Category Archives: Big Tech

Apple has been called a lot of different names over the years. On Tuesday, an executive for a new email app added another one to the list: gangsters.

There is no chance in bloody hell that we're going to pay Apples ransom, wrote David Heinemeier Hansson, the chief technology officer of Basecamp, the Chicago tech company behind Hey, a new email app aimed at people willing to pay $99 a year for aggressive filtering of their inbox. "I will burn this house down myself, before I let gangsters like that spin it for spoils."

The online vitriol began earlier this week when Hey said that Apple was forcing it to make changes so that Apple would get a cut of its sales. Hey had planned to sign up subscribers through a website with no involvement by Apple except distributing the app through Apples app store, similar to how many people subscribe to Netflix or other subscription services.

Apple charges a commission of 30 percent on users who subscribe through the app store. Hey said Apple threatened to block the app if it didnt comply.

And Apple isnt backing down. In an email Thursday to Basecamp chief executive Jason Fried, shared by Apple with NBC News, Apple said that the Hey app needed to change to include in-app purchasing as an option for users.

Apple has been here before. Many companies have bristled at what they call Apples tax and the policies Apple has to ensure money flows through its platform. Last year, Spotify complained about it to European antitrust authorities, while Apple countered that Spotify pays only a small amount.

But the circumstances have changed. In Europe, complaints about Apple have ballooned into two newly announced investigations, one into the app store and another into Apple Pay. In the United States, antitrust enforcers are scrutinizing how Big Tech firms wield their power, from mergers to their lucrative advertising business. The Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and House antitrust investigators have made Apple part of their broad review of competition in the tech sector.

House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., called Apples commission highway robbery in an interview on The Vergecast podcast posted Thursday.

Apple isn't the only big tech company facing antitrust concerns. The CEOs of Amazon, Facebook and Googles parent company have agreed to testify in a congressional hearing, but Apple CEO Tim Cook is holding out, Politico reported this week.

The Hey app has made the blowback even more visible and sparked the attention of other companies. Epic Games, the maker of the game Fortnite, said Tuesday that Apple was being an extractive monopoly, while Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and OKCupid, said consumers were paying extra as Apple squeezed certain industries.

Were acutely aware of their power over us, Match Group said in a statement to Axios. The company noted that only some apps, deemed digital services, pay a commission to Apple, while others like ridesharing apps pay nothing.

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The situation has also kicked off a discussion within the tech community, with comparisons that may be ominous for Apple.

I would go so far as to say that executives in the tech industry are more afraid of Apple in 2020 than they were of Microsoft two decades ago, Ben Thompson, an independent tech analyst, wrote Thursday in his popular industry newsletter Stratechery.

The Justice Department sued Microsoft in 1998, alleging violations of antitrust law in a case that had long-term implications for the company and the tech industry.

Thompson called Apples app store review an absolute gatekeeper and said the number of ways that Apple can retaliate are so varied and hard to verify, that no one is willing to publicly breathe a word against the company.

Microsoft itself is worried about app stores, Brad Smith, the companys president, said in an online event Thursday hosted by Politico.

Increasingly, you are seeing app stores that have created higher walls and more formidable gates to access to other applications than anything that existed in the industry 20 years ago, Smith said. The time has come, whether talking about D.C. or Brussels, for a much more focused conversation about the app stores.

Part of the issue is that Apples rules for who pays the 30 percent and who doesnt arent always consistent or transparent, said John Bergmayer, legal director for Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington focused on consumers and tech. Googles Gmail has a paid version, but Apple doesnt share in that revenue or publicly explain the difference, he said.

The harsh scrutiny for Apples app store could hardly come at a worse time for the company, as legal challenges pile up.

Two app developers filed a lawsuit last year in a case that makes similar allegations about the app store. Its still pending in federal court in Oakland, California.

And the company was already a defendant in a proposed class-action lawsuit brought by consumers, also in Oakland federal court. Like the app developers, the consumers allege theyre being overcharged in the app store by an Apple-run monopoly, and last year the Supreme Court ruled their suit could move forward toward a possible trial.

Apple lost an earlier antitrust case at the Supreme Court four years ago, when the high court upheld a decision that Apple conspired with book publishers to raise the price of e-books.

An expanding list of antitrust complaints does not work in any firms favor, Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, said in an email.

She said there were now many pathways for an antitrust case to move forward against Apple, and that the companys past decisions in the app store may be telling. That evidence could set some unfavorable context in future antitrust cases, she said.

