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I am surprised that no-one has brought up a neutrality argument yet. The app is legal within Saudi Arabia and in fact published by their government. Are we to

I am surprised that no-one has brought up a neutrality argument yet. The app is legal within Saudi Arabia and in fact published by their government. Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left? If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N? Just to be clear I’d prefer this app not exist, and I would not be unhappy if it gets “unpublished”. I also think it would be cool if the major platforms just came out and made an unambiguous statement on what they will and won’t stand for.

burtonator 8y ago
Instead of Hooli someone is going to launch Halali ... Cloud hosting according to the laws or the Koran.
- Animats 8y ago
  It exists, sort of. There's a "halal search engine"[1]. Iran has something like the Great Firewall of China.[2] Saudi Arabia has official censorship, and they're open about it; there's a web form for requesting that something be censored, and blocked sites divert to a page saying it's blocked.[3] It seems that Iran's system is fairly tight, but the Saudi system isn't really that strict. On the other side, there are multiple "kosher ISPs" with cloud-based filtering. There are even "glatt kosher" ISPs.[4] "The Secured program will block pornography and violence; Secured Plus will also block women wearing intimate apparel; Secured Squared and Protected will filter out any immodest clothing; and Sealed will enable access only to sites with religious and modest content." In Israel, there are "kosher phones", which are either voice only or can't access the web at all. They just run rabbi-approved apps.[5] [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/internet-searching-islam-halalgoogling/25042250.html https://www.rferl.org/a/internet-searching-islam-halalgoogli... [2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/hewlett-packard-iran-censorship-halal-internet/ https://www.dailydot.com/news/hewlett-packard-iran-censorshi... [3] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/saudi-arabia https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/saudi-arabi... [4] https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3446129,00.html https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3446129,00.html [5] https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-israel-unveils-kosher-smartphone-for-haredim-1.5338700 https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-israel-unveils-koshe...
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Anecdotally, VPNs are incredibly popular in Iran and the government hasn't had a great deal of success in blocking their usage. Unlike the Chinese GFW, the government entities in Iran that want to run a nationwide firewall are not able to attract the 'best and brightest' network engineers. The sort of Iranians who might be qualified to implement such are not living in Iran, they're living in Los Angeles and working for six-figure salaries in US dollars.
  - solatic 8y ago
    An important note regarding the "kosher" ISPs - they're opt-in. Anybody who has an account with a "kosher" ISP is free to cancel and get an account with an unrestricted ISP. That makes them qualitatively different from Chinese etc. ISPs where people have no choice but to submit to censorship.
AmericanChopper 8y ago
The internet I grew up with was a champion of free speech and exchange of ideas. No matter what they were. It’s very sad to see that it’s being taken over calls for censorship on so many different levels. I do find the nurtrality aspect to be very hypocritical though. The same communities that demand ISP infrastructure be kept neutral at all costs will often support content censorship in numerous other ways.
walrus01 8y ago
Counterpoint: Nobody owes the Saudis a publishing platform to push their app. If they want to fully self host it on servers within the geographical borders of the kingdom, they can. Good luck getting it to install on the majority of non-rooted iOS and Android devices. I would encourage anyone running any 'cloud' based services for the Saudi government to discontinue serving them as soon as possible. This runs the gamut from basic DNS hosting, VM hosting (google/AWS/azure/whatever), email and managed service hosting (office365), everything. They're welcome to have a go at fully self hosting everything for their own citizens on their own ISPs, inside the kingdom, with netblocks they don't advertise to BGP upstreams.
- jabberthemutt 8y ago
  Nobody owes you anything either. I don't like your opinion. Your internet access will be cut tomorrow. Apple and Google ban you from using their phones. You are welcome to create, manage and host your own infrastructure though. Good luck! Oh wait, most of the AS around you also prefer not to route your traffic. And your domain? Nah, DNS is also at their providers' whim and you are on a very popular blacklist.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Current evidence shows that the AS that I run backbone engineering for have hundreds of peers at some of the world's largest IX points, and a number of highly reliable upstream transits. I get the point of your comment, but the reason why my AS is not shunned by the global Internet community is that we're responsible citizens. Unlike some other ISPs that I won't bother naming. Now, the bar to being a halfway decent and ethical ISP is not really so high these days. You have to actually go to extra effort and make things intentionally more complicated to fuck with your customers' traffic. In North America, at least, part of that includes not censoring content and not even contemplating doing something like the Saudis do. I can guarantee you that if the C-level executives at my company were asked to implement something that was grossly in violation of the US constitution/bill or rights, Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, or similar concepts upholding the rule of law, they would refuse. I feel for the people who run telecom and ISPs in Saudi Arabia, who need to implement technical solutions at the whim of a corrupt hereditary monarchy. I debated whether it was even worth my time to write this comment, since your argument is weak and theoretical. Reality is that major ISPs don't cut each other off for arbitrary reasons. But I'd bet $5 you're not involved in the practical day to day logistics of things like establishing 100GbE PNIs between major ASes.
