Google and Facebook have been lobbying against state privacy legislation for a while now [1][2]. The latest Facebook privacy scandal will give those bills momentum.
Also Marsha Blackburn's privacy bill would have applied to telcos as well as internet companies. You can guess that it went nowhere [3].
The best thing that could happen is for Congress to pass an omnibus privacy bill modeled closely after GDPR.
pmoriarty: no you don't, not unless you are on the board or are a corporate officer.
Having worked in a large tech company for quite a while now, grunts have very little (at best) influence on the decisions that upper management makes regarding where they sling their lawyers. In this time when you can be laid off for being "too old" or for other arbitrary reasons, you'll be removed/replaced for causing a stir.
First, you could just resign and choose not to participate in ongoing violations of privacy. By not giving them your help, you are already making a small difference.
Second, you could threaten to resign because of this. Better, you could get together with others of like mind and threaten to resign en-masse. If enough people do this, upper management will take notice. It's just a matter of how many Google and Facebook employees have the will to do it.
Third, when privacy issues come up, employees could try to influence their companies to err on the side of privacy. In companies this size there are always many situations which aren't guided by explicit policy or direction from on high, and where employees can use their own judgment or advocate for one course of action over the other. This is where people who care about privacy can make their voices heard.
Finally, Google and Facebook employees are smart, creative people. They are more than capable of figuring out other ways they can make a difference -- if these issues are important to them. The main question is: are they?
With all the media attention around Facebook and Google privacy violations it's becoming harder and harder for their employees to stand on the sidelines and claim ignorance or pretend there's nothing they can do. By not doing anything they are choosing to continue enabling these companies. They could act instead.
From what I've seen, most employees of big tech cos seem to have carved out a distinction in their minds about how their data hoovering company does data hoovering right, and the other data hoovering companies do it wrong. These distinctions don't hold up super well to scrutiny (which is why doing so is an incredibly fast way to get blocked due to cognitive dissonance).
At the end of the day, Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
If helping the US government refine their drone strike capabilities didn’t make them realize, I think it’s fair to say they’re totally self-interested. If you want to get their attention, go after their personal bottom line.
Each employee should act according to their conscience, not according to your conscience.
Your perspective reminds me of a Chris Rock joke: "How come it's only unemployed people who tell you to quit something?" The point being: it's really easy to tell someone to quit their excellent, fulfilling job over some moral outrage that you perceive.
Finally, while I understand this is an unpopular opinion around here, I believe the tech community's focus on privacy is overwrought. We should expect to be tracked on the internet. If you're doing something that you don't want to be tracked, there are numerous tools to avoid tracking. Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.
That said, there are also plenty of people that do choose what they perceive to be the 'high road' despite the consequences, and based on my personal experiences these people are not rare, but not plentiful either.
Most of us try to find a kind of 'middle road', and the conviction of those that do choose these high roads can be extremely valuable, as I personally believe the default is that it's easy to go for the 'low road'.
All that said, I do find people who tell others to take the high road without doing so themselves, or from a completely different situation, to be tiresome.
As for your unpopular opinion: part of me thinks that the cat's out of the bag and we'll have to find a way to deal with a world where privacy is basically non-existent. I could see a way forward in such a world provided that privacy does not become yet another thing that only those in positions of privilege or power can afford. It could be interesting, maybe even positive, if lack of privacy becomes a fact of life across the board.
That said, I think it's too early to conclude it's all a lost cause, but I quite likely might be naive about all this. Mostly I count myself lucky that I can think about these matters with no obvious or direct 'skin in the game'. For now, at least.
>Each employee should act according to their conscience, not according to your conscience.
This ignores that when you ask them about their conscience they will tell you that they support privacy and all of that good jazz, so can I at least expect them to come out in the future and tell me honestly that they don't give a damn instead of branding themselves like saviors and friendly neighbours?
>Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.
Protecting our citizens privacy falls under the obligation of the state and legislation. No citizen should be required to hack together technical solutions to escape constant spying, the fact aside that most people do not even possess the expertise to do this.
First: You'll be replaced by someone who is either ignorant of the problem, or isn't but doesn't care.
