently got picked up by interested parties from time to time. There was a fun bit recently when we were co-opted into part of the QAnon narrative because of it.
In fact, our core funding comes from individual donations from members who understand the dangers and the potential of technology in the space of civil liberties and human rights. I can confidently say that I listen a lot more to their valuable feedback than I do anyone who yells at us from Google, Facebook, Twitter, et al.
We started Privacy Badger out of our skepticism that DNT was going to go anywhere (as mhoye recalls correctly), and to see if we couldn't implement an effective and similar mechanism for people to use, not because it's some sort of optimal solution, or the equivalent of "recycling" as an alternative to strong laws. Other advocacy groups don't have much opportunity for providing tech solutions to match their activism; we're lucky enough to be able to do that, and see it as part of our mission.
We've consistently called for more, better privacy regulation as a vital part of the solution to many of these problems. It gets tricky because, of course, if you are a powerful, quasi-monopolistic feudal data lord like Google, Facebook, etc, you can also lobby to get the privacy regulation *you* want not the privacy regulation we actually need, so we have to spend a great deal of time trying to fend off proposals that look amazing but would be both ineffective in protecting personal privacy and actually cement the current tech companies in their current roles and current business models. The long-term solution is strong privacy tech, strong privacy regulation, and to break up these tech monopolies, both through robust anti-trust action, and an environment that fosters alternatives.
Here are some of EFF's recent writing on this:
Federal and State Antitrust Suits Challenging Facebook’s Acquisitions are a Welcome Sight, and our take on how to tackle Google's monopoly.
Our take on the EU's digital markets act, probably one of the better proposals to reign in big tech.
How Big Tech is lobbying for a federal privacy law in the US that would pre-empt stronger state laws.
This isn't the full scope of our work here -- I plucked these more or less at random. EFF is big enough that holding everything we write and all of our positions in my head takes a sizeable chunk of my brainpower, but the org isn't as big as I think some people believe. I believe our size is often moderated by not pursuing easy-headline-grabbing policies. We're a public impact law firm, staffed and supported by geeks, and that means some times we have to shut up and study what's really going on, else we'll either lose in court, or else lose through a gazillion of our supporters pointing out how we're technically incorrect (the worst kind of incorrect). So a bunch of our work is shot through with "it depends," and "how about this (wonky proposal with ifs and buts in it)".
I should also say that we are not the only organization working on digital privacy, and there's plenty of room for different tactics. If you'd like your activism with a different mix of anti-corporate consumer privacy versus say government surveillance, should also check out our compadres in the US, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy, both of who have done fantastic work in this space, and really don't get the same level of tech headlines as we get, and they deserve.
In Europe, I always point people to the members of EDRi. There are also groups elsewhere that I'm happy to point people to. Ping me in memail or danny@eff.org if you'd like to know who the right people are in your country, or just if you'd like to continue to chat about EFF, our failings and our glories, because I am really really trying not to derail here. Again.
Anyhoo: in the hopes of wrenching us back on-topic, but at some risk of triggering Mefi's Doctorowitis, here's my colleague Cory writing (independently) on Surveillance Capitalism, the book. It isn't an ex cathedra EFF piece, but I think it reflects a good chunk of our internal debates, in the sense that Cory is not just responding to Zubroff, but our own back and forth as we try to work out how to solve this mess.
posted by ntk at 7:57 PM on January 29, 2021 [21 favorites]
Here's my pitch for the 0th Amendment. If freedom of the press is first most important why can an amendment for personal protections not be inserted before with precedence? Something very short and clear. We are not turning off the internet, tech is not going away and even if public cameras were outlawed more advanced algorithms and data collection of any type will just know us all, it can fit on the next gen single ssd and duplicated. So it's there, what's the harm, well harm, and that needs at least an amendment level protection. Actually at the world lever, well actually at the Solar System level, but well, in a few years.
posted by sammyo at 9:47 PM on January 29, 2021
posted by sammyo at 9:47 PM on January 29, 2021
Yeah, mark me down in the sure, you don't need to be a coder, but sheesh our current batch of geriatric rich people who have literally never even used a modern phone because they have staff for that and still think of that electronic-mail stuff as a weird super new thing the kids are into are manifestly unsuited to regulate technology column.
I'm not at all universally opposed to government regulation. I am however deeply concerned/opposed to our current American government regulating the internet.
They don't even comprehend the basic issues and they don't comprehend that they don't comprehend.
Worse when they do understand, they're all strongly influenced by a toxic combination of submission to big media **AND** submission to blue nose prudes who think an internet porn ban is a great idea. Our theoretically liberal Senators are all under the sway of Hollywood and think that a dystopian nightmare of universal surveillance to protect copyright is a great idea, the Republicans want to make sure we aren't masturbating, and both of them think that law'n'order in the form of backdoors to everything and letting the CIA/NSA/DIA/FBI/etc have access to everything you do is a great idea.
Despite my utter loathing of the data miners, I'd much rather have no regulation at all than regulation from the current US government, or for that matter any future US government I can realistically envision.
A government genuinely interested in privacy and taking the needs of the actual citizenry could produce some useful and non-harmful regulation. We do not have such a government.
Remember the DMCA? The CDA? Clipper?
The reason most Americans online recoil in utter horror at the idea of the government regulating the net is because of our past experience with the government being a combination of malicious, incompetent, and woefully ignorant when they've tried to regulate the net. Hell you can't even get the most of the current government to admit that the DMCA was an awful, evil, law.
And that's assuming we have a government that isn't actively and maliciously trying to ban the uncomfortable facts.
