Context in the URL.
If WeChat is not sold to a US company by September 15th, it’ll be banned in the US. And, well, September 15th is nearly upon us…
Thoughts?
Context in the URL.
If WeChat is not sold to a US company by September 15th, it’ll be banned in the US. And, well, September 15th is nearly upon us…
Thoughts?
On balance I’m fine with them being banned too, yup. Same as TikTok. The Citizen Lab has run many investigations into Internet surveillance in China that it boggles the mind how anyone outside China would want to use these apps (except for when they have to deal with people living there). Then again… most of the rest of the world use Facebook-owned apps, sigh.
https://citizenlab.ca/
I absolutely detest Facebook but at least in the US you theoretically get to choose who surveils you I guess? In practice not so much as they have a monopoly. But I think the Chinese economic and political model is far more dangerous to individual rights than the US.
Yeah, the choice is theoretical. Agreed that the Chinese model is more dangerous, but the US needs stronger regulation to control what tech companies can do with our data. I like one of the ideas suggested in The Social Dilemma that data hoarders get taxed on how much data they collect, as an incentive for them to get by with less.
I would use Messenger (either Lite or web, so no ads) to talk to people who are only on it but I draw the line at using Facebook Pay for sending or receiving money (unless it’s to a fellow Facebook employee). If you’ve seen how bad Facebook’s customer service is it’s obvious that end users are not our real customers – so using us for financial transactions is madness.
Regulation won’t fix this problem. Regulation fixes details. We are talking about a system that was designed from the ground up to exploit people for their money and their data. The only way to approach this is to have the public take free software seriously, and not fund or support companies which have power structures that care only about profit. We need non-profits and transparent worker co-operatives.
I’m in complete agreement there. We should try pushing on both fronts - build the replacement from the ground up, but anything that makes it a bit harder for attention economy platforms to maintain the status quo would help too.
Furthermore the companies are the ones who really have the power in the west. Regulation to them is practically just guidelines that they choose to follow if they wish, and manipulate and lobby if they don’t feel like it.
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I would argue that while western governments and their militaries are certainly the most powerful in the world, they are held accountable to at least some extent by the political system. China and Russia’s military have no accountability and no consequences to any of their actions, so they post a much greater threat.
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The government certainly does serve the corporations no doubt about that. But there is still some accountability, due to a little more transparancy and freedom of press. I’m not defending the extremely corrupt system we have.
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Make it progressive perhaps. Make it a multiple of userbase * data per user * number of privacy antipattern.
Facebook and Google **would*be affected if the fines amount to billions per year instead of haphazardly every decade or so
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ah, any source for Google’s OKR? 8 bytes per user seems overly ambitious.
I guess we also have to consider how data is tied to the use cases that the user intended. e.g. Facebook misusing 2FA phone numbers for other purposes should have been fined under any decent privacy framework.
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My best bet right now is for EU regulations like GDPR creating a space for service providers selling paid hosting for open-source software that replace proprietary US tech.
e.g. Nextcloud hosting to replace Dropbox / Google {Drive, Contacts, Calendar}; mailbox.org / migadu / posteo / protonmail to replace Gmail, Mastodon/Pleroma to replace Twitter; Lemmy to replace Reddit…
just gradually ramp up the friction for using privacy-invasive US tech for EU businesses and consumers (it might already be illegal for EU businesses to store their data in the US depending on how you interpret that recent ECJ ruling) … it won’t happen fast since the US sees any immediate curtailing of its tech companies as a trade war.