geofft 8y ago
Neutrality is a moral viewpoint in itself. It's the viewpoint that nobody is actually wrong, that simply by being a country you have a right to have your moral views respected. In the specific case of app stores, it's the viewpoint that everyone deserves to have the things they're doing made more efficient, and that helping anyone speed up their work is virtuous. (Neutrality, by the way, is IBM's present defense of Dehomag's actions in World War II: there was a market opportunity in Germany, market opportunities are not inherently immoral, and by the time Germany's morality was beyond the pale, it was too late to say no. See https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss .) And this isn't really neutrality, anyway. It's neutrality between the views of the powerful. The morality of Saudi Arabia is in scope; the morality of the Unabomber isn't. The morality of the LDS Church is in scope; the morality of Jews who object on religious grounds to the actions of the state of Israel isn't. The morality of China is in scope; the morality of non-authoritarian Communists isn't, because they lost all the Communist countries to authoritarians.
- slg 8y ago
  "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." ~Desmond Tutu
  - innocentoldguy 8y ago
    I love this quote. Neutrality has enabled some of the greatest evils in history. I think it is impossible to be neutral and also be a force for good.
    - notMice 8y ago
      What if it’s not mice you’re talking about?
  - BigFish12 8y ago
    In situations of injustice, choosing the side of the oppressor is not always a bad thing, It's sometimes beneficial to let oppressor get it's way. You need to look and evaluate the whole picture before making a decision because constant local optimization is not always the best global strategy. Your goal is to win the war, not the battle.
alacombe 8y ago
True, but it can be difficult for public relation on one side to censor LEGAL speech you disagree with locally (here in the US), and yet accept worse conduct remote. Same argument about Google in China. Though I guess it only make sense if you consider that both practice bring profits in.
realusername 8y ago
> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left? Since Apple & Google created a walled garden, any damage the apps can do fall into their responsibility. If they wanted to avoid this responsibility, they should have created an open platform.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
OpieCunningham 8y ago
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is probably a good place to start. https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
- mda 8y ago
  There are so many things that are iffy but do not violate these.
  - slavak 8y ago
    That's not the target standard, that's a basic baseline. When you're worried about violating neutrality by denying service based on potentially subjective moral judgements, using at least the low bar of an almost-universally accepted set of rights is probably a good place to start.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I don't think a real argument can be made that morality is subjective. If morality were subjective then the choice would be clear, no, Google and everybody else should respect other peoples' morals. But things like slavery and the Holocaust make that determination, well, difficult. To say that morality is ultimately relative is ultimately to condone societies choosing to do really repugnant things to people. There is a line to draw. That much is certain. The only question is where. I don't think we should be charging into the Sentinel Islands like a bunch of idiots and destroying their culture. But Apple choosing not to technologically enable the Saudis to further disenfranchise their women seems to be worthy. In 1807, Britain passed the Slave Trade Act, outlawing slavery throughout the Empire. Passing the law wasn't enough to actually stop the slave trade. So the British Empire established the West Africa Squadron at considerable expense, to curb the illegal trade. At first the squadron was hampered by the need to remain on good diplomatic terms with other European countries, but soon they signed treaties allowing Britain free reign to interdict and search ships they suspected of carrying slaves. At it's height, one sixth of the resources of the Royal Navy was devoted to curbing slavery. What should be the arbiter of morality? I don't really know. But the public willingness to devote considerable social resources to stamping out an awful practice is a gift we shouldn't turn away. Another example is the Latin American drug trade. The liberal-minded thing to do is to legalize drugs so that the cartels can't profit from them. But history teaches that cartels are in the business of doing nasty things, not in any one nasty business. So if they can't make mountains of cash funneling drugs across borders, they'll make hills of cash funneling humans. It takes cross-border cooperation to smash these quasi-states, as they largely managed to do in Colombia. Saudi Arabia is not interested in rapid social change, many many countries are doing the best they can to resist the destabilizing effects of Western technology on their traditional cultures. China has their Great Firewall. North Korea is closed off completely. Maybe they have a point. But the West can't put the genie back in the bottle, we can't go back to a world before the Internet. And the elites in these traditional societies are perfectly fine profiting off of the tech when it's convenient for them. So I don't really have much of a problem with Apple deciding to stick their neck out, or with us placing a moral onus on them, to stop facilitating the exploitation of humans.
