Do you actually know people that work at these companies? Have you interacted with them?
I worked at Microsoft and Amazon and have associates at Facebook, Google, etc.
I’m not saying that there aren’t good people working there, just that the employees aren’t the company’s aims and goals and have little control over protecting us citizens.
I also don’t get what libertarians have to do with anything… the civil libertarians’ main goal this election appears to have been to “protect” us from Hillary’s surveillance state while welcoming Pence and Trump’s (in that order.)
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Because it was claimed upthread that tech company decision makers were largely Trump supporters sans evidence.
The amount of Trump supports I’ve met in tech can be counted on both of my hands here in California.
I notice you didn’t contradict me about my comment about Microsoft or other places.
So, yeah, I guess someone could go “Well, their STAFF might be all liberal and shit but the REAL decision makers are all Trump supporters” but I think I would still want a citation. Peter Thiel is the exception, not the rule.
Their general support for ALEC would indicate that they back whatever ideology gets them what they want.
I don’t know if I’d say “Trump supporters” so much as them not pushing back enough to protect their customers from a surveillance state.
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Eh? No.
I wasn’t saying that tech workers voted Trump; I was claiming (yes, without evidence; personal perception only) that tech worker politics trends towards “deregulated capitalism = good”.
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I wasn’t talking about you.
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is Obama somehow better than any of the menu choices we’ve been given?
Cynical version: Obama provided the comforting illusion that he was doing it because he had to, not because he wanted to.
Less cynical version: the true centre of power in the American government isn’t the Presidency, it’s the legislature…which is why the whole world is royally screwed now. Trump is an ignorant, bigoted buffoon, but the real damage is going to be coming from Congress.
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Thanks, I must’ve misread it and thought it was also talking about TSL (end-to-end as in client-to-server). Makes sense in terms of client-to-client without a decrypted stage at a server in the middle. That is a weak spot for a lot of current services.
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You think that things like PRISM aren’t inherently “abuse?”
You should be able to show how somebody was harmed by the use of the data. Collecting data is passive and I don’t care about that. It’s how that data is used.
I remember some small scale incidents, like analysts sharing nude photos, but even with that it’s hard to quantify the specific harm. If you told me somebody looked at nude photos of me a year ago, well, I might not like it, but it had no impact. It’s about as harmful to me as you saying “Chesterfield is an idiot” to whomever is closest to you.
You might not care about that, but other people do. Collecting anything, by nature, is not passive. (Unless you’re a Buddhist fisherman and justify it by saying the fish just happen to swim into the nets.) The problem is the potential for abuse, and the short circuiting of the legal system.
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When the government admits the program exists and gives us transparency into it, you can ask me to show things.
You’re basically saying “as long as it is a secret program and, therefore, hidden from disclosure, it is ok becusse no one can prove abuse.” That doesn’t pass muster unless you work for the government as a spook.
We can’t prove the scale of abuse because the only reason we even know these programs exist is because of a whistleblower.
I’d say the monitoring of Muslim Americans by government agencies qualifies as abuse as well but, until there were leaks, the government wouldn’t allow them to sue because they couldn’t prove they were being spied on.
In the same way, I think government monitoring of ALL online activity of US citizens qualifies as abuse but the government still hasn’t admitted to the full scale of things or even what is shown in Snowden’s leaks.
You have a nice catch-22 there, don’t you?
As others have mentioned, those rather liberal people you’re so proud of don’t actually direct the company, make strategic business decisions, or otherwise have anything at all to say about what the company itself does. Those roles are largely filled by tech-savvy venture capitalists who are far more interested in 3-5 year plans, IPOs, and financial minutiae than moral stands or societal impacts. Keep your bullshit.
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I will! Clearly you know more about these companies (from reading CNN?) than those of us who work in them.
Actually, you clearly have no clue how many of them (if not most) actually run but that’s ok. It isn’t like you’re going to work there.
I tried reading CNN but the raster made my eyes hurt.
Is your appeal to “authority” here going to change how companies behave?
Is your making up your own “facts” going to do the same?
If people obviously, from the point of view of those same leaders of companies, get their values and motivations wrong, are they going to listen to anything that people who do that say to them? No, they’ll dismiss them as clueless and out of touch. If you want to influence silicon valley, the first step is understanding how folks actually think there. It is hardly uniform or simple.
I’m not here to convince you, but “nuh uh you don’t know anyone who’s worked there I know different” isn’t particularly convincing.
Thiel’s idea of consumer protections isn’t going to jive with mine.
You realize that Thiel is strongly vilified in Silicon Valley as a complete piece of human shit?
My point is that people who read a few pieces in the New York Times or on Salon and think they understand Silicon Valley tech workers, the people who run companies there, or the larger tech scene are woefully uninformed of the realities of that world.
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