Tag: Big Tech
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Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy
Written by Issie Lapowsky on Protocol.
”Snyder and others argue these new arrivals, who drape themselves in the flag of competition, are really just concern trolls, capitalizing on fears about Big Tech’s power to cement the position of existing privacy-invasive technologies.”
… ”If the privacy advocates inside the W3C have been put off by Rosewell’s approach, he hasn’t exactly been charmed by theirs either… From his perspective, browsers have too much power over the community, and they use that power to quash conversations that might make them look bad.”
A long read where everyone comes out looking bad. (And those portrayed as the ”defenders of privacy” aren’t necessarily doing so out of the goodness of their hearts either!)
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Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power
Written by Natasha Lomas on Techcrunch.
“Slaughter also argued that it’s important for regulators not to pile all the burden of avoiding data abuses on consumers themselves.
‘I want to sound a note of caution around approaches that are centered around user control,’ she said. ’I think transparency and control are important. I think it is really problematic to put the burden on consumers to work through the markets and the use of data, figure out who has their data, how it’s being used, make decisions… I think you end up with notice fatigue; I think you end up with decision fatigue; you get very abusive manipulation of dark patterns to push people into decisions.
‘So I really worry about a framework that is built at all around the idea of control as the central tenant or the way we solve the problem. I’ll keep coming back to the notion of what instead we need to be focusing on is where is the burden on the firms to limit their collection in the first instance, prohibit their sharing, prohibit abusive use of data and I think that that’s where we need to be focused from a policy perspective.’”
Read ‘Perspectives on tackling Big Tech’s market power’ on the Techcrunch site.
Tagged with: regulation, Big Tech, surveillance capitalism.
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The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech
Written by Safiya U. Noble on Noema.
“Investments in anti-democratic technologies come at an incredible cost to the public at a time when deeper investments should be made in public health, education, public media and abolitionist approaches in the tech sector.”
Read ‘The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech’ on the Noema site.
Tagged with: Big Tech, public goods, society.
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Thousands of contracts highlight quiet ties between Big Tech and U.S. military
Written by April Glaser on NBC News.
“Tech Inquiry’s research comes as technology companies have ramped up efforts to win large military and law enforcement contracts, despite employee activism against the work.”
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“It’s important to recognize that the marketing that happens inside of these companies, assuring workers that what they’re doing is good and that their surveillance program is used for disaster relief and not drone targeting, for instance, is much like the marketing targeted at the public,” [Meredith Whittaker] said.
Tagged with: Big Tech, military, Silicon Valley.