Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/13/the-surveillance-economy-has-6.html
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I would love to think they will respond, but of course Google and Facebook are built on monetizing user data, so they won’t. They might fight such things in court, but they won’t erase their data.
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It’s cute how he thinks companies have morals.
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They don’t, but their gut flora might. And the company might at least have a sense of self-preservation. Then again, IBM never got censured for selling computers to the Third Reich that were used for managing the Holocaust.
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Companies don’t have morals. They do have an instinct toward self-preservation. The key is for their customers/products to make it clear that they are willing absent themselves from the system en masse unless they beef up their security and data retention policies.
The good news is that tech attracts a lot of paranoid small-l libertarians who are already aware of the dangers and the benefits of strong crypto and strong legal departments. The bad news is that, with the possible exception of Google, the major companies either drop the ball or play ball when it comes to government demands.
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Maciej doesn’t think they have morals at all - he’s a brilliant and hilarious critic of Silicon Valley endless moral failures. That’s why he’s mounting a campaign to pressure them via every channel he can.
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so no trouble for tech companies at all then, is what you’re saying.
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I’m sure SV’s all-around good guys Peter Thiel and Palmhair Lackey will be sure to get their companies right on this.
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So NOW this Pinboard jackass is worried about the surveillance state he helped to build? It’s a little late. Why didn’t he show such concern while building it in the first place? It’s not like these are unforeseeable consequences. Even under Obama, these databases have been abused.
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It never occurred to him that one-half of those executives probably voted for Trump and think it’ll all be fine?
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I reckon we could very quickly get rid of the Surveillance State if everyone, in all their internet communications, inserted all. or some of, the words “bomb, heroin, smack, ANFO, coke, ammo, ISIS, Empire State Building”, and other similar words.
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Do you have evidence that Maciej is a jackass or that he has helped to build the surveillance state? Genuine question; because in my experience he runs a service that is paid for by the users, not monetised and data-mined, and though he’s a developer, he’s always struck me as fairly ‘outside the tent’.
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Playing Ingress, by Google spin-off Niantic, I notice that the XM dots away from portals tend to be persistent and only over certain houses and locations. It looks a lot like it’s based on wifi activity, picked up in scans by Google camera cars. (The sort of thing Google got in trouble over.)
Naturally they also have my phone location while the app is running.
Time to think about all those apps that stay in touch with the mothership.
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This. After reading IBM and the holocaust it is remarkable that they got away with so much and nobody so much as batting an eyelid, the executives knew exactly what the machines were being used for.
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Ah, that takes me back, or is it forward?
It’s cute how he thinks the government hasn’t been in 100% surveillance mode for at least a decade. Sorry to sound tin-hat, but I think the government already has all of these data. But, better security is always a good move.
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Used “Twitter Archive Eraser” to delete all of my tweets from 2008 to two months ago. I’d been meaning to do this for a while (I don’t need joking things I said in the early days of twitter hanging out forever) but upcoming changes made it more interesting.
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The fact that your phone provider knows what cell your phone is in at all times and will pretty much hand over your location data without a warrant is more of an issue than Google, which fights government interference.
Who is “he” here? The author of the article Cory links to?
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I was replying to writebastard, near the top of the thread. But Mr. Ceglowski in the article seems equally culpable.
Yes, the ISPs and mobile carriers are far more worrisome in what they can track and are far less likely to “disarm,” despite the fact that their base business models treat end-users as paying customers in the traditional manner rather than considering their personal profiles and activities as products to be re-sold (as is the case with app makers and companies like Yahoo and Google).
