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Tech and Liberty

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Re: Tech and Liberty

#161

Post by SllX »

jeegsy wrote: post #160
SllX wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or we move on. Mastodon and the like seem to show promise. Reddit is around for something in between Mastodon and Facebook/Twitter, although it is ultimately susceptible to the same problems as the latter. Snapchat isn’t nothing, and while TikTok has problems stemming from its country of origin, it also isn’t nothing. I would say we have a lot of choices of platforms. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t the end of…

What happens when there is collusion to exclude between all these supposedly separate platforms? I seem to recall a certain Jones guy who was deplatformed by nearly all the major social networks in a single day. Any holdouts (twitter) were thereafter hounded into submission by the media. The market aint working like it should I think.

Alex Jones.

He still has his radio show. He still has his website. He still has a Wikipedia page. I’m not going to go trolling through a bunch of social networks I don’t use to see if I can find the guy, but presumably he has a means of asserting an online presence somewhere besides his website.

I think his podcast was removed from the Apple Podcasts Directory, but if there’s a valid feed URL, then there isn’t anything stopping you from pasting the URL in to any podcast app.

That’s just online. Again, I don’t know the guy’s life, but there isn’t anything stopping him from having an active social life or a prolific writing career. I don’t like the guy, but are you going to tell me the guy has no options just because Facebook and Twitter kicked him out of their gardens?

Re: Tech and Liberty

#162

Post by KozmoNau7 »

lliamander wrote: post #159
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics. The idea that the mainstream media is somehow overwhelmingly progressive is something conservatives like to parrot, but I've never found it to have any basis in truth. The "leftist" big media outlets are really centrist, at best.

> The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics. I'm going to have to ask for a citation for that. Unless you are suggesting that supporting the interests of the rich elite is an essentially conservative position (a claim which both the rich elite and conservatives would deny). If you look at the politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file)…

Supporting the rich elite is literally the basis of the current Republican party platform. Along with a not insignificant amount of xenophobia and distaste for the poor working class.

All of the major media outlets (which is what I am talking about, not academia or entertainment) are owned by big backers of the Republican party. It's publicly available information, look it up yourself.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#163

Post by thundergolfer »

lliamander wrote: post #159
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics. The idea that the mainstream media is somehow overwhelmingly progressive is something conservatives like to parrot, but I've never found it to have any basis in truth. The "leftist" big media outlets are really centrist, at best.

> The mainstream media is overwhelmingly owned by the rich elite, with deep connections to conservative politics. I'm going to have to ask for a citation for that. Unless you are suggesting that supporting the interests of the rich elite is an essentially conservative position (a claim which both the rich elite and conservatives would deny). If you look at the politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file)…

> politics of all the people (executives and rank-and-file) working in the institutions of media, entertainment, and academia, you'll find that a significant majority are left of center

Where is the evidence of this? I know of no surveying so broad as to include the executives and 'rank-and-file' in media and entertainment.

Even if your claim is supported, we have 2 problems. The first is basically the "vegan waiters at steak restaurants" retort, which is to suggest that below the top executive level of the hierarchy employees have increasingly little power over their organisation, such that those at the bottom are like vegan waiters at steak restaurants who have no power to change the menu despite their politics.

The 2nd problem is basically that "left of center" != "progressive". The majority of the ostensibly left-leaning medial is still broadly pro things that progressives are against. Some examples would include single-payer healthcare, animal rights, public higher education, the Green New Deal, and anti-imperialism.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#164

Post by thundergolfer »

dave_b wrote: post #74
thundergolfer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by your first paragraph. In what way do progressives control the public space? Republicans are far more powerful than progressives in all branches of government (and remember Democrat != progressive). Corporations obviously dominate corporate space, which is a large sphere of life in the USA, and not at all “public space”. So what’s left?

By “public space,” I meant the predominant avenues for public discourse (maybe not the best choice of words). Mainstream media, tech platforms, and universities are the specific things I had in mind.

Ok fine, but I hope it's now a little clearer that it's weird to refer to actually private, corporate space as "public space".

It's I'd venture a symptom of a culture dominated by capitalism and corporatism, such that the former two things become so dominate that their presence is invisible. Malls and Facebook pages become "public spaces" in the minds of citizens even though they are spaces, public regulation notwithstanding, controlled by the rich and existing in the main to profit them.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#165

Post by matheusmoreira »

devnulloverflow wrote: post #106
matheusmoreira wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy mavens are going to lose. Controlling what can and can't be shared is just like copyright enforcement. If they want privacy, the answer is to not share information at all or share only with trustworthy people. If some post leaks, all bets are off. There is nothing they can do about it and that's how it should be.

> copyright enforcement. Ahh, but copyright won the last war, by moving to centralised platforms. The privacy mavens are going to lose, but they are going to lose to Big Brother, not to decentralisation.

They won by making services that are good enough for most people to not bother infringing, not by enforcing copyrights. Now they're getting greedy and fragmenting the market, making life needlessly difficult for consumers. I have no doubt lots of people will turn to "piracy" because of that.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#166

Post by seanhunter »

stickfigure wrote: post #155
seanhunter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium. Facebook shared data that people had shared with their friends with Cambridge Analytica. That's not remotely in dispute - both Facebook and CA have admitted that. CA used Facebook's API and Facebook's servers gave CA the data. People's friends didn't share that data with CA.

A genie grants you one wish; Facebook has been replaced with a decentralized social network based on open protocols. To your horror, your friends _still_ install insipid quiz apps and grant them permission to all of "your" data. And now there is nothing to stop it and no one to blame. From a systems perspective, the fact that the medium is currently named Facebook is irrelevant. The primary actors in the Cambridge An…

I'm not sure why you think your hypothetical changes the fact that facebook actually did share the data with Kogan (and thereby Cambridge Analytica) in the real case, and blaming the "friends" avoids responsibility by the actors in this case who provided the medium and those who knowingly exploited it.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. ...

Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends’ data....

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that." - Mark Zuckerberg as reported https://qz.com/1234956/read-mark-zuckerbergs-full-facebook-s... and elsewhere)

You could as usefully blame yourself for sharing anything with your friends - after all if you had not done so, they couldn't have shared it with someone you didn't like. "He who would keep a secret must keep secret that he has a secret to keep" as Goethe wrote.

It's certainly conceptually possible to design a system without facebook such that your friends share data they shouldn't. The real world also works in this way - people are indiscreet and share things which were told them in confidence.

In the real facebook/CA case, the friends did not knowingly share their network's data with CA, they did a personality test quiz set by a social science researcher. That quiz used the facebook API to grab data on the social network of everyone who participated which was then sold to Cambridge Analytica by the developer. Given that facebook's privacy settings have been the subject of studies in UX "dark pattern" design (eg https://fil.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/201... and elsewhere) it seems unreasonable to consider this 3rd party sharing to be consensual.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#167

Post by seanhunter »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #152
seanhunter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook didn't share your data with Cambridge Analtyica; your friends did. Facebook was just the medium. Facebook shared data that people had shared with their friends with Cambridge Analytica. That's not remotely in dispute - both Facebook and CA have admitted that. CA used Facebook's API and Facebook's servers gave CA the data. People's friends didn't share that data with CA.

It didn't like, round trip through them. But people's friends did authorize CA to read that data; otherwise CA wouldn't have been able to use the API to get it.

That's not true. People's friends had no relationship with CA. They ran an app by a third-party (Aleksandr Kogan) which harvested the data and then he sold it to CA.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#168

Post by dave_b »

thundergolfer wrote: post #164
dave_b wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By “public space,” I meant the predominant avenues for public discourse (maybe not the best choice of words). Mainstream media, tech platforms, and universities are the specific things I had in mind.

Ok fine, but I hope it's now a little clearer that it's weird to refer to actually private, corporate space as "public space". It's I'd venture a symptom of a culture dominated by capitalism and corporatism, such that the former two things become so dominate that their presence is invisible. Malls and Facebook pages become "public spaces" in the minds of citizens even though they are spaces, public regulation notwith…

It’s just a confusion between two different valid definitions of the word public, not some indication of the state of the culture.

Public/private can refer to government vs commercial, or it can refer to “out in the open for all to see” vs “the privacy of your own home.” “Public space” is a common phrase that uses the latter definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_space

Re: Tech and Liberty

#169

Post by stickfigure »

seanhunter wrote: post #166
stickfigure wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A genie grants you one wish; Facebook has been replaced with a decentralized social network based on open protocols. To your horror, your friends _still_ install insipid quiz apps and grant them permission to all of "your" data. And now there is nothing to stop it and no one to blame. From a systems perspective, the fact that the medium is currently named Facebook is irrelevant. The primary actors in the Cambridge An…

I'm not sure why you think your hypothetical changes the fact that facebook actually did share the data with Kogan (and thereby Cambridge Analytica) in the real case, and blaming the "friends" avoids responsibility by the actors in this case who provided the medium and those who knowingly exploited it. "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been workin…

Facebook shared data with Kogan the same way that Google shares my email with people on the To list when I click the 'send' button.

A human being installed a stupid quiz app and explicitly answered "yes" to a dialog saying "would you like to share your friends' info with this app?" We can argue if the UX was good or bad or if users are dumb, but the actor in this situation is not Facebook.

Re: Tech and Liberty

#170

Post by lliamander »

widowlark wrote: post #89
lliamander wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not call this "peer-review" as if it were some sort of scientific process. What you're talking about is a social acceptability test. Now, that's fine , so far as it goes. Every society needs mores and norms to govern behavior (and speech) in order to function. But let's not suppose that suppressing an individual's freedom to express thoughts not pre-approved is going to result in a net win for truth.

>Every society needs mores and norms to govern behavior What we are experiencing today are those new norms

These new norms are hardly universal.
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