16 January 2021

Too Complicated? Too Long Didn't Read? Short Attention Span?

Don't know about you, dear readers, but sometimes we all need more encouragement and more discipline dedicated to staying with what at times is way-too-much an inflow of fast-streaming information that tends to overload our temporary capacity to deal with it all.
It happens when your MesaZona blogger accesses agendas for the items presented with only a two-day or three-day notice for public meetings of the City of Mesa's government, boards and committees - where there's usually no time or resources for objective independent analysis.
Fortunately there is a website Techdirt https://www.techdirt.com/ that helps get a rational handle.
Here's a selection from yesterday: three or four to skim over for now if that's all the time and tolerance you can muster.
Keep in mind there's a lot more information in the space between the dots - that's the hard part!

Another Day, Another Location Data Privacy Scandal We'll Probably Do Nothing About

from the this-problem-isn't-going-away dept

Another day, another location data scandal we probably won't do anything about.

Joseph Cox, a one-man wrecking ball on the location data privacy beat the last few years, has revealed how a popular Muslim prayer app has been collecting and selling granular user location data without those users' informed consent. Like so many apps, Salaat First (Prayer Times), which reminds Muslims when to pray, has been recording and selling detailed daily activity data to a third party data broker named Predicio. Predicio, in turn, has been linked to a supply chain of government partners including ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI.

As usual, users aren't clearly informed that their every waking movement is being monetized on a massive scale, . .Throughout it all, government has refused to lift a finger to address the problem, presumably because lobbyists don't want government upsetting the profitable apple cart, and government doesn't want to lose access to its ability to track your every waking stumble without much transparency or oversight. Meanwhile, countless folks continue to labor under the illusion that this sort of widespread dysfunction will be fixed by telecom or adtech "market forces."

It's not clear what people expected would happen when we created a massive online ecosystem that monetizes users' every waking movement (and tied it to the federal government) while simply refusing to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era.

Instead of taking this problem seriously, the nation's top policy voices in 2020 spent most of their time freaking out about a Chinese teen dancing app or trying to destroy a law integral to the functioning of the internet in the mistaken belief this would let them be bigger assholes online.

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A Few More Thoughts On The Total Deplatforming Of Parler & Infrastructure Content Moderation

from the it's-tricky dept

I've delayed writing deeper thoughts on the total deplatforming of Parler, in part because there was so much else happening (including some more timely posts about Parler's lawsuit regarding it), but more importantly because for years I've been calling for people to think more deeply about content moderation at the infrastructure layer, rather than at the edge. Because those issues are much more complicated than the usual content moderation debates.

And once again I'm going to make the mistake of offering a nuanced argument on the internet. I urge you to read through this entire post, resist any kneejerk responses, and consider the larger issues. In fact, when I started to write this post, I thought it was going to argue that the moves against Parler, while legal, were actually a mistake and something to be concerned about. But as I explored the arguments, I simply couldn't justify any of them. Upon inspection, they all fell apart. And so I think I'll return to my initial stance that the companies are free to make decisions here. There should be concern, however, when regulators and policymakers start talking about content moderation at the infrastructure layer.

The "too long, didn't read" version of this argument (and again, please try to understand the nuance) is that even though Parler is currently down, it's not due to a single company having total control over the market. There are alternatives. And while it appears that Parler is having difficulty finding any such alternative to work with it, that's the nature of a free market. If you are so toxic that companies don't want to do business with you, that's on you. Not them.

. . .In the end, it's tough to argue that this is as worrisome as my initial gut reaction said. I am still concerned about content moderation when it reaches the infrastructure layer. I am quite concerned that people aren't thinking through the kind of governance questions raised by these sledgehammer-not-scalpel decisions. But when exploring each of the issues as it relates to Parler specifically, it's hard to find anything to be that directly concerned about. There are, mostly, alternatives available for Parler. And in the one area that there apparently aren't (cloud hosting) it seems to be less because AWS has market power, and more because lots of companies just don't want to associate with Parler.

And that is basically the free market telling Parler to get its act together.

* It's noteworthy that AWS customers can easily migrate to Oracle Cloud only because Oracle copied AWS's API without permission which, according to its own lawyers is copyright infringement. Never expect Oracle to not be hypocritical.

Filed Under: app stores, aws, cloud computing, content moderation, deplatforming, infrastructure, network stack, play store
Companies: amazon, apple, google, parler

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