killjoywashere 8y ago
Google shut down support for Project Maven, which was just running code in their cloud at retail prices. If you can impose your morality in a way that prevents the defense of the constitution of the country in which your company is incorporated, I don't see what the issue is with imposing your morality on a dictatorial foreign government.
int_19h 8y ago
US public opinion. Why? Because Apple and Google are both American companies, and their respective stores are hosted in US. If Saudis don't like it, they can roll their own, without our assistance, and without us profiting from any of it.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > If Saudis don't like it, they can roll their own, without our assistance, and without us profiting from any of it. Be careful what you wish for. They have the money to do it. Cornering a market isn't that hard if you're doing it for strategic reasons rather than to turn a profit. And then what? We have to petition the Saudis to approve our apps? Maybe it would be better if we didn't have a central party that controls everything for everybody, regardless of who it is.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running. Thus, to prevent them, you will need regulation - which stops at the border. Saudi government will have their own, and you can be sure that it'll be the kind that enables what they want to do. On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running. That would be an argument if people were given the independent choice, but the choice is tied to the phone you buy. It's not much of a choice if both of the major platforms are tied to a walled garden and the alternatives are esoteric enough that most people aren't even aware they exist. And it is regulation keeping them that way. Third parties would sell iPhones modified to add competing app stores if there weren't laws preventing it. To say nothing of the lack of antitrust enforcement as yet -- markets don't work when there is insufficient competition. > On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets. Then they would reciprocate, oil prices would skyrocket and the dollar would fail as the reserve currency, both because of the oil market and because other countries wouldn't want to accept it if US foreign policy becomes to seize them back from a country where they were used to make trillions in purchases over decades. You could say "and we could nuke them" with about the same probability of that actually happening. And what would you even use to justify it, while we continue to do business with China and a dozen other countries with similarly problematic records?
JackPoach 8y ago
I agree. It's kind of pointless to demand from FB, Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants that they both don't interfere with freedom of speech and other freedoms and do promote various kinds of favorable social agendas at the same time. Also, KSA is backward as fuck, I just don't see how it's Google's fault that someone wants to live in the dark ages.
- watwut 8y ago
  But ... the app is designed to prevent the freedom. The function of notifying is literally for the purpose of stopping women who don't want to live like that by people who force them to live in the "dark ages".
  - JackPoach 8y ago
    So, in other words, you are willing to ask Apple and Google to proactively police their apps, if they are designed to prevent freedoms on not. You'll probably need to ban any app related to Koran or Bible, because they condemn certain types of sexual preferences. Anything Catholic, Mormon, Scientology, got to go. So, when do you stop? How about apps used by Pentagon (Pentagon kills people)? Or banking apps that charge exhorbitant fees and 'prey on the poor'. It's a really fine line. Again, you can with both want and not want for the tech giants to police behavior of others.
    - watwut 8y ago
      There is no thin line between app with catholic content or Koran and app that notifies male guardian of a women who is trying to cross the border. Nor between bank app that pays on poor. This app is not preying on vulnerable women trying to convince them to go back. There is also difference between policing apps that are designed "designed to prevent freedoms or not" and between policing apps that do in fact prevent basic freedoms. This app is sending message to another person so that he can stop physically stop her and punish her. You can choose to ignore bank app and bible. You cant choose to ignore saudi police coming for you, because male guardian was notified. But for that matter, sexual content is already heavily policed. It is not like the app stores ever claimed to be anything goes zones.
terminus 8y ago
> If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N? I agree that not every situation is this easy to decide but this one -- women as chattel -- seems rather staightforward. Corporations claim free speech rights (via corporate personhood) all the time. Not using those rights in this case seems to be quite a statement.
