Subhed: "The truth begins putting its pants on."
Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#42"Yahoo went to bat for its users – not because it had to, and not because of a possible PR benefit" Good for them, but also perhaps motivated from poor PR resulting from this episode: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Yahoo!#Outing_of_C...
Even if the incident with screwing over the chinese dissidents is the entire reason they fought the NSA in court that does not subtract one iota from the good karma they deserve for fighting the NSA in court.
People who learn from their mistakes deserve at least as much praise as the ones who got it right from the beginning (the list of which seems to be exceptionally short in this case).
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#43Notice the name of the law used is mentioned in this article.
Modern newspeak and equivalent English terms: Department of Homeland Security - Department of State Security Public Safety - Police Department of Defense - Department of War Enhanced interrogation techniques - Torture
Public Safety includes way more than Police; there's the fire brigades, the emergency medical services, the DMV and more.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#44The complete tally for different companies is here: https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013
I suppose the big empty space on the right is where "Respects users' privacy in their own business practices" should be. But of course this is only about the Big Bad Government. It's an interesting cultural difference how privacy suddenly becomes in issue in the US now that it's about the government, and totally fine when people were being tracked an profiled for profit.
There's a key difference.
When it's the government, there's a chance a big black van will pull up next to you and haul you away for the rest of your life.
A corp is likely just trying to manipulate you into buying their worthless junk. Not good, but at least you're not dead or imprisoned.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#45Only in 2005, Yahoo helped the Chinese regime prosecute a journalist. That wasn't the only time that happened, either. (Source: NYT - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/business/worldbusiness/07i... )
I'm tired of this example. AFAIR, Yahoo got a valid court order to turn over information, and they complied because they had a presence there. No other company: not Google, not Microsoft, not AOL would have done anything different.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#46The complete tally for different companies is here: https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-2013
not surprsed to see dropbox rated so well. My friend used to work there, and even though they split over differences, he commended them for truly respecting user privacy and that it is one thing that dbox absolutely gets right.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#47Notice the name of the law used is mentioned in this article.
Protect America Act?
US legislation often seems to have titles like that - 'America Invents Act' or 'Stop Online Piracy Act'. Legislation here in the UK has much more prosaic, factual titles, like the "Apprenticeships and Skills (Public Procurement Contracts) Bill".
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern newspeak and equivalent English terms: Department of Homeland Security - Department of State Security Public Safety - Police Department of Defense - Department of War Enhanced interrogation techniques - Torture
Public Safety includes way more than Police; there's the fire brigades, the emergency medical services, the DMV and more.
That's true, but to me lumping in the gendarme with firefighters and EMS is pretty Orwellian language engineering.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There is always a choice to be made… No, there isn't, in case you haven't been paying attention. When it comes to NSA, there is no "they" anymore. In the eyes of NSA, a company is not a whole, but rather a group of individuals that can face jail time, individually. And yes, "legally" speaking, companies and individuals supposedly can fight back, but they are coerced into doing it in secret. Doing otherwise can lead…
So Yahoo! "fighting back" apparently was apart of the smoke and mirrors, since apparently they have no choice what so ever except to bend over and take it from the surveillance state? > Doing otherwise can lead to the labeling of individuals as national security threats or even potential terrorists, after which all gloves are off. Are you suggesting that if in the event of a CEO or shareholders of multinational corpo…
"they have no choice what so ever except to bend over and take it from the surveillance state?"
Yep. I guarantee that as well as taking the process through the courts, they have also been obeying the existing law. They have no choice.
"Are you suggesting that if in the event of a CEO or shareholders of multinational corporations deciding not to comply with secret orders then they will be labeled by the state to the public as terrorists and national security threats?"
or child molesters, or rapists, or tax fraudsters, or anything that can be found and has the smallest chance of sticking. There is a pretty good history of this, including Assange, and the CEO of some telco whose name I forget. It is a pretty standard way for Intelligence departmentsto get what they want, see the history of intelligence companies.
The NSA have access to all our communications, finding something to use as blackmail isn't going to be hard.
"If one needs the populace at large in order to discern whether the actions undertaken by the state or any of it's outsourced entities are reprehensible or not, they we have bigger problems at hand…"
we honestly do. The actions of the state are moving beyond the common understanding of the social contract.
Re: Yahoo's Fight for its Users Earns the Company Special Recognition by EFF
#50Companies should be commended for their efforts to fight these orders. However, let's not forget that Yahoo also handed over information to the Chinese government that led to the arrest and prolonged imprisonment of multiple people, and then tried to cover up their behavior by pretending they didn't know why the information was being requested. I suspect that the backlash from those actions may have led the company t…
I don't think that's how it works. Yahoo went all-in with China and has significant staff and hardware and user records located in Chinese jurisdiction. Once you make that initial mistake you're basically fucked when it comes to resisting the Chinese government, because they'll just throw your people in jail, or confiscate servers.
In America there are appeals processes, so Yahoo could avail themselves of those.
So Yahoo may well have had a consistent "fight for the users" policy, but were constrained differently in different jurisdictions.