311–320 of 437 posts
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So Google will either pay up, or exit Australia long enough until the law gets overturned - whichever is cheaper. For massive companies like Google, presenting them with silly fines and taxes is like a truck finding a little speed bump.
Google paid up when the competition regulators in the EU fined them €1.5bn, didn’t they?
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> I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent: The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove. Google, a foreign private entity has no su…
So you are saying democracy is magic?
I'm pointing out some differences between a private entity and a goverment, which the parent commenter either ignored, or forgot to mention when comparing said governement with said private entity.
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> I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent: The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove. Google, a foreign private entity has no su…
So what? Democracy isn’t a sacrament, it doesn’t sanctify the government. Hitler was democratically elected. Democracy does not have moral valence as such.
But I agree that democratic government doesn't automatically justify everything. Minority and fundamental individual rights are a problem. There are a lot of tricky issues with self referentiality if you think about independence movements for instance.
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> I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent: The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove. Google, a foreign private entity has no su…
True, and I absolutely support regulation where necessary. I strongly support regulation that require companies to handle user data in a confidential manner, for example. But that doesn't make all regulation automatically good; I strongly oppose regulation that requires companies to share sensitive user data with anyone who asks for it, for example. And forcing a company to do business it does not want to do, seems u…
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Australia is not (yet?) a Republic
That was probably the least useful thing to criticise in the comment you replied to. I know, I know, pedantry is fun. But I don't think the Queen makes much of a difference to Australia's problems one way or another.
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hehehe. yeah the due diligence document room. and lots of minified JavaScript UI code. I love how companies can say complying with legislation would be overly burdensome. and how governments can make laws that have no technical reality. the interface between tech and law is pretty leaky and inefficient.
In theory a tech-competent judge could enforce laws to be closer to technical reality.
A possible way to counter it would be for the big IT companies to grow a pair - when someone puts such crazy regulation - ban ALL the country from the services and leak ALL the citizens data they have - photos, emails, videos...
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There are lots of examples of where personalization results in a worse experience for users but better metrics for the tech company. Somehow the Instagram ads algorithm has figured out exactly what I’m self conscious about with my own body; all I see are ads for invisible braces, skin cleansers, and hair treatments. I don’t actually want to buy any of these things, and they make me feel bad to look at. A de-personali…
You can click the ... menu, then "hide ad". It will show you fewer similar ads in the future. An unpersonalized IG ad experience would be teenage women's clothing and Netflix branding (assuming you're in the US). You probably don't want that either.
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> but they behave much better than the Australian government, who recently admitted they spy on their citizens [0], can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software [1]. But Google has exactly this. First, it collects and saves all its users' data, and can build very detailed profiles of probably each of us. Second, and perhaps more importantly, all the information going through th…
Murdoch's investigators illegally wiretapped anyone they could to get a scoop, including a murdered child. The process of doing so made it look like she was reading the messages and still alive.
My understanding is that this turned out to be untrue. Wikipedia isn't super clear on this point, but I think it backs me up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
Google evil etc etc aside, they have been decent custodians of their users data. I don't really want to trust Google, but they behave much better than the Australian government, who recently admitted they spy on their citizens [0], can coerce citizens and companies to install backdoors into their companies software [1]. I trust Murdoch less than the government, and much much less than Google. Remember when Murdoch in…
> Google evil etc etc aside, they have been decent custodians of their users data. They've been decent custodians to data they force users to give. It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.
Fair enough.
It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.
I don't necessarily buy this argument. They collect a lot of data, and we could argue whether they need to collect so much data, but that is not necessarily 'stealing' your data.