According to New York Times story today, Facebook is developing a tool to effectively allow China to block content on its news feed. In return, Facebook would finally get to enter the Chinese market. Although Facebook does provide blocking of certain content in other countries (e.g., content that is allegedly inconsistent with local culture and laws in places like Pakistan), the apparent willingness to cooperate with China's government to block actual news that helps it blockade information to the Chinese people is a step way beyond what Facebook has done to date. And, it further reflects that Mark Zuckerberg's consistent statements about facilitating communications for the common good is a lie; he and Facebook clearly are only interested in becoming more profitable, even if that means cooperating with the massive censorship programs of the Chinese government. And, while I'm generally in favor of companies making as much money as possible based on the quality of its services and products in the market, directly cooperating with an oppressive government and developing tools to facilitate that oppression should called what it is: collaboration in censorship and oppression. The US government should be concerned that US companies are actively supporting and encouraging the oppression of millions of people by a foreign government, especially one that is hostile to the US. Perhaps the US government should also consider passing laws that prohibit US companies (and Facebook is not the only one; also, Cisco and others) from doing business with or in such countries if their business is used to facilitate such oppression.
23 November 2016
19 November 2016
"Doing Evil All The Time" Is A More Appropriate Motto
You may recall that Google's initial motto was said to be "Do No Evil" or "Don't Be Evil". According to the Wikipedia site about this, it was proposed by one or another employee in 2000 and has generally been considered part of Google's Code of Conduct. That sounds great. And, other large technology companies that arise out of Silicon Valley tend to make public statements that they are saving the world in one way or the other by increasing global communications, etc. In some circumstances, the various technologies have, indeed, been crucial towards advancing certain good causes. For example, the Arab Spring events resulted in several stories of how Twitter essentially facilitated a revolution against dictators. And, depending on your view of the "main stream media", Donald Trump's use of Twitter was an extremely cost-effective way to get his views into the political consciousness and supported his successful election bid.
I'm sure there are many, many examples of all the good things that Google, Twitter, Snap Chat, etc. have been used for (sometimes even better than sharing funny cat videos). However, these companies have also been complicit with China in preventing important data from reaching the Chinese people. More important, what most of these companies have in common is that they capture and devour and then sell your data. That's really all they do. Google does it under the guise of providing free search information. Snap Chat and Facebook do it under the guise that they are helping people share information with each other. Twitter does it under the guise that they are helping people communicate.
They don't charge membership fees to the users. As such, the business models of all of these companies are driven by one thing and only one thing: acquiring the public's personal data and selling it to advertisers or other consumers of the data that want to sell things and services to the users. The sophisticated algorithms and other tools used to acquire, analyze, slice and dice and sell the data to third parties result in "targeted advertising" that has developed into virtual mind control over their user populations (which means nearly everyone). It results in a all sorts of companies using the massive amounts of data to push consumerism like never before. For example, I was once looking for a faucet when I was re-doing my kitchen. When I left the kitchen renovation websites, I was followed around on other sites for days by "targeted advertising" of the same faucets that I had looked at. I also once heard a Google executive state that gathering all of this information was really good for everyone by explaining that it would be great if when our sneakers were wearing down and we were walking by a sports store then the sports store would know you were close by and would send an advertisement to your phone to sell you those sneakers that you so desperately needed at that moment. From my perspective, that would effectively a form of mind control; a process by which "free will" is taken away from us but we don't know it. Even if that sneaker example sounded useful at some level, there is no way the sneaker company is going to wait to push those sneakers on you only when your sneaker is likely to be worn out. Instead, they'd be constantly trying to get you to buy then earlier than that and to buy multiple styles and colors.
This omnipresent and rapacious data collection and usage is the only real reason these companies exist. Their business models are far from living up to the naïve idea that they "Do No Evil". Instead, the manner in which they are knowing and using virtually everything bit of information about our lives is what I would call "Doing Evil All The Time".
Very recently, some of these tech companies have lost data-usage regulatory law suits in the UK and the EU. These cases must be very worrisome to the big-data tech companies that are virtually trying to know and track every bit of information about you. Personally, I think the government should very aggressively limit and regulate these companies' acquisition and usage of the our data. I would even go so far as to say that the license and usage agreements should be strictly limited by new laws that restrict the data-collection and data-usage provisions the license agreements that we click without reading all the time. Sure, there may be fewer world-saving technology companies, but at least our world will be less controlled by these companies and the amount of wasteful consumerism would decrease.
I'm sure there are many, many examples of all the good things that Google, Twitter, Snap Chat, etc. have been used for (sometimes even better than sharing funny cat videos). However, these companies have also been complicit with China in preventing important data from reaching the Chinese people. More important, what most of these companies have in common is that they capture and devour and then sell your data. That's really all they do. Google does it under the guise of providing free search information. Snap Chat and Facebook do it under the guise that they are helping people share information with each other. Twitter does it under the guise that they are helping people communicate.
They don't charge membership fees to the users. As such, the business models of all of these companies are driven by one thing and only one thing: acquiring the public's personal data and selling it to advertisers or other consumers of the data that want to sell things and services to the users. The sophisticated algorithms and other tools used to acquire, analyze, slice and dice and sell the data to third parties result in "targeted advertising" that has developed into virtual mind control over their user populations (which means nearly everyone). It results in a all sorts of companies using the massive amounts of data to push consumerism like never before. For example, I was once looking for a faucet when I was re-doing my kitchen. When I left the kitchen renovation websites, I was followed around on other sites for days by "targeted advertising" of the same faucets that I had looked at. I also once heard a Google executive state that gathering all of this information was really good for everyone by explaining that it would be great if when our sneakers were wearing down and we were walking by a sports store then the sports store would know you were close by and would send an advertisement to your phone to sell you those sneakers that you so desperately needed at that moment. From my perspective, that would effectively a form of mind control; a process by which "free will" is taken away from us but we don't know it. Even if that sneaker example sounded useful at some level, there is no way the sneaker company is going to wait to push those sneakers on you only when your sneaker is likely to be worn out. Instead, they'd be constantly trying to get you to buy then earlier than that and to buy multiple styles and colors.
This omnipresent and rapacious data collection and usage is the only real reason these companies exist. Their business models are far from living up to the naïve idea that they "Do No Evil". Instead, the manner in which they are knowing and using virtually everything bit of information about our lives is what I would call "Doing Evil All The Time".
Very recently, some of these tech companies have lost data-usage regulatory law suits in the UK and the EU. These cases must be very worrisome to the big-data tech companies that are virtually trying to know and track every bit of information about you. Personally, I think the government should very aggressively limit and regulate these companies' acquisition and usage of the our data. I would even go so far as to say that the license and usage agreements should be strictly limited by new laws that restrict the data-collection and data-usage provisions the license agreements that we click without reading all the time. Sure, there may be fewer world-saving technology companies, but at least our world will be less controlled by these companies and the amount of wasteful consumerism would decrease.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)