But any case may be a steep climb, said Amitai Aviram, a University of Illinois law professor. He said Apple can point potential benefits to consumers from a robust app store review, such as ensuring the integrity of apps, and he said higher prices arent themselves illegal even if Apple has a monopoly.

If excessive pricing is an antitrust offense, courts and antitrust agencies will need to determine what is the proper price, which would turn them into price regulators of all markets, something they are not equipped to do, Aviram wrote in an email.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday, and it is not clear if the company is considering changes to its policies.

Apple has been vocal in defending its app store. On Monday, it said in a news release its app economy was responsible for $519 billion in economic activity, including everything from Uber and Lyft rides and airline tickets bought through an app to in-app advertising and paid gaming apps.

Apple charges a flat 30 percent commission on paid apps. And for apps that have ongoing subscriptions, Apple charges 30 percent for the first year and 15 percent for successive years if people sign up for the subscriptions through the app store. For people who get subscriptions on a web browser or another way, as Hey planned, Apple gets no cut.

Apple says that app developers get plenty for what they pay, including tools and software kits that make their apps usable and better, free marketing in the app store and camps for entrepreneurs. Consumers get quality control and security assurances, it says.

We carefully review each app and require developers to follow strict guidelines on privacy, design, and business models, the company says on a website dedicated to explaining and defending the stores practices.

Its review team covers 81 languages and since 2016 has removed more than 1.4 million apps that were out of date or not working, Apple says. This helps unclutter the search for new apps, and makes it easier for users to find quality apps.

Read the rest here:

Apple's app store is suddenly a flashpoint in the Big Tech debate - NBC News

TOPLINE

Analysts from Morgan Stanley on Tuesday warned that Tesla stock, at over $1,000 per share, is grossly overvalued and set to plunge, with too many investors ignoring the risks of running a car company and instead treating Tesla like a high-growth tech company.

It may be time to sell Tesla as shares edge towards record highs, says Morgan Stanley.

After surging to record highs of over $900 per share in February, Teslas stock plunged amid the coronavirus sell-off in late March, falling below $400 per share.

But shares have since seen a strong rebound: Tesla is up 130% since the markets coronavirus recession low point on March 23, and now trades for over 1,000 per share.

In a note to clients on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas warned that while he understands the attraction of the Tesla story and its high-growth potential, it is still hard to see Tesla justifying its high stock price over the next decade.

He gives the stock a $650 price target and an underweight rating, warning that investors are ignoring a host of execution/market risks facing the company.

Morgan Stanley said that it forecasts Tesla to make 2 million cars annually for the next 10 years, but its current stock price implies a much higher production output: At $1,000, we believe the stock is discounting roughly 4 million units by 2030.

The companys high valuation is coming from tech-oriented investors who see Teslas valuation as reasonable and in the framework of discussion amongst large-cap tech names like Amazon, Google or Apple.

But comparing Tesla to these tech giants is far from perfect, Jonas says: It still faces a multitude of risks associated with running a car company that the market seems to be ignoring.

When comparing Tesla to big tech companies like Microsoft or Apple, one would have to consider (or ignore) significant inherent differences in Teslas business model and capital intensity, Morgan Stanley said in its note. One must also take into account many of Teslas business objectives face a degree of execution risk that may be significantly higher than many of the more proven/mature companies in this analysis.

When Morgan Stanley first downgraded Tesla to underweight on June 12, the firm identified three primary risks: Near term risks to demand and pricing, longer-term risks to its business in China and potential competition from other big tech companies. But investors didnt react much to the banks downgrade. Why? According to Morgan Stanley analysts, We believe that investors are in a little bit of a wait and see mode, looking for more clarity around the potential lasting impacts of COVID-19.

With Teslas stock rising to new record highs in 2020, so has its market valuation. The company now boasts a market cap of $185 billionup from just $75 billion at the end of last year, making it one of the most valuable car companies in the world. In fact, it is now worth more than Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler combined. Since April, founder and CEO Elon Musk has grown his net worth from $24 billion to just over $42 billion.

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Tesla Is Overvalued: Investors Are Treating It Too Much Like A Tech Company, Says Morgan Stanley - Forbes

Big Tech will annihilate Telcos. Analysts are saying that the pace of Big Tech and its role in bringing global internet to all will annihilate Telcos as we know them in the not too distant future.

Regular readers will know that we have been writing about Big Tech. Specifically, can you trust FAANG with our personal data? Well as Big Tech gets bigger, it appears that Big Tech will annihilate Telcos and that may have some dramatic privacy implications.