- Pristina 8y ago
  >seems rather staightforward. So your entire argument is based on your personal subjective valuation that it is straightforward. The idea that a homosexual should be thrown from a bridge onto an oncoming train is as straightforward to a good many people as this is to you. What you are invoking here is really 'US public opinion' or its related 'western world public opinion' circa. 2019. If this is basically all the substance of your argument, then your position is no better than the moslem over there that thinks blasphemer should be beheaded.
  - terminus 8y ago
    Are you seriously saying that there are two sides to the whether women are chattel or not? What's funny is that your specious analogies try to equate this argument -- for more freedom for the Saudi women -- to others where people's freedoms are being restricted. Might I suggest you have another go at remedial logic.
ulfw 8y ago
> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Yet all adult apps are banned, just because as US companies morals when it comes to sexual content are just very Disneyesque in that country. Even for 18+ year olds.
- Mindwipe 8y ago
  Yep. The point at which Google and Apple don't both ban apps even aimed at sexual minorities like kink people (even just dating apps) is the point they can cry that they don't make moral judgements. They do, and they've decided that consenting adult's sexual preferences are worse than an app that allows a dystopian regime to track the movement of women so abusive men can control them. That's messed up.
sschueller 8y ago
Pornographie is legal in the US, yet you won't find any of those apps in the app stores. Either you are neutral or you take full responsibility of what you offer in your walled garden. You can't have it both ways.
- megaremote 8y ago
  No, it is not full or none, that is ridiculous. You are allowed to have a line that you will not cross.
  - sschueller 8y ago
    Not if you want neutral carrier protection under the law. As soon as you start to pick and choose you loose that protection and you are liable for illegal content on your service. What would phone service be like if the carrier could decide who gets to use it and who doesn't? They are not held responsible for criminals using phones but if they decided who gets to use it they would be liable.
  - xanipher 8y ago
    How is it reasonable that "this line that you will not cross" is pornography and not "an app that tracks and controls Saudi Arabian women"?
    - Codestare 8y ago
      It's reasonable because it's their own decision to make. What you (or any of us) think about it in moral or ethic terms, is irrelevant.
    - x15 8y ago
      It would be ironic if the USA government tried to regulate or fine Google on this, while at the same time selling heavy weaponry to SA.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
    And they do. But what exactly is that line. Prurient content that empowers people? Banned. Content that literally allows control over non-consenting individuals based on their gender? Accepted. This is like a serial killer who campaigns against littering. They have a line they won't cross, but we shouldn't accept it.
stickfigure 8y ago
Serious question: Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks? I think it's pretty reasonable for the court of modern political opinion to pass judgement on the more egregious examples of injustice in the world. Yes, morality is relative, but there's a strong majority opinion on this - especially in the countries that build the technology platforms we're talking about. Apple & Google should yank the apps, and we should hold their feet to the fire until they do.
- xyzzy123 8y ago
  Ouch. There’s been a lot to think about over the course of this thread. I think South Africa is a good example because there were wide ranging trade sanctions against them during Apartheid which could have supported actions such as yanking government apps as a matter of international agreement. Overall though I don’t think it’s a good idea for FAANG companies to unilaterally wade into foreign policy or cultural influence even more than they already do. Other commenters have made some good points that the platforms are already very not neutral, pointing to adult apps and arbitrary TOS violations as app store death penalty. I agree that this is true but I remain broadly opposed to the idea that we must stop others from running code that we don’t like. Overall it doesn’t seem like the right mechanism to do politics.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  > Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks? Yes (but only begrudgingly). Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation. That means within their borders they can do as they please, even if we don't like what they do. We fought one of the most devastating wars in history (the 30 years war [1]) trying to control what other people think, and at the end everyone agreed that sovereignty is a great concept [2][3]. Using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms is in stark contrast to the idea of sovereignty and signals to everyone else that that kind of behaviour is ok. That's how you get cold and hot wars. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty
watwut 8y ago
We blame companies for helping catch Chinese or Saudi etc dissidents too. We blame them when they help catching human rights activists. Generally speaking, tolerance goes from here to there.
mk89 8y ago
>Under Saudi law, every woman has a legal "guardian" who can restrict her travel to specific airports and routes, and get automated alerts when they cross borders. What neutral argument do you really wish to have? The fact that their legal system is messed up won't make me say "oh, but by law you are not allowed...".