We see in Florida that Gov DeSantis is abusing existing law to maliciously prosecute people who dare to speak the truth about COVID. You know as well as I do that any new regulations written with Republican involvement will be flat out guaranteed to have some Republican style Ministry of Truth provisions that make it a felony to be critical of Trump or whatever.
Better the current corporate dominated quasi-anarchy than the inevitable utterly awful laws our broken and unrepairable government could make.
Facebook is not awful enough to convince me that anything Mitch McConnell approves of could possibly be better.
posted by sotonohito at 6:21 AM on January 30, 2021 [3 favorites]
I'm not at all universally opposed to government regulation. I am however deeply concerned/opposed to our current American government regulating the internet.
They don't even comprehend the basic issues and they don't comprehend that they don't comprehend.
Worse when they do understand, they're all strongly influenced by a toxic combination of submission to big media **AND** submission to blue nose prudes who think an internet porn ban is a great idea. Our theoretically liberal Senators are all under the sway of Hollywood and think that a dystopian nightmare of universal surveillance to protect copyright is a great idea, the Republicans want to make sure we aren't masturbating, and both of them think that law'n'order in the form of backdoors to everything and letting the CIA/NSA/DIA/FBI/etc have access to everything you do is a great idea.
Despite my utter loathing of the data miners, I'd much rather have no regulation at all than regulation from the current US government, or for that matter any future US government I can realistically envision.
A government genuinely interested in privacy and taking the needs of the actual citizenry could produce some useful and non-harmful regulation. We do not have such a government.
Remember the DMCA? The CDA? Clipper?
The reason most Americans online recoil in utter horror at the idea of the government regulating the net is because of our past experience with the government being a combination of malicious, incompetent, and woefully ignorant when they've tried to regulate the net. Hell you can't even get the most of the current government to admit that the DMCA was an awful, evil, law.
And that's assuming we have a government that isn't actively and maliciously trying to ban the uncomfortable facts.
We see in Florida that Gov DeSantis is abusing existing law to maliciously prosecute people who dare to speak the truth about COVID. You know as well as I do that any new regulations written with Republican involvement will be flat out guaranteed to have some Republican style Ministry of Truth provisions that make it a felony to be critical of Trump or whatever.
Better the current corporate dominated quasi-anarchy than the inevitable utterly awful laws our broken and unrepairable government could make.
Facebook is not awful enough to convince me that anything Mitch McConnell approves of could possibly be better.
posted by sotonohito at 6:21 AM on January 30, 2021 [3 favorites]
In Capitalist America, Google searches you!
posted by toddforbid at 8:01 AM on January 30, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by toddforbid at 8:01 AM on January 30, 2021 [6 favorites]
In a recent speech at Brussels' International Data Privacy Day, Apple CEO Tim Cook went on the offensive against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.Cook took direct aim at Facebook without ever mentioning the company by name.
posted by adamvasco at 3:20 PM on January 30, 2021
posted by adamvasco at 3:20 PM on January 30, 2021
Personally I think the laws around the internet and data, as well as the finance industry (see GameStop thread), DO need to be so clear that a bunch of geriatric congresspeople can understand them. Neither of those spheres has to be complicated. The complication is deliberate. How about “you can sell things online, but you have to pay taxes, and it’s not ok to transact data about citizens, even if they opt in, because no one really knows the ramifications of that. “ also, you may not gather any information at all about a user who is not an active account holder on your site, and then use of that information is limited to actions while the user is actively traversing your site. Advertising isn’t as necessary as we think. If people know a product exists and can seek it out if they need it, that’s plenty. Prior to the internet you could just live a full life without thinking about buying stuff for days or weeks. Watching tv or reading a magazine resulted in ads, but otherwise you could just ignore consumerism. It was better.
If you have a Great Thing that everyone would need if they knew about it, guess what? They don’t actually need it 99% of the time.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:41 PM on January 30, 2021
If you have a Great Thing that everyone would need if they knew about it, guess what? They don’t actually need it 99% of the time.
posted by freecellwizard at 3:41 PM on January 30, 2021
In a recent speech at Brussels' International Data Privacy Day, Apple CEO Tim Cook went on the offensive against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.Cook took direct aim at Facebook without ever mentioning the company by name
Apple’s always been pretty good on privacy because doing so takes direct aim at their biggest FANG competitors. They don’t need to mine and monetize in the same way because they’re not in the ad business.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:01 AM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
Apple’s always been pretty good on privacy because doing so takes direct aim at their biggest FANG competitors. They don’t need to mine and monetize in the same way because they’re not in the ad business.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:01 AM on January 31, 2021 [1 favorite]
Thank you very much for this excellent post. The NYT piece is eloquent, brilliant even, and should be required reading IMO.
posted by blue shadows at 1:35 PM on January 31, 2021
posted by blue shadows at 1:35 PM on January 31, 2021
I think this is an interesting piece, but I do think it often rests a bit on priors about liberal democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law, that aren't really borne out by the experiences of people outside Zuboff's class and target audience. I don't expect any different from the NYT opinion page, but I'm curious to see if the book makes similar assumptions.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:49 PM on January 31, 2021
posted by aspersioncast at 7:49 PM on January 31, 2021
I do really appreciate Zuboff pointing out how inadequate antitrust law is for the task of dealing with the surveillance capitalists.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:54 PM on January 31, 2021
posted by aspersioncast at 7:54 PM on January 31, 2021
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posted by NoxAeternum at 12:31 PM on January 29, 2021 [11 favorites]