When it does, everything we do online, every word we speak, everywhere we go, what we buy and more will be rivers of gold to Big Tech. Is that good, bad, or inevitable?

U.S. Correspondent Sam Bocetta steps a little outside his usual comfort zone to explore some fundamental changes that may see FAANG getting its teeth into us by controlling data/internet/voice and more. Sam writes:

This article was inspired by Peter Adderton, CEO of Boost Mobile, and his startling admission to GadgetGuy, In the next five years, Telcos as we know it may not exist. We may be buying communications (voice and data) directly from Amazon (Bezos/Project Kuiper), Google (Project Loon), SpaceX (Elon Musk), OneWeb (Richard Branson), Boeing, Samsung and even Facebook (Solar-powered drones).

Yep, thats right. Although Telcos dont care to admit it, their whole house of cards business model might be about to tumble. And when push comes to shove, the dinosaur Telcos are no match for the agile Big Tech meteors that will rain down upon them.

In the beginning, we had analogue voice and data remember those old pinging modems and raspy telephones. Everything went over Telco-owned copper wire. It was relatively private as the consequences of metadata were unfathomable.

Then came the digital superhighway, and everything changed because of two letters I.P. (internet protocol). Suddenly the world started going digital. Voice became a series of 0s and 1s and transmitted as data. Metadata was born, and Big Tech started to monetise the rivers of gold it creates!

Next, we enter the world of the internet, where Big Tech rules. We use I.P. to transmit voice (VoIP), stream music/movies, email, bank/pay bills, search, research, shop, social media, news, store photos, go paperless, monitor security and baby cams, OK Google/Alexa/Siri, IoT, watch porn, gamble and move everything to the cloud (other peoples computers).

Ultimately everything ends up digitalised. This allows Big Tech to collect huge amounts of both personally identifiable data and metadata on us all. We knowingly or otherwise give up privacy to use their free or convenient services.

They are not breaking the rules there are few anyway. But the EU GDPR, California Privacy Rules and reasonable Australian privacy provisions will hopefully eventually force Big Tech to respect what should be our inalienable privacy rights.

The internet is also a dangerous place where Cybercriminals hide behind the lack of regulation. They use its anonymity to steal our data or I.D., empty bank accounts, install nefarious malware, perpetrate frauds and generally make the digital highway damned unsafe. Cybercriminals likely know more about you in your dark web profile than you do!

And then you have data-harvesting apps (almost any free app) where if the product is free, the product is you. Facebook is a data-harvester that sells access to you not a benign social media platform.

So, it comes down to who do you trust with your data? It is not about the Telcos owning copper, fibre, 2/3/4/5/6/7G (infrastructure) or Big Tech and satellites/drones. It is about how we use that infrastructure and what bullet-proof regulations protect us as we bare our very soul to the internet

So back to the prospect of Big Tech controlling communications.

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Big Tech will annihilate Telcos (a weekend read!) | Gadget Guy Australia - GadgetGuy

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- As the coronavirus pandemic continues, Bloomberg Opinion will be running a series of features by our columnists that consider the long-term consequences of the crisis. Thiscolumn is part of a package on the future of tech and innovation.

Theres no question that we are being saved by technology during the pandemic, as we use Zoom for our education and entertainment and rely on Amazon for just about everything else. Still, we may need to worry whether Big Tech itself will retain its strength in innovation after the crisis, given that companies wont have as many employees working side by side in the office anymore. About 60% of Americans who have been working from home say they would like to continue doing so once the pandemic is over. Many employers are also happy to permit it.

For all the obvious conveniences, distance work has its drawbacks. Elite tech companies, in particular, run the risk of losing the highly effective corporate cultures theyve built. And tech labor could end up increasingly commoditized and underpaid. If the remote working trendbecomes the norm for tech, Silicon Valley might end up losing a lot of what has made it special.

Lets consider how this might play out.

Bay Area companies follow a similar model: Build the organization by hiring and bringing together smart people.(1)This emphasis on cognitive ability is combined with high-powered incentives, such as large salaries and options, to drive performance;all sorts of weirdness are tolerated if accompanied by intellect and a focus on results.

This model, which has served tech firms (and us) well, is in danger. It was already the case that living in the Bay Area was remarkably expensive, creating pressure to rely on workers living elsewhere and working at a distance. But the limitations of the model ran deeper too.

