
Technology firms as a threat to basic liberties - RickJWagner
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/03/how-silicon-valley-went-from-dont-be-evil-to-doing-evil/
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montrose
This headline is valuable in being so precisely mistaken.

I've been around Silicon Valley since the late 90s. It hasn't changed. What
has changed is the amount of attention you can get by attacking it.

When Google was little, it seemed cute and inconsequential. To attack it would
have seemed mean (and inconsequential). Now that Google is big, attacking it
reads instead as "speaking truth to power." But Google is no more evil now
than it was in the past. Which is not to say that Google was ever perfect,
just that the change in reporters' attitudes toward it derives – whether the
reporters realize it or not – from nothing more than its increased size.

~~~
jamra
Well, given the Snowden leaks and knowing the forced complacency with
government surveillance, I think that people are just waking up to just how
invasive technology is in our lives.

The direction we're moving towards seems to be one in which Amazon controls
what you can buy by blocking out competing products. Google controlling what
you can learn by censoring results based on politics. Facebook controls which
news you read by allowing for purchased content. It may be related to the size
of the company, but I think it's more related to the general conscientiousness
of society as a whole and the awareness of how dangerous these companies are.

~~~
skj
> Google controlling what you can learn by censoring results based on
> politics.

Is there an example of this?

~~~
random4369
China. Searching 'tiananmen square' or 'tank' man' won't show any traces of
those events.

~~~
namdnay
As opposed to all the other media in China that will show you those events?
It's hardly "Google Censorship", it's Chinese law that Google follows. Just
like DMCA takedown requests in the US.

~~~
candu
This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal,
and how they are not usually the same thing.

Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where
"following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would
now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at
what point does following the law itself become immoral?

There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA
takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on
the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics
/ morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we
consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much
stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of
reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost
when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on
any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)

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stevievee
What bothers me about some of these larger tech companies (especially Google)
is that they patronize non-expert users. For instance, Google is getting a
steep discount on very high quality machine learning training data and
pretends to be oblivious to this in the public eye.

Google builds its image recognition algorithm using Google Photos, Google
trains its driving algorithms using Google Maps, Google trains its NLP
algorithms using Google Home. None of this is explicitly told to its "free"
users. I'm starting to think the training data I'm providing is worth more
than what I am receiving (free photo storage, traffic info, voice controls).

Side note: Elon Musk recognizes the advantages these big tech companies have
in this area which is why OpenAI exists. It's not some altruistic endeavor -
it's Elon trying to catch up to the big boys or bring them down to his level
with Government regulation and/or spreading FUD.

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kolbe
Public corporations really can't remain moral given the diffusion of
responsibility effect. There are so many owners of every company, literally
millions of them, that individuals never feel responsible for the evil actions
of their property. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised to hear that Joel
Kotkin, the author of this article, owns Google stock through an index or
mutual fund.

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unicornporn
I scorn this good/evil narrative. It's all economics and politics. Companies
are not out there to "be good", whatever their marketing and PR tells you.
Companies make money and these companies finally found a way to make money
from our attention and personal data.

Until they are regulated, they will proceed doing so with little regard to our
privacy and mental health. GDPR is looking good.

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abhv
* How FB is evil: They create an addictive, time-wasting service that encourages narcissism, they manipulate people's news feeds and thus their worldviews, and they inadvertently bias important societal decisions.

* How Amazon is evil: They lure people into buying from them, soon you will only be able to buy from them and the damage will be felt; they create addicting home surveillance devices that pretend to be helpful ?

* How Apple is evil: They engineer a basic necessity to break down every 18 months, they introduce progressively more useless "features" into their new products, they rapidly change standards in order to force people to buy stupid connectors, they no longer create amazing products? [Really is this evil?]

* Exactly HOW is Google doing evil now? The only argument I can see is that they collect a lot of information about you which they plan to use later. They still provide a quintessential information service. You can avoid their ads very easily.

~~~
ionvoe3w
How google is evil:

1\. AMP is eating the open web [https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-
amp/](https://80x24.net/post/the-problem-with-amp/) 2\. The youtube algorithm
leads users "down hateful rabbit holes."
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-
youtu...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-
algorithm-distorts-truth) 3\. Google is using monopolistic practices to favor
its own products. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-
against...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against-
google.html)

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arca_vorago
One more thing RMS was always right about, and why copyleft (gplv3) is so
important. If you aren't on gnu/linux I feel sorry for how controlled and left
behind you are going to be, as control was always what this was all about.

All the apologists here disgust me.