- thanatos_dem 8y ago
  I think the parent poster’s point is that that’s a very western perspective of morality. Imagine if the tables were turned, and the apprent promiscuity promoted by apps like Tinder was deemed immoral by a country that’s more conservative. Should that app be pulled globally as a result? To them the fact that we allow so much casually dating could be (and in middle eastern cultures often is) viewed as “wrong”.
  - mk89 8y ago
    I understand completely the parent's point of view, because I am confronted with hundreds of people like that on a daily basis. To be honest? I am tired of justifying insanity, despite the legal point of view, and despite the fact that tables are not turned. I am not a lawyer and I am not sitting at a round table, and I have opinions. And my opinion is that due to this "oh, by law, or by religion" we are throwing away every sort of freedom and respect our parents and grandparents fought so hard so that we could today give them for granted. Tell me one woman in this world that likes to be treated less than a car to rent (take a look at the website, you even have to justify where to go and for how long. Basically with car2go a car is treated with more respect than a human being). But as someone might argue, it's not up to me to judge. Thankfully I live in a country that treats everyone with respect.
    - londons_explore 8y ago
      When you are employed by a company, you are treated 'like a car to rent', yet nobody seems to have an issue with it. At some point in the future, people will look back at this time and consider it immoral that companies could rent people by the hour. Likewise, people in many non-western cultures do not have any issue with having a guardian 'look after' you, in return for a payment to your family. If the people don't see an issue with it, why should some foreign company come in and decide to ban it?
megaremote 8y ago
We have to have a line somewhere. Google and Apple aren't IBM helping the Nazi's.
- JetSpiegel 8y ago
  IBM had the Nazis as a client, while the modern companies have the Saudis as investors. The power structure is inverted.
vr46 8y ago
This appears to be an ethical issue, not a moral one.
dgzl 8y ago
I generally like to assume that other people have the same rights that I do.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Just because you can't define an objective standard doesn't mean all ethical systems are equally good. Personally I would take what is acceptable in the US/Europe over what's acceptable in the middle east.
jaabe 8y ago
I think you're spot on with your UN suggestion. I mean, didn't we (the world) establish the concept of human rights, exactly as an answer to this problem of bias? I think we could go a long way, if we simply required our technology to abide by the international human rights convention. Of course this might be a problem for a lot more Apps than the Saudi women's-tracker.
deathanatos 8y ago
Honestly, I think this is what the Prime Directive really gets at. The mistake was "interfering" (hosting) in the first place.
avip 8y ago
For apple we could use the precedent https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/ https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-ba... as surely this app is offensive to not less than 50% of customers.
edoloughlin 8y ago
If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality Just... wow. This app is literally designed to allow men to enforce morals on women.
mscasts 8y ago
They already block porn because it's sensitive in the US. Games where you shoot people in the head or drive people over is okay though. I can't see how this differs.
- 908087 8y ago
  Are you saying you don't see the difference between video games, and an app that is meant to harm/control actual living human beings?
  - mscasts 8y ago
    No that is not what I am saying. I am for the ban of this app since they already block less offensive things like porn. It would be double standard to allow a muslim app to control real human beings but block porn.
glangdale 8y ago
This is a typical argument from 'neutral principles'.In this kind of thinking, the notion of 'being fair to everyone in a principled fashion that is easily and mechanistically describable' is more important than say, the notion of 'not oppressing women, even if the Saudis think it's OK'. This is itself a value judgement and comes down to your opinion. Like the old joke about turtles, it's opinions all the way down. It's also fairly obviously absurd; there are countries where public opinion and even the legal system are pretty much OK with rounding up gays and beating them up, or worse. You have to have a pretty hefty commitment to neutral principles to think that Apple and Google should be OK with the "Let's Beat Up a Batty Boy" app because it's OK in some country...
- avip 8y ago
  You did not address anything OP raised. Maybe read this https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/ https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/ (it's short, concise and relevant) and try to articulate your stance here - who should have the authority to take these subjective moral decisions? [edit: sorry it's not short at all, but self-repeating so just read a few and you're done]
  - glangdale 8y ago
