On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 5:23 AM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@email-addr-hidden>
wrote:
[ some good points ]
4. There is a big difference between government surveillance and between a
> company gathering your data anonymously to show you ads. Google or
> Microsoft should be tightly controlled by the public, however this control,
> in my view, should not take the form of ideological hatred.
>
this is the one that gets to me. "Google or Microsoft should be tightly
controlled" ... the issue here is that in the US at least (less so within
the EU; I don't really know about the rest of the world), they are *not*
tightly controlled by the public. The USA has no data protection laws, and
even under the Obama administration tends to defer to the wishes and whims
of large corporations.So the control that you rightly see as a necessary
thing isn't really in place, at least for those of us within the USA, and
to some extent for people elsewhere too.
As for ideological hatred, I would remind you somewhat light-heartedly of
Google's original corporate slogan (which it seems to either downplay or
have abandoned): "Don't be evil". Do you think that this was *just* an
aspirational slogan? Everybody who watched the emergence of Google knows
that it was a direct ideological dig at Microsoft (and to a lesser extent
at Apple), regarding practices that put those corporations profits ahead of
the interests of users and society more generally. Now,, maybe these were
just the musings of a couple of immature Stanford graduate students, but it
was an attitude widely held within the tech community in the 1990s, and it
wasn't based on hatred, but a clear-eyed assessment of the way that
existing large technology corporations operated. I am sure that the word
"evil" was chosen partly in jest, but also partly with real feeling.
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Received on Fri Jun 17 16:15:02 2016
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