Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
And when did you stop voting Tory Tony?
More whataboutery than you could stuff with straw....
Facebook vs World Governments
- Thread starter richardg
- Start date
And when did you stop voting Tory Tony?
More whataboutery than you could stuff with straw....
G
Guest432
Guest
I think you are confused as to what 'surveillance' is, it is not just CCTV on the street.
If the govt were so obsessed with keeping the downtrodden and poor oppressed don't you think the first place they'd be using it was the estates to suppress and monitor dissension?
I suggest you read and understand the subject before posting (your posts have naff all to do with Facebook or internet surveillance)
Caledon1297
pfm Member
Governments, aided and abetted by MSM (the UK being a particularly 'fine' example), prey on people's fears in order to 'justify' their latest round of repressive, illiberal, rights abusing actions/legislation - 'New Labour', Tories, doesn't matter, they're as bad as each other. 
Having said that, I'd trust the tech corporations as far as I could throw them...
So, in conclusion, you're fvcked, either way.
Having said that, I'd trust the tech corporations as far as I could throw them...
So, in conclusion, you're fvcked, either way.
vuk
\o/ choose anarchy
wtf?
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
It's called thread drift.... and I understand only too well!
G
Guest432
Guest
Irrelevant ranting is not thread drift, how's about answering the question I asked instead.
Arkless Electronics said:
Or explaining why you'd like to see pedos, drug traffickers and right wing nutters go unchecked just because you hate 'the man' ?
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
Yes, and around the world. The snag with Tony's argument is that the big 'social media' companies are now working for the rich few who are using it to take control over our *governments* as well. Via a process of keeping reality beyond the walls of the 'walled gardens' (1) they have drawn so many into. We get "Trump" and "BloJo" and "Climate Change is Fake News", etc, etc, *because* of how they operate. It panders to what people wish to believe rather than accepting having to look for real data and make sense of it, which can take some effort and yield uncomfortable conclusions.
'Cambridge Analytica' was just a straw in the wind.
When Orwell wrote '1984' not even he realised that people would *pay* to have the 'screen' accompany them whereever they went!
(1) Note plural. They devise a set of various 'gardens'. Whichever one your activity puts you into, you can't see that the others even exist. The Tories of this world have practiced 'divide and rule' by relatively crude means... until now.
richardg
Admonishtrator
Lol. I'll start leaving mine at home if I can just peel it off my face somehow.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
The problem isn't that people use mobile devices to talk to friends or find out things. It is the way that commercial 'social media' companies have exploited this and allowed others to pay them to control what they will see. The system is closed, and lacks transparency or accountability.
Tony L
Administrator
I don’t think that is fair. These companies provide a very broad platform, e.g. all the far-left stuff Vuk and Maxflinn etc spend days a week watching is published on YouTube, I’m constantly bombarded on Facebook by all manner of shared Momentum, AAV etc memes as much of my social group (ex-musos etc) are left leaning and even Corbyn supporters.
I’d also argue that Cambridge Analytica and the Russian Trump/Brexit bot spam thing is not policy at all, both were absolute breaches of the Facebook terms and conditions/AUP. The above is kind of like blaming me if you see some spam-bot thread on keto supplements, penis enlargement or whatever that has managed to breach my security before I have had the opportunity to remove them (we get about 40 a day, maybe more, but only a few actually get through to drop a spam payload).
As I understand it Cambridge Analytica used a fraudulent back-door in a trojan Facebook app that was masquerading as an opinion poll to harvest data. It was absolutely in breach of the site’s terms and conditions.
Anyway, I don’t want to be seen as always defending them, and they certainly get a lot wrong as this is an emerging technology and market, but they also get blamed when they are hacked and abused by shit like CA, Russian spam-bots etc, which is entirely unfair IMO. Any platform does. Any public access website is under attack 24/7 these days, including the likes of pfm!
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
The problem, though, is that what I said is essentially true. The social media companies work for money. They aren't pro bono or open source. They sell data and enable targetted propaganda which biasses the democractic system. And dodge being accountable. Note Zuckerberg's refusal to appear for a HoC committee. And his manner when forced to come to the US Congress.
I'm *not* saying he is evil or bad, or has broken any laws. But I am saying he and his equivalents are essentially taking a "just business" attitude in how they have *behaved*. Note for example the persistent refusal to accept they are 'publishers' and thus have the legal responsibility of publishers.
As with older forms of 'capitalism' the basic problem is that - in the absence of transparency and accountability - monopoly/trust takes over and runs things to suit *them* not the society in general. And the people who control them tend to feel what tye are doing is OK.
In one sense its no different to the way shady characters shovel money at the Tories to push 'no deal Brixit' having 'shorted' the UK economy. Legal, but if everyone knew the details it might just affect their views. So it is kept out of sight.
And when these things are happening - as they have been - *without* people knowing, we can't legislate or call to account or demand change. Now we know about some of it we could, for example, 'ban' such targetted propaganda at times near elections. But how would we know if it happened anyway in ways hidden from our view? Like it or not, without transparency and accountability the "we are not publishers" and "the users have no way to know" isn't compatable with democracy once a platform gets to dominate so much discourse as to affect the public mood. It then becomes a tool for those who can pay the most to control what people 'know'.
In effect, we need these companies to be treated as both "publishers" and "utilities". Perhaps even broken up into competing companies having to compete on a more open basis. How we do that, I don't know. But as things stand, I can't see that they do more good than harm. If you have a better plan, I'd love to hear it.