From the beginning, the idea of building a company around the smart people had its drawbacks the most obvious being, there are limits to how many very smart people you can find and successfully recruit. It is easy enough for everyone to be impressive when the company is small (imagine the early days of PayPal, when Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk and Max Levchin were a dominant force).But general expansion will, by definition, dilute the original flavor of the organization.

Yet as tech companies(2)grow, they have to employ more than just programmers and tech geniuses. They need lawyers, communications people, facilities people and many more ordinary workers, including in sales and, yes, government relations. This is a natural development, but unfortunately, it means the original culture becomes less about glorifying tech smarts. Furthermore, performance in these other roles often has more to do with interpersonal skills and less to do with the sheer programming and tech savvy so prominent in many of the founders, again leading to a shift in corporate priorities. Even if these companies dont end up run by lawyers, over time they will still lose much of their distinctive flair.

The sudden move to distanced work has greatly sped up this process. So even as tech companies grow more essential, the geographic distribution of company activity will also make them less unique. Theyll start to resemble a typical cross-section of the workforce, with all of the routines and bureaucracy that most other companies experience. Theyll have less fire in the belly to disrupt and overturn previous institutions.

***

One of the early salvos came from Twitter, when the company announced that its workers could stay home forever. Presumably, the company has been finding that the pandemic-driven move out of the formal workplace has been just fine. So why not continue with that arrangement and even offer it as a perk to workers?

FacebookInc. similarly announced that employees could work from home indefinitely and that they neednt live near Menlo Park or their other offices. The net effect for Facebook will be a larger pool of talent to choose from, but perhaps a less cohesive atmosphere in the company as a whole.

If Twitter, Facebook and other tech companies shift toward everyone working from home, it will mean less reliance on esprit de corps and morale to ensure performance, and more management using direct financial incentives and project- and output-based monitoring. Virtual tools can help organize teams, but they simply cant replicate the intellectual frisson of gathering the smart people together, and this could damage performance and innovation. As performance weakens, wages will fall, if only slightly, which will lead to a further reduction in performance and worker quality. Facebook already has announced that individuals who decided to live in cheaper areas and telecommute may receive lower pay.

Story continues

There is some evidence that when employees work at a distance, they dont put in extra hours or extend themselves for the benefit of co-workers. That probably means a better work-life balance for many people, but perhaps also inferior performance from a lot of companies over the longer haul.

This move away from workplace morale as a motivator will help self-starter employees, but it may not be good for tech labor overall. In essence, without a local workplace ethos, it is easier to commoditize labor, view workers as interchangeable and fire people. The distinction between protected full-time employees and outsourced, freelance and contract workers weakens. A company can make the offer of, If you hand in your project, we pay you, to virtually any worker around the world, many of whom might accept lower wages for remote roles.

The idea of a headquarters will not go away, however, so the true geographically-centered insiders may keep their privileged status and also their high productivity. But overall, the tech industry may increasingly comprise commoditized workers who have probably never met the boss or each other.

Another problem will be the onboarding of new labor. Telecommuting works best when everyone on the team already trusts one another and shares expectations. But as new workers are hired, it gets harder to develop relationships and create shared understandings. One solution is to onboard new workers by having them meet everybody in person;this will likely happen at first. But eventually corporate groups will rely less on trust and corporate culture and more on sheer direct incentives and measurement of output. Again, parts of the tech corporate ethos will wither and disappear.

Finally, all of these developments are unlikely to help the influential state of California. Recent events have shown that California is economically vulnerable: Although the numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths have been relatively low, the state has been hit hard in its entertainment, tourism and winery businesses. Now the future of the Bay Area is in jeopardy as well, because even if the tech companies prosper throughout the crisis, their employees will be spread out over many more locations. I would not wish to be long San Francisco office space.

Of course, many people would prefer to see more tech jobs redistributed to other parts of America and the world. But let us not forget the unique status of California as a significant generator of so many of Americas innovative developments, including hippie culture, gay liberation, the environmental movement, the tax revolt and Reaganism, the ascendance of tech and much more. Whether or not you like all of these, a poorer, less special California may not be in our long-term interests as a nation.

For all the bashing of the tech companies that goes on these days, we may be sorry to see their culture, and their home, becomesignificantly diminished.

(1) Such generalizations usually trigger a lot of pushback, but still it is my personal impression that average employees at say Google or Facebook are quicker and brighter than those in most companies on the East Coast or elsewhere, with the exception of the quantitative financial sector.

(2) Disclaimer: the major tech companies (or affiliated foundations) discussed here are donors or potential donors to my university and research center.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include "Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero."

