
BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie is sounding the alarm about surveillance - walterbell
https://thewalrus.ca/are-you-afraid-of-google-blackberry-cofounder-jim-balsillie-says-you-should-be/
======
aresant
This article is a long winded view of the sophisticated behavior modeling ad-
targeting networks that google and others employ - long on hand wringing and
short on solutions.

Stratchery published a beautiful, irreverent proposal earlier this week to
address this very challenge through a regulatory framework that actually feels
like it could work and I encourage all HN users to absorb:

[https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-
the-...](https://stratechery.com/2019/a-regulatory-framework-for-the-
internet/)

~~~
maksimum
> platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in
> their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers
> separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price
> or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic
> content

The article does a good job of explaining why YouTube and Facebook don't
currently do a good job of currating content, or whether that should even be
their responsibility. It's not about machine learning, it's about price
incentives.

~~~
nnq
Maybe _forcing separation_ of _content providing companies_ and _advertising
companies_ should be the modern equivalent of separating State from Church.

An advertising company would always want to get more and more infos about the
users that it sees as "resources" instead of customers. A content providing
company would be forced to treat its users as actual customers and respect
their rights at least a bit, and would push back against the advertising
company asking for more surveillance data.

Now, unfortunately this _can 't actually work_ because the more an advertising
company makes, the more it can afford to pay the content
creators/channels/providers, and everyone just wants more $.

 _But if anyone has any idea how to make it work, do share!_

------
batbomb
I’d be afraid of Google if I had worked at Blackberry too, just look at the
destruction they did.

~~~
na85
Eh, I think blackberry's destruction was of their own making. They had a huge
head start but failed to embrace apps. The onboarding process for developers
was painful and their devices were chronically underpowered.

They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to
the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.

~~~
29083011397778
Jim Balsillie actually tried to change course, open up, and monetize BBM. He
was shot down hard by the rest of the board, who thought hardware was the way
to go. I can't imagine how much that would sting, considering a couple years
later Whatsapp would be sold for billions. Taken from the book mentioned in
the article actually, _Losing the Signal_ , before anyone asks for a source.

~~~
na85
I was an avid bbm user and when they brought in the monetization changes I
quickly grew to detest the app.

If that was his vision at work, then I'm not surprised it failed. Monetized
bbm was/is a spammy, irritating mess.

------
AFascistWorld
Any of these big tech companies is not your friend.

------
Zhenya
Pretty rich, coming from the co-founder of a company that willfully handed
over encryption keys of user data to authoritarian and brutal governments[1].

[1][https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackberry-saudi/rim-
to-s...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blackberry-saudi/rim-to-share-
some-blackberry-codes-with-saudis-source-idUSTRE6751Q220100810)

~~~
cantrevealname
I would fully trust an encrypted communication system only if it is (1) end-
to-end encrypted, (2) open source (or at least with source code available and
buildable from source), and (3) based on a sound security design. Having said
that, however, you're being very hard on Research In Motion (now called
BlackBerry Ltd).

From everything I read and know about RIM, the enterprise level BlackBerry
systems were unbreakable to governments and the keys were generated and
controlled entirely by the customers (not by RIM). The pissed-off governments
demanded access and threatened to ban RIM--the market leader at the time. I
think the first to demand access was India and RIM put up a years-long fight
against them before they capitulated.

It's easy to say that they should have taken a principled stand and lost the
market. (In a similar vein, RIM had to pay a slimy patent troll $612.5 million
dollars [not a typo, more than half a billion!] by a certain deadline
otherwise the judge in the case would have _banned them from the entire US
market_ until they had a trial. The patents in question were ludicrously
obvious and should never have been granted. I'd like to have seen RIM take a
stand and fight the troll, but I can forgive them for having chosen not to go
bankrupt.)

At the other extreme of corporate misconduct, are you aware that AT&T has been
giving the call records (meta data) of every person in the United States to
the NSA for _decades_? If Snowden's info is correct, they even allowed live
tapping into phone calls for every phone call that passed through their
network.

Furthermore, here's a quote from the article you linked to: _" RIM, unlike
rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers
located in Canada and other countries such as Britain."_ I have a high degree
of respect for Apple (and somewhat for Nokia), but isn't it odd that RIM was
being targeted by the host country but Nokia and Apple weren't? Perhaps they
had a way to monitor communications (or at least get meta data) on Nokia and
Apple phones, but they couldn't monitor RIM because RIM maintained its servers
outside of the country.

In summary, cut some slack on RIM. RIM did use good encryption and did put up
a fight. Many other companies have done and are doing much _much_ worse.

~~~
bigprovolone
not sure if you are aware of this story concerning Blackberry

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg77vv/rcmp-
black...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg77vv/rcmp-blackberry-
project-clemenza-global-encryption-key-canada)

~~~
cantrevealname
I hadn't seen that story, thanks for linking it. Just to clarify, that story
is about consumer BlackBerrys which were known to be insecure, where the keys
were at the mercy of RIM's willingness to protect them.

I was talking about enterprise BlackBerry systems being unbreakable to
governments. That story does not contract this. However, it's saddening to
hear that RIM apparently coughed up the keys for consumer BlackBerrys even
though it didn't face an existential threat. If they had refused, I doubt that
they would have been banned in Canada, being their home turf and a darling of
the Canadian industry at the time.

~~~
amaccuish
I believe you are correct. Blackberrys connected to a BES were end-to-end
encrypted before that became mainstream. The key was only stored on the device
and on the server.

For consumer services the story is very different.

------
dosy
it's pretty funny as blackberries used to be the phone of choice for
intelligence services. but now their business has failed he's against people
who are exploiting data. I know he's talking about a different type of data
but it's still funny.

as an aside I'm wondering when the the last nail in the coffin is going to
laid for one of these big tech services. and how are these huge tech companies
going to respond to this increasing government interference.

I'm sort of waiting for one of the big five to go full early-airbnb or Uber
and just start circumventing. a part of me would find this big tech versus big
government civil war out in the open pretty funny.

plus big tech being distracted and hammered by government would provide more
opportunities for startups.

------
IshKebab
I got many paragraphs in with no new information given. Yes we know that
Google allows targeted advertising. It's how they make money. We also know
that they don't sell user information. Neither does Facebook actually - they
just had a stupidly permissive (and _free_ ) API in the past.

------
frolig
"Free as in puppy" is something people say? I don't like this meme.

------
devoply
In the future we are Sims running on Google's computers.

------
guntars
Does a day go by when an article about some version of Google Is Evil doesn’t
make it to the top of Hacker News? It’s ruining the site, imo.