Second: You'll be replaced by someone who is either ignorant of the problem, or isn't but doesn't care.
Third: Your complaints will fall on deaf ears and you'll be replaced by someone who is either ignorant of the problem, or isn't but doesn't care.
The only way to reach companies of this size is by convincing their customers to go elsewhere. Throwing legislature at the problem might help, but it's unlikely that it will carry any teeth because of the lobby strength these companies possess.
Why do you think they're standing on the sidelines?
1. People already decide this by choosing which team to work on. If you care about this sort of thing, you're probably already not on that team. You might even be on a team that's improving privacy?
2. But you'd be hurting your own career and a team that has nothing to do with the issue of the week.
3. There is certainly lots of internal discussion, so this already happens. Whether it works is another issue.
Yes, and all of Google's employees could join the IWW and organize a wildcat strike, too, maybe with a holacracy instead of worker councils; so why don't they?
You're conflating being a socialist with respecting privacy. Respect of privacy is an issue that cuts across the left/right divide. You could be a capitalist or communist, libertarian or socialist and still respect privacy. Organizing for change isn't limited to socialists either.
These big tech giants have learned from Microsoft's failures in the 90's of beating back government. They all have a well funded government relations program going on with lobbyists in every important region.
We just need better technology. We need to stop giving our information away and then hoping it is somehow protected. We need technology to empower us without sacrificing our privacy and freedom.
Decentralization and encryption are probably two big parts of the answer. Laws may help or hurt but they won't solve the problem.
There's a high chance that without political activity from people who care, efforts to further decentralization and encryption will be suppressed and thwarted.
In other words, the right legal environment is likely a necessary-but-not-sufficient criteria for decentralization and encryption to flourish.
Think of all these online brands that have built huge businesses off of Facebook and Google profiling. The Dollar Shave Clubs and Tough Mudders of the world and hundreds of others who all have built incredible companies off of micro ad targeting. Are we going to go back to the world of a few big mega brands who can do untargeted saturation marketing? That's the world you're going to get with all this privacy lunacy. We've got 6 media companies that own 90% of the market[1] we can easily get 10 consumer goods companies that own everything[2] the way things are going. All in the name of privacy!
CA does not need more laws and "regulation". It's got plenty. I had two _very_ nice police officers (near the AZ border) explain it to me last time I got pulled over there:
Officer: See this? (pointing to a banned inanimate object)
Me: yes.
Officer: That's fun. You cant have it in CA.
Me: oh. Sorry. (not sure yet what is going to happen, it could have gotten very expensive)
Officer: See that? (pointing to another banned inanimate object), that's fun too. Can you have it in CA?
Me: I dont know?
Officer2: It's fun right?
Me: yes...
Officer2: Then you cant have it in CA.
It went on like that for awhile. Surreal experience. My point is that free speech is next (incrementally of course, starting with records restrictions similar to GDPR). They already passed a (totally unconstitutional) law punishing some people if they use the wrong pronoun.
Patchwork state privacy and net neutrality regulations are cumbersome and ridiculous. Any such requirements should be debated and enacted on the federal level.
It's not a direct democracy is it? these representatives are not blindly beholden to the whims of every Tom, Dick and Harry, they are also entrusted with the wellbeing of their constituency which ultimately means supporting existing and emerging local enterprises.
First, federal action on this issue is not happening in the near future, when this issue needs to be addressed. To say it's a federal issue is to say that it shouldn't be addressed.
Second, huh? That's an argument for total deregulation at the state level and abdication of the state's responsibility to protect its citizens.
Protect them from what? this is a partisan knee jerk reaction to goings on in DC. More importantly these actions are potentially detrimental to local companies the interests of which are intertwined with the state's.
Also Marsha Blackburn's privacy bill would have applied to telcos as well as internet companies. You can guess that it went nowhere [3].
The best thing that could happen is for Congress to pass an omnibus privacy bill modeled closely after GDPR.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/06/30/facebook-google-facial-recogni...
[2] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-geolocation-pr...
[3] https://www.axios.com/blackburn-bill-would-extend-privacy-ru...