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2019-09-21 Home Front: Culture Wars
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It's Time To Rein In Big Tech
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Before Facebook there was FaceMash. Mark Zuckerberg founded FaceMash in his Harvard dorm room in 2003 and Facebook a year later. According to the Harvard Crimson, FaceMash used "photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine [Harvard] Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the "hotter" person. Having gone viral (at least by 2003 standards), the Harvard authorities stepped in, shut FaceMash down and charged Zuckerberg with breach of security, violating copyright, and violating individual privacy. The charges were later dropped.
Mark Zuckerberg remains proud of his hacker roots to this day.
Even now, Facebook’s campus is located at One Hacker Way. Zuckerberg may not run from these hacker roots, but what of the data privacy and security charges Harvard levied against him? Well, it seems that not much has changed in this regard wither. In November 2018, Facebook revealed that it had exposed photos belonging to 6.8 million consumers to third party app developers without permission. The next month, The New York Times revealed that Facebook had continued to share troves of personal information with some of the world’s largest corporations long after it had sworn to cut off access to the data. These are but two recent examples of Facebook’s difficult relationship with user privacy.
Facebook is not alone among its peer companies, but it is the poster child for Big Tech’s attitude toward privacy. Eric Schmidt of Google has displayed equal disdain for privacy in his public remarks, once famously boasting "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." Sit on that one for a minute.
Having taken a hands off approach for years, there is a growing consensus among lawmakers that Big Tech must be reined in. But how? Most lawmakers now recognize that the nation’s privacy laws need to be modernized. Efforts are currently underway in the Senate Commerce Committee to craft legislation that would create a ’one-size-fits-all’ federal privacy standard for businesses, large and small.
Beyond privacy, a smaller group of lawmakers is calling for the break-up of internet platforms under the antitrust laws. Last week, a precedent setting 48 states announced an investigation into Google and the week before a smaller group announced an investigation into Facebook. These investigations will take time, years even, and it may be challenging to build a case against Big Tech under current antitrust case law, but it’s a start.
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-09-21 04:18||
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Posted by Skidmark 2019-09-21 05:28||
2019-09-21 05:28||
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Posted by Skidmark 2019-09-21 05:29||
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Posted by Lex 2019-09-21 08:13||
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Posted by CrazyFool 2019-09-21 08:40||
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Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2019-09-21 12:38||
2019-09-21 12:38||
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