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Original post:

Big Tech Wont Be the Same If Everyone Works From Home - Yahoo Finance

Sometime around dinnertime, the two sides fought for 40 minutes over the security of the southern border.

But the most incendiary exchange took place between the normally low-key Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), an acolyte of President Donald Trump who specializes in throwing rhetorical bombs at Democrats.

The spat took place as Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) offered an amendment to order federal agencies to consider whether antifa, the militant anti-fascist movement, is a terrorist organization. Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) dismissed the proposal as arrant nonsense itself an extraordinary comment by a chair in the middle of a markup while Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) claimed that antifa was a figment of Donald Trumps imagination.

Richmond, for his part, had clearly had enough of what he believed was Republican stalling. Richmond an African American lawmaker who is the House Democratic liaison to Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee lashed out at Republicans for trying to distract from the underlying issue of police violence.

To my colleagues, especially the ones that keep introducing amendments that are a tangent and a distraction from what we are talking about, you all are white males, you never lived in my shoes and you do not know what its like to be an African American male, Richmond declared. All the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are white.

Gaetz interrupted Richmond to ask whether he was certain that none of us have nonwhite children, because you reflected on your black son and you said none of us could understand.

But Richmond cut off Gaetz: It is about black males, black people in the streets that are getting killed. And if one of them happens to be your kid, Im concerned about him, too. And clearly Im more concerned about him than you are.

That enraged Gaetz, who angrily declared: Youre claiming youre more concerned for my family than I do? Who in the hell do you think you are? You dont know how much we care about our families. This is outrageous.

Was that a nerve? Richmond asked.

Youre damn right it was a nerve, Gaetz responded.

The exchange was one of several heated moments in the daylong session. The Judiciary Committee, just six months removed from impeaching the president, includes some of Congress most ardent Trump critics and defenders, and the hangover from that battle still reverberates.

Rep. Cedric Richmond speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup on Wednesday. | Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP

There were numerous detours from the issue of police brutality, as Republicans brought up topics such as Big Tech censorship, anti-abortion rights and lawlessness in Seattles protest zone.

The "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone," in fact, was a recurring theme throughout the proceedings. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) at one point offered an amendment to cut off federal police grants to any municipality that allows an autonomous zone to be created within its borders.

Rep. Pramilya Jayapal (D-Wash.), whose district is home to the Seattle zone, was upset by Republicans repeated attempts to raise the issue. She blamed Fox News and right-wing media pundits for what she said was misinformation being spread about her hometown.

I dont know how to keep telling people that what theyre saying are lies, Jayapal said, growing exasperated as she again slapped down Republican accusations of a law-enforcement-free micro-state in her district. Please stop this nonsense and lets get back to the bill that's at hand.

Multiple Democrats, meanwhile, repeatedly used their time to call out Republicans in the hearing room who occasionally took off their masks in violation of a guidance circulated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Monday. Under the new coronavirus guidance, Pelosi permitted chairmen to instruct the sergeant-at-arms to bar anyone who refuses to cover their face from a hearing room.

After several stern reminders, Nadler told Republicans he wouldnt recognize anyone who is not wearing a mask. Despite the warning, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), remained maskless for much of the hearing. Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) declared that he didnt wear a mask because he didnt think contracting coronavirus was any more a health threat than getting the flu, and he dared Nadler to cite a House rule that required masks to be worn. But McClintock did bow to Nadlers demands and put on a mask so he could be recognized to speak.

Still, it was a historic day for the subject matter alone a debate on systemic racism and police brutality consuming both chambers of Congress amid nationwide demonstrations.

For many Democrats, the issue is intensely personal. Eight lawmakers on the panel are African American, including the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), and the House Democratic Caucus chair, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Many have been introducing bills for years to rein in police power.

The Democratic roster also includes freshman Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), whose teenage son, who was black, was murdered by a white man over the volume of his music. McBath sat in the front row on Wednesday, just steps away from Gaetz.

And it was those voices, other Democrats say, they intended to showcase.

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who is white, said his first instinct was to introduce his own legislation on policing reforms. But he said he was urged by black friends and staff to leave it up to the CBC.

I think Cedric [Richmond] said it best, speaking to Republicans: You dont know what its like to be in my shoes, Swalwell said in an interview. Im not in the shoes of my CBC colleagues. Their ideas are going to be more meaningful, so Im just trying to listen to debate, rather than interject.

But the panels meeting on Wednesday also made history as the Houses first-ever virtual markup amid the global pandemic.