    I reread everything from OP, and everything from my post, and think I addressed it well enough. Both OP and many of the critics of Cloudflare are casting around, like the philosophical equivalent of a dog with a bucket on its head, hoping that the uninteresting question of "is there some magic neutral principle that will allow us to operate from day to day without making subjective moral decisions" (narrator: "there isn't") will be conveniently resolved with some appeal to local law, free speech absolutism, slippery slope fallacies, catchy Latin slogans, etc. My stance here is that everyone has to make these subjective moral decisions all the time and that the hope that we can pull a neutral principle out of our ass and Resolve Everything is itself a moral decision and not exempt from moral criticism. It's just yet another value judgement: specifically in the Cloudflare case, it's that "the abstract neutral principle of free speech and the idea that companies shouldn't interfere with who they host" is more important than "maybe we shouldn't let those assholes from the Daily Stormer go about their business with impunity". I'm OK with you believing that if you want to, but it's just as much of a subjective moral decision to prioritize a quest for neutral principle over making your own ad hoc moral decisions (which you will wind up doing anyhow). In short, it's subjectivity all the way down, so you may as well 'fight your corner'.
colechristensen 8y ago
Taking down "blasphemous" content is immoral. More generally, allowing religiously-based morals to restrict the freedoms of those who aren't willing participants is immoral. Building and distributing or in any way being involved in the technology to track women in SA makes you directly responsible for the abuse that happens as a result. Technology companies have a responsibility that comes with the power they enable, true it is very difficult to exercise properly, but in some cases it is very clear what is right and wrong.
posterboy 8y ago
For servers based in the USA or for crimes such as slavery facilitated by entities from the USA, yes USAmerican moral is the guidance. It's difficult to keep up segregation in a world growing together. I mean segregation of morals, though quite ironically the ambiguity works swell.
zeeed 8y ago
A lot of posts seem to imply that there is some sort of moral or neutrality or higher ground to be assumed by an App Store. That is not so. App stores are, at best, opinionated, some more than others.
IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
You don’t need a bright and fast rule that covers every imaginable case. You can just decide the easy cases, like this, and you lose absolutely nothing in the process.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
>If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? Apple and Google are, and their moral guideline is money. They are in the business of making money. If the content seems close enough to illegal and small enough revenue to not be worth investigating it, or if the content is legal but costs more to host than it brings in due to backlash, it will be censored. I would even guess that content that is illegal but brings in enough money won't be banned (unless a court order comes in that isn't worth the cost to fight). One can just look at Reddit's history of banning content and see that it bans things not based on morals or laws but on when it stopped being a revenue generation. The allowed their most popular sub-reddit for years until moral outrage grew due to a news investigation, and then banned it under the guise of being illegal and protecting minors (despite the content not being illegal, as the federal government wouldn't have allowed to continue operating had it been). Don't Apple and Google already block plenty of legal content they don't want to deal with? Consumers should force them to explain why they are willing to deal with this specific content.
snarf21 8y ago
I think we have to take a different stance. If you think a company is anathema for some position they take or product they offer, then stop supporting them. Boycott all Apple and/or Google products. Sell their stock out of your retirement holdings. Shed a light to others explaining why they should care and hope they do the same. I also agree (as posted below) that a good place to start is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We've collective agreed that this is a minimum line and should require all companies and countries to meet or exceed these requirements.
gyaniv 8y ago
I don't think the neutrality argument works here. Because by having this app Google and Apple are clearly siding with the Saudi government. The neutral thing to do was not to allow this app, but to also not allow an app that for example, helps women get out of Saudi Arabia. This app helps clearly helps the Saudi government, and the men that choose to oppress their women (not all of them do), control the Saudi women. It makes this task easier and so helping it (by giving it a place and spreading it in your app store) isn't neutral.
wonthegame 8y ago
I think the stockholders would understand that SA is absolutely wrong and both should yank the app. This app goes against human decencies and rights and that overrides the legality.
anonlastname 8y ago
I support the Google play model- if you want to have your app on the Google Play store it has to conform to certain standards, but the operating system allows you to install arbitrary APKs
writepub 8y ago
This is less about morals than it is about modern Western Civilization, and human rights. Given how Google and Apple are products of modern Western Civilization that benefits from human rights, it's a fair demand to expect these companies to call out blatant violations by powerful Nations on the same. After all, if Saudi Arabia is unapologetic about Khashogi, or women's rights and defiant enough to break ties with Canada, Google and Apple can be defiant with the current international human rights council head!
buboard 8y ago
You mean, ios App store and Google play are neutral?
appleflaxen 8y ago
it's the golden rule: would you want this app used against you? if not, then it should be taken down.