Tony L
Administrator
I have zero issue with a profit motive; I work for money, as do you, Vuk or whoever. There is no reason at all that a global social media company can’t be privately owned. Its end-users will decide if its modus operandi is acceptable or not, and if not it will crash and burn as so many internet companies have previously. I have no issue with this model at all.
FWIW I’d have just the same attitude as Zuckerberg toward individual nation states when it comes to what is a global infrastructure. For context just swap the UK HoC with an oppressive tyranny like Saudi, Iran, Syria, Russia, China etc. Would you really go and appear in front of powers that often imprison and even murder their citizens for speaking out against state authority? Screw that. And that said why on earth would you care what some authoritarian idiot like David Blunkett, Theresa May or Priti Patel thought?
My view is we certainly need to find ways to tax these companies on the earnings they make in specific regions, but I’d far prefer that censorship etc was customer-driven. I really don’t want shit-holes where one gets hung from a crane for being gay, beheaded for speaking out against religious tyranny/bullshit or beaten up/tortured for having a political view having any stake at all in such entities. The internet needs to exist way above petty national interference and state authoritarianism. Let innovation and market forces dictate the trajectory, be it commercial or open source. There is clearly room for all models.
Marky-Mark
pfm Member
So the solution for companies exploiting this social problem of narcissistic, reward-based behavior to make a buck is to .....
How do you implement something like printing a dire warning on a pack of cigarettes or banning liquor ads from television? And those sorts of things only do so much for addiction.
My issue with what you're talking about goes further than thought-policing languid apes. Nothing is made from social media; it's not a product. Information service is about the best I can come up with. And so you have this foo thing providing foo income for those predisposed to exploit it, while players in finance capital shift shares and other devices to shower themselves with bigly foo. It's all one big bubble of lazy & self-absorbed; the epitome of exploiting a democratic ideal that will ultimately eat itself as it's fetishized in favor of labor. But whatever .. I see it as the sum of ape's ambition to navel gaze and pat ourselves on the back for doing as little as possible to live well. What sucks is that the bill is coming due.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
FWIW for some years I've made most of my work available for free. The main exception in recent years is I'm paid for my HFN column because they require the copyright.
Again, I have no objection whatsoever to people working for money. Nor with the principle of IPR.
But my point isn't about 'tax' nor about 'censorship'. It is about transparency and accountability. Otherwise what a company does for profit may not be something we'd find acceptable. But we're prevented from being able to decide because it is being done out of our sight. So your comment about end-users being able to decide depends critically on being able to see what the company is *actually* doing. Which mere users are *denied* for the relevant 'social media' companies.
Allowing companies to keep data to themselves can have all kinds of undesirable consequences. Here's an example I read today in IEEE Spectrum. The author kindly also has put it openly available on the web. Note how the problems arise...
https://its.berkeley.edu/node/13539
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
Good post.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing as they say...I'll admit what turned out to be a gross naivety on my part, that when I first saw what the internet could be, and that within a few years it would be in every home etc, I thought it would signal the end of neoliberal capitalism, the abuse of workers rights, wealth inequality etc etc as "the light of truth and knowledge" would be available universally and people worldwide would realise just how they are being used, manipulated etc... there would be the "Network" moment where the people did the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more!" thing.... Ah well...
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
The good news is that we have now rumbled some of the things which have previously been going on out of sight. The challenge is to ensure this leads to change, and not be 'buried' by most people being kept away from knowing about it in their 'walled gardens'.
That would be the "EU human rights legislation" which allowed the arrest and incarceration of Catalan separatists, along with police attacking elderly voters with batons, whilst preventing an elected MP, subsequently appointed Home Secretary, from merely deporting Abu Qatada. Really effective stuff, not.
Our constitution is based on precedent, like our common law. And we have a perfectly adequate Bill of Rights (1688-9), if the legal system would simply use it, as it is based on sound principals which apply as much today as when it was passed. Finally, I can see no obvious problem with living in a monarchy, 21st century or no — some things are timeless, and having what amounts to a ceremonial head of state makes some sense in context, as long as they earn their keep (no problem there) and keep their family and hangers-on quiet and in their place as tolerated benefit claimants (some issues, certainly).
That's a big assumption (my bold above). At some point, the CCTV network will be / has been hacked, and we probably won't /didn't hear about it. Further, it's all rather circular. If the required (and assumed) "societal stability" to allow the existing surveillance technology actually existed, then we wouldn't "need" the surveillance. Put simply, if you want to watch everyone, you don't have much stability left to maintain. And for at least 20 years, that has been, I believe, the case. We are a simmering powder-keg of rage, cooked up by successive governments doing too many of the wrong things, whilst ignoring much that should have been attended to. Blair's lot are the standouts here of course, but every single government since the mid-1960s has done this at least to some extent, while failing to recognise that their misdemeanours are cumulative, not individual.
So you're in favour of universal surveillance when it serves your own interests. Remarkable how little it helped with the abused children of Rotherham. I think, overall, that Arkless' position is the more principled.
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
richardg
Admonishtrator
This is the most striking and disappointing thing for me about the UK. Road rage, pub brawls, scooter thieves, muggings etc etc. About 5 years ago a guy using the cash machine in front of me turned round and told me to 'back off, you're too close, man, you're making me nervous'. I was probably 3 feet away. So I gave him 4 feet. He was about 6'5" and looked like he was used to looking after himself.
In France the edginess is about terrorism, the bombings and shootings have seen to that. But the streets feel so calm and safe in comparison to UK. Thugs worry me much more than terrorism, even though the Strasbourg shooter was killed about 20 doors from me.