The proceedings took place in a cavernous room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol, with members spread 6 feet apart, only a handful of staffers and even fewer reporters. Roughly a dozen members took part in the hearing via remote hookups from their districts.

With each roll-call vote, the clerk looked not only to each member in the room, but also to a massive TV screen that showed the livestream video of members in California, Washington and Texas.

The bill was ultimately approved with zero Republican amendments, sending it to the House floor for a vote on June 25 when it is expected to pass largely along party lines. It will then likely languish in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said the chamber will take up the GOPs own version of policing reforms.

In both bills, the biggest challenge is how to overhaul decades of systemic racism in police departments without causing permanent rifts between officers and the communities they serve.

Theyre being hunted down like theyre the enemy of society. Yes, we want to protect black lives, and all lives, including those who put theirs on the line, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) said, noting members of his own family who are in law enforcement.

Im sorry, I get emotional about this, but its an emotional subject.

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Antifa, Big Tech and abortion: Republicans bring culture war to police brutality debate - POLITICO

Attorney General William Barr said Sunday that the primary motive behind the Justice Departments push to reform Section 230 liability protections for big tech corporations is to preserve free speech following a progressive trend in selective censorship.

Barr said on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo that the idea behind the initial protections provided under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act was to encourage platforms to take down obscene content while promoting an open forum to all users. Recent events however, encapsulated in last weeks attempts by Google and NBC News to de-platform The Federalist show online companies abusing Section 230 protections to censor unwelcome narratives.

We wanted to encourage platforms to take off obscene material or harassing material or other kinds of offensive material, Barr said, explaining that doing so would prevent a company from being deemed a publisher. Unfortunately, [companies] started taking down view points and started really being selective and based on whether they agreed with the viewpoint or not taking it down, and that should make them a publisher.

The Justice Department unveiled several reforms last week aiming to curb big tech immunity to secure free and open access to the 21st century public square monopolized by tech giants in the Silicon Valley. The department is requesting that corporations clarify websites terms of service and have a reasonably based reason for stripping down content while preserving companies rights to take down unlawful posts. Barr said companies also must give people notice that their content will be ripped off the site with a process to dispute the action.

Continued here:

Barr: Changes To Big Tech Protections Are Meant To Protect Free Speech - The Federalist

There is a reason that photography and videography are frowned upon at protests like the ones currently sweeping the nation: Surveillance capitalism has made it easy for even masked protesters to be identified. Both authorities and everyday citizens have access to search tools that can "out" someone from even the tiniestclues; even peaceable demonstrators are right to fear being fired or publicly shunned if their presence at a protest is discovered and then widely broadcast. Thus it is no accident that civil rights and privacy are intimately interlinked. Indeed, as law enforcement departments have become more militarized, they have equipped themselves with increasingly sophisticated surveillance technology from devices that intercept cell phone signals to backdoors into social media sites.

Yet the civil rights battle over the right privacy is not waged on the street with protest signs and banners at least, not generally. Privacy struggles are waged in more subtle ways, often through individual choices we make on our gadgets. We are told to "resist" by abandoning digital services; to "break up with Google Maps," so as to prevent some of our personal data from falling into the hands of the corporations who profit off of it.

Yet this very neoliberal notion of personal agency fails to acknowledge the role these services play in modern life. Being asked to resist only punishes those of us struggling to preserve our privacy. To imagine a world where privacy is preserved we need to explore what privacy truly means and to name it, for to name something is to own it.

What does it mean to see privacy as a civil rights struggle? The collapse of our privacy is exposing each of us to palpable risks: the erosion of the right to pray, to study, to congregate, or to participate in our democracy. In a digital world, privacy is the barrier between civil society and racial, political, or religious profiling writ large.

The rise of surveillance capitalism the buying and selling of our identities and our data may herald the death knell of privacy. Social media and targeted online advertising are designed to allure us; in the process, we are losing our rights to anonymity and accelerating the erosion of our civil rights. Proposed individual "solutions" such as configuring our social media privacy settings or using the anonymous Tor web browser are at best half-measures. A personal example best illustrates why.

Like 21.5 million Americans, I too had my personal information stolen by Chinese hackers in the 2015 breach of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). To compensate me for their failure to protect my records (and that of every member of my family and relatives) I was provided with credit monitoring services from Experian, one of the big three credit bureaus. The primary result of this service is that I'm now flooded with offers to sign up for new credit cards carefully selected by Experian based on my credit score. My reward for being an OPM breach victim is to receive targeted spam that uses my personal information to benefit Experian and its commercial partners.