burtonator 8y ago

Instead of Hooli someone is going to launch Halali ... Cloud hosting according to the laws or the Koran.

Animats 8y ago
It exists, sort of. There's a "halal search engine"[1]. Iran has something like the Great Firewall of China.[2] Saudi Arabia has official censorship, and they're open about it; there's a web form for requesting that something be censored, and blocked sites divert to a page saying it's blocked.[3] It seems that Iran's system is fairly tight, but the Saudi system isn't really that strict. On the other side, there are multiple "kosher ISPs" with cloud-based filtering. There are even "glatt kosher" ISPs.[4] "The Secured program will block pornography and violence; Secured Plus will also block women wearing intimate apparel; Secured Squared and Protected will filter out any immodest clothing; and Sealed will enable access only to sites with religious and modest content." In Israel, there are "kosher phones", which are either voice only or can't access the web at all. They just run rabbi-approved apps.[5] [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/internet-searching-islam-halalgoogling/25042250.html https://www.rferl.org/a/internet-searching-islam-halalgoogli... [2] https://www.dailydot.com/news/hewlett-packard-iran-censorship-halal-internet/ https://www.dailydot.com/news/hewlett-packard-iran-censorshi... [3] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/saudi-arabia https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2017/saudi-arabi... [4] https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3446129,00.html https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3446129,00.html [5] https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-israel-unveils-kosher-smartphone-for-haredim-1.5338700 https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-israel-unveils-koshe...
- walrus01 8y ago
  Anecdotally, VPNs are incredibly popular in Iran and the government hasn't had a great deal of success in blocking their usage. Unlike the Chinese GFW, the government entities in Iran that want to run a nationwide firewall are not able to attract the 'best and brightest' network engineers. The sort of Iranians who might be qualified to implement such are not living in Iran, they're living in Los Angeles and working for six-figure salaries in US dollars.
- solatic 8y ago
  An important note regarding the "kosher" ISPs - they're opt-in. Anybody who has an account with a "kosher" ISP is free to cancel and get an account with an unrestricted ISP. That makes them qualitatively different from Chinese etc. ISPs where people have no choice but to submit to censorship.

AmericanChopper 8y ago

The internet I grew up with was a champion of free speech and exchange of ideas. No matter what they were. It’s very sad to see that it’s being taken over calls for censorship on so many different levels. I do find the nurtrality aspect to be very hypocritical though. The same communities that demand ISP infrastructure be kept neutral at all costs will often support content censorship in numerous other ways.

walrus01 8y ago

Counterpoint: Nobody owes the Saudis a publishing platform to push their app. If they want to fully self host it on servers within the geographical borders of the kingdom, they can. Good luck getting it to install on the majority of non-rooted iOS and Android devices. I would encourage anyone running any 'cloud' based services for the Saudi government to discontinue serving them as soon as possible. This runs the gamut from basic DNS hosting, VM hosting (google/AWS/azure/whatever), email and managed service hosting (office365), everything. They're welcome to have a go at fully self hosting everything for their own citizens on their own ISPs, inside the kingdom, with netblocks they don't advertise to BGP upstreams.

jabberthemutt 8y ago
Nobody owes you anything either. I don't like your opinion. Your internet access will be cut tomorrow. Apple and Google ban you from using their phones. You are welcome to create, manage and host your own infrastructure though. Good luck! Oh wait, most of the AS around you also prefer not to route your traffic. And your domain? Nah, DNS is also at their providers' whim and you are on a very popular blacklist.
- walrus01 8y ago
  Current evidence shows that the AS that I run backbone engineering for have hundreds of peers at some of the world's largest IX points, and a number of highly reliable upstream transits. I get the point of your comment, but the reason why my AS is not shunned by the global Internet community is that we're responsible citizens. Unlike some other ISPs that I won't bother naming. Now, the bar to being a halfway decent and ethical ISP is not really so high these days. You have to actually go to extra effort and make things intentionally more complicated to fuck with your customers' traffic. In North America, at least, part of that includes not censoring content and not even contemplating doing something like the Saudis do. I can guarantee you that if the C-level executives at my company were asked to implement something that was grossly in violation of the US constitution/bill or rights, Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, or similar concepts upholding the rule of law, they would refuse. I feel for the people who run telecom and ISPs in Saudi Arabia, who need to implement technical solutions at the whim of a corrupt hereditary monarchy. I debated whether it was even worth my time to write this comment, since your argument is weak and theoretical. Reality is that major ISPs don't cut each other off for arbitrary reasons. But I'd bet $5 you're not involved in the practical day to day logistics of things like establishing 100GbE PNIs between major ASes.

geofft 8y ago

Neutrality is a moral viewpoint in itself. It's the viewpoint that nobody is actually wrong, that simply by being a country you have a right to have your moral views respected. In the specific case of app stores, it's the viewpoint that everyone deserves to have the things they're doing made more efficient, and that helping anyone speed up their work is virtuous. (Neutrality, by the way, is IBM's present defense of Dehomag's actions in World War II: there was a market opportunity in Germany, market opportunities are not inherently immoral, and by the time Germany's morality was beyond the pale, it was too late to say no. See https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss .) And this isn't really neutrality, anyway. It's neutrality between the views of the powerful. The morality of Saudi Arabia is in scope; the morality of the Unabomber isn't. The morality of the LDS Church is in scope; the morality of Jews who object on religious grounds to the actions of the state of Israel isn't. The morality of China is in scope; the morality of non-authoritarian Communists isn't, because they lost all the Communist countries to authoritarians.

slg 8y ago
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." ~Desmond Tutu
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  I love this quote. Neutrality has enabled some of the greatest evils in history. I think it is impossible to be neutral and also be a force for good.
  - notMice 8y ago
    What if it’s not mice you’re talking about?
- BigFish12 8y ago
  In situations of injustice, choosing the side of the oppressor is not always a bad thing, It's sometimes beneficial to let oppressor get it's way. You need to look and evaluate the whole picture before making a decision because constant local optimization is not always the best global strategy. Your goal is to win the war, not the battle.

alacombe 8y ago

True, but it can be difficult for public relation on one side to censor LEGAL speech you disagree with locally (here in the US), and yet accept worse conduct remote. Same argument about Google in China. Though I guess it only make sense if you consider that both practice bring profits in.

realusername 8y ago

> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left? Since Apple & Google created a walled garden, any damage the apps can do fall into their responsibility. If they wanted to avoid this responsibility, they should have created an open platform.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

OpieCunningham 8y ago

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is probably a good place to start. https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/index.html https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...

mda 8y ago
There are so many things that are iffy but do not violate these.
- slavak 8y ago
  That's not the target standard, that's a basic baseline. When you're worried about violating neutrality by denying service based on potentially subjective moral judgements, using at least the low bar of an almost-universally accepted set of rights is probably a good place to start.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I don't think a real argument can be made that morality is subjective. If morality were subjective then the choice would be clear, no, Google and everybody else should respect other peoples' morals. But things like slavery and the Holocaust make that determination, well, difficult. To say that morality is ultimately relative is ultimately to condone societies choosing to do really repugnant things to people. There is a line to draw. That much is certain. The only question is where. I don't think we should be charging into the Sentinel Islands like a bunch of idiots and destroying their culture. But Apple choosing not to technologically enable the Saudis to further disenfranchise their women seems to be worthy. In 1807, Britain passed the Slave Trade Act, outlawing slavery throughout the Empire. Passing the law wasn't enough to actually stop the slave trade. So the British Empire established the West Africa Squadron at considerable expense, to curb the illegal trade. At first the squadron was hampered by the need to remain on good diplomatic terms with other European countries, but soon they signed treaties allowing Britain free reign to interdict and search ships they suspected of carrying slaves. At it's height, one sixth of the resources of the Royal Navy was devoted to curbing slavery. What should be the arbiter of morality? I don't really know. But the public willingness to devote considerable social resources to stamping out an awful practice is a gift we shouldn't turn away. Another example is the Latin American drug trade. The liberal-minded thing to do is to legalize drugs so that the cartels can't profit from them. But history teaches that cartels are in the business of doing nasty things, not in any one nasty business. So if they can't make mountains of cash funneling drugs across borders, they'll make hills of cash funneling humans. It takes cross-border cooperation to smