Google bans my events app for referencing Covid-19, or related terms

Contrast the iPhone where the only real things apps get you are push notifications and there’s nothing you can do even if you’re a decent programmer because you’re totally locked out. Plus nowadays we have github so there’s no need to “hunt” for software.

It wasn’t used to track their users, or serve ads, or nag users to come back to Zoom or monitor anything on your machine. It was used so that when you wanted to join a meeting, it would get you into the room completely effortlessly.

Again I just feel like compared to the innumerable ways that big and “well respected” companies are regularly screwing their customers, using a technical hack only to make your product easier to use is in some ways commendable even.

I’ve wasted 15, even 20 minutes on some hour long conference calls just trying to get everyone dialed in and able to hear and talk. I actually chose Zoom because of how hard they worked to make it “Just Work”. I guess I feel like they had their heart in the right place, and didn’t actually abuse their users’ trust like almost every other company I’m forced to put up with.

I think Fortnite is even more ethically clear cut than Zoom though, because Fortnite tried to develop a feature that they have every moral and technical right and justification to do.

I see self-distribution along the lines of self-hosting. It’s feature that we want to be able to exist and be well tested and understood how to “do it right” for strong competitive and anti-censorship reasons.

Fortnite just happened to screw up a specific aspect of the implementation. In some cases you screw up, you patch it, you write a blog post explaining what you got wrong and how you fixed it, and you’re a hero for helping the community learn from your mistake!

I don’t understand why Fortnite got pilloried instead of the community wanting them to succeed so that they could blaze the trail for independent developers in the future?!

Why wasn’t the pressure on Google for not having better documentation and support for what they were trying to do, and for imposing arbitrary technical limitations like not allowing developers to keep the sandbox enabled for side-loaded apps?

Wasn’t it Google that actually found and disclosed the bug in Fortnite’s installer? That’s some serious gray hat level hacking.

If Fortnite had succeeded in mainstreaming the concept of side-loading it might have made it much more popular and pressured Google into not making side-loading technically inferior. That put the fear of God into Google and gave them a massive financial motive to undermine that effort.

It’s not like Google hasn’t badly screwed up many times with Android security in the past.

I actually run my own dovecot and postfix server, and use an SMTP proxy. That way I know I have full custody of my email.

I just use Outlook as a client, and it was surprisingly not awful.

Honestly, encryption and privacy isn't what motivates me. It's the fact Google could delete my data without warning, because they have with others. They also have no support I've ever been able to speak to. Even when I was using GCP, and I was paying Google hundreds for the privilege of decent technical support, it was like pulling teeth to get ahold of someone who could actually help. Not sure if Protonmail is like this, or has ever deleted paid accounts (I have one with them, too), but their vendor lock-in is very real, and it's justified through encryption and privacy measures.

Honey, if I wanted actual privacy and anonymity, I certainly wouldn't use a paid service. There are ways to get an email and server that never asks for your name, and can be paid for in privacy coin. Then, you can own your own VPN, and that's where you proxy. Tor wouldn't help here, since even if you ran a hidden service and SOCKS proxy, you're still screwed if the logs are compromised. So make sure your distro is adequately LUKS encrypted, etc., etc. Best to think hard about your threat model depending on what you want to do. I don't do illegal shit, but I'd just done the thought exercise of how someone would if they lived in a place where stuff we'd consider an infringement on our freedoms an acceptable reason to do something illegal in their jurisdiction.

The United States is a remarkably safe place to do business and live your life, as long as you keep your nose clean and pay your taxes. Have some money stashed away for a good attorney if necessary. Try to make their job easier by not doing anything the cops would need to care about, of course.

But people like easy privacy, and pseudonymity even when they're doing nothing that could even be misinterpreted as illegal. But if they were, they're absolutely doing it wrong if you pay for Protonmail, or don't but sing up with a phone number they pay for or with their personal Gmail address.

The goal of Section 230 is to allow companies to moderate. It was based on two cases: one where a company that tried to moderate harmful content got stuck with liability, and one where a company that did no moderation at all got off by calling itself a platform.

The point of Section 230 is that you should be able to moderate a forum you run or remove malware from the Ubuntu repositories without opening yourself up to liability. There is no exception to Section 230 based on revenue. If you put a paywall up on your forum, you don't suddenly become liable for slander that someone else posts.

I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but if you really wanted to find a way around that, probably the best strategy would be to argue that the company was purposefully disseminating unlawful content. A lot of old pirate hosting sites got hit with this. They weren't liable because they were publishers, they were liable because lawyers argued that piracy was the only reason their services existed, and that in some cases the companies had gone far as to encourage their own employees to upload pirated material.

So I'm not going to make a 100% black-and-white blanket statement; there are ways you could get around Section 230. But none of them really apply to Google. Google isn't building its own ads for Covid misinformation, and it would be hard to argue that banning the Covid keyword was evidence that they actually wanted misinformation to spread.

She isn't going to Github to download Whatsapp either.

IT folks are extremely tech savvy and do not count as normal when it comes to the market as a whole.