With the arrival of COVID-19, and the subsequent demands for contact tracing, we are all about to have our own individual privacy breach. In order to be effective, the results of any COVID-19 testing will need to be shared far beyond just you and your doctor. Counties, states, and possibly even national agencies will need access to test results. At scale, truly effective contact tracing will likely require very detailed location information, the kind your phone can trivially provide. In the current situation, your data won't be hacked by a foreign government, but freely given to assist with public safety.

Like many of us in the middle class, I and most writers on privacy tend to focus on the visible accoutrements of status, i.e., our phones, our online services, and our social media profiles. And with good reason, these are at the intersection of surveillance capitalism and consumers: services that have been instrumented to feed your personal information back into the engine powering those very services.

But the stakes are much higher than you may realize, for privacy is truly our civil rights struggle in the 21st century. Privacy violations are a gateway to identity-based targeting, which singles out individuals by race, religion, or gender identity. Yet with over 1 billion, mostly apathetic users, fighting Google (or Facebook or Experian for that matter) may move you to turn your despair into resignation.

So what does a world where our privacy is preserved look like?

Privacy and personal information are not the same

Many headlines call out the demise of privacy, but what they really mean is that some of your personal information is being sold, or stolen, or simply misused. The two concepts are not quite the same. It is reasonable to consider the loss of personal information under the general heading of privacy, but separating the two concepts opens the door to a more effective conversation about how to protect them both.

When we read about Facebook or Google (or our own government) wanting to listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, or review your Facebook feed, we're talking about privacy, pure and simple. Privacy in this case means freedom to engage in conversation or thought without unwanted or unknown surveillance. This is the notion of privacy that most of us think about when using the word "private." Our outrage is palpable when this notion of privacy is egregiously violated. Even Amazon was forced to respond to public outrage when it was revealed that Amazon employees could listen to your Alexa commands. (Amazon recently announced that they'd enable "options" that permit you to block sub-contractors of Amazon to eavesdrop on your requests to Amazon Alexa.)

Protecting one's personal information takes us into a different realm with more everyday practical implications. When I give Google my phone number in exchange for a Gmail or Google Voice account, I'm exchanging my data for a service. And I suspect most of us are fine with this type of value-based trade-off. Google needs to know where to route my Google Voice phone calls or how to text me an alert related to my account. It's Google's subsequent reuse of this information where things start to go awry.

Whether it's Google, Facebook, or the gym down the street, companies reuse, release, and resell this personal information. They allow third-parties to use this information to figure out what ads to show you in your account. Most people who spend time online are familiar with this experience, which does not always feel intrusive. Just the other day I was researching the dog food we feed our dogs and by that evening Google had displayed several ads for dog food brands in my Gmail inbox.

Dog food is only the beginning. If you do a quick Google search of anyone's name, you'll find dozens of offers to sell you a background check and other information about the subject of your search, (as a side note, many of these services are owned by the same company, they merely rebrand themselves to fool you). In the digital world your personal data is collected, repackaged, then correlated with other information to enrich the commercial understanding of you as a consumer. Even a cursory examination of the websites you visit will quickly reveal your political and sexual orientation, your racial identity, your ethnic heritage, and socio-economic status. Add to that your buying history, your Facebook friends, the people you follow on Twitter or Instagram, and a detailed profile of you emerges that probably transcends your own understanding of yourself.

Even if you feel comfortable with targeted advertising, the use of your personal information as fuel for the digital economy has a sinister aftermath few realize.

Privacy equals civil rights

Oppression originates whenever one group marks another group as "other," then uses that "otherness" to isolate, discriminate, and disempower. Often the markers for discriminatory behavior are obvious: darker skin, for example, or observation of gender.

But what if every marker of your individuality were known and sold, accessible to advertisers without your knowledge? The potential for manipulation or oppression is palpable, as one could easily use personal information for these suspect marking purposes. In 2016, the Russian Internet Research agency used Facebook to target ads at Black voters, ads designed to depress their voter turnout. Facebook had already siphoned up all of their vital personal details; all that the Russian Internet Research agency had to do was click a few buttons picking out the demographic they wished to target.

A 2016 NPR article mentions that the Iraqi army used Facebook data to identify students attending an ISIS run school. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook data that was inappropriately acquired was used to create unusually manipulative advertising for valuable voter demographics. And let's not forget this horrific tidbit, that Facebook "played a determining role" in the mass slaughter and rape of Rohingya in Myanmar, according to the U.N.

These examples are points along a spectrum of uses of your personal information. Finding terrorists using social media should be a good thing. Targeting groups of voters by their age and income levels makes sense if you're trying to effectively use your limited campaign advertising resources.

Yet now that technology-mediated services have an outsize ability to shape culture at large, the malicious use of this same personal information threatens to undermine every advance made by modern liberal society. This is why I call privacy the last line of defense in the battle for civil liberties.

Imagine an Uber-like service that used publicly traded information associating your phone number to your race, and used that pairing to provide slightly poorer service to African Americans. Or a real estate site that used such data to surreptitiously tailor the house listings presented to you based on your assumed religious or ethnic background. What if ICE quietly bought ads on sites offering immigration assistance to migrants, only to raid and arrest everyone who clicked "I'd like to hire an attorney."

Race, ethnicity, and religion aren't the only types of personal information that can be maliciously exploited. With the utter abandonment of principled politics and the open use of the federal instruments of administration for political aims, profiling has taken on an even more ominous direction.

There are signs that regulators are catching on. Indeed, after the announcement of a $5 billion dollar fine levied against Facebook, you could be forgiven for thinking "finally, someone is doing something to protect our privacy."

You'd be wrong. All of the regulations imposed on the major data brokers suffer from one fatal flaw: they reflect a belief that a statutory, regulatory response to this problem can succeed. One might say "If Facebook violated their terms of use, then we must pass a regulation forbidding them from doing that" or "if Amazon's employees have access to Alexa commands, they should stop that practice." But none of these proposals fundamentally address when it is permissible to collect personal information and what can be done with it.

Preserving our privacy

If regulation is not enough, how are we to protect our privacy? Thus far, regulations do not clearly address when it's permissible to collect personal information and what can be done with it, and the fines are rarely punitive enough to change behavior. If we think broadly of privacy as a resource to be valued, perhaps we can find some insight on how to protect it.

Imagine you come to work one day, and find someone has put a nude picture of you on the wall. You quickly have it removed but the embarrassment and anger lingers. Eventually, even that fades maybe you even move to a new job where no one knows you as "the naked person." Embarrassing, but you recover. For those who have had their personal information stolen, there is no "but you recover." It is impossible to fully remove published information from the digital web. Even if you could miraculously convince every legitimate web service to remove your data, you can never convince those who illicitly deal in personal data to erase it. This immutability of stolen personal data is part of the horror of modern crimes such as revenge porn.

This is again why an incremental, regulatory based approach to protecting personal information will always fail: because a wound to our digital privacy never heals. We can't wait for a loss, then regulate the circumstances that led to it. By then it is too late. Privacy must be preserved, not conserved; that is why I advocate for a "preservationist" approach.

The preservationist solution is simple and easy to visualize. Imagine a world where we didn't have to figure out how to rein in Facebook. Where creating a set of regulations wasn't something we had to do, but rather Facebook (or Google, or the furniture store down the street) had to figure out how to operate with the principle that personal information may not be bought or sold. That is, we preserve our privacy by simply forbidding our personal information from being used as a commodity. Would this eliminate the need for statutes protecting our personal information? No, we'd still want to regulate how and when a service provider could ask for and how they must secure your personal data. But we'd have a principled floor a bright line not to be crossed eliminating some of the worst abuses.

Would this mean the end of Facebook or Google? Of course not. These companies have legions of bright energetic people working for them and they'd quickly adapt. Capitalism, warts and all, is an incredibly effective means of focusing humans on specific problems. Nor does this mean that these companies wouldn't be able to provide services to you. Indeed, with proper assurances on data handling there's nothing to prevent you providing personal information to a company in order for them to provide a service. Google needs my cell phone number so they can route those Google Voice calls to me. But they'd not be permitted to re-use it or sell it.

With the potential arrival of a new administration in Washington, and new faces in Congress, now is the time for optimism and activism. The potential nightmares of contact tracing, social distance monitoring, and mass testing only increase the urgency of addressing these issues. As citizens we must require candidates to elevate the status of privacy as an issue that differentiates them from the status quo. Privacy is the spine of the body politic. Preventing the sale of our personal information is the only effective tool left to preserve our civil rights as they are assailed by both commercial and governmental bodies. People are not a commodity, and we need to legislate that it is wrong toimbuehumans with attributes we reserve for property. It is deeply saddening that we need to call for laws to say:I am not for sale.

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We're losing the war against surveillance capitalism because we let Big Tech frame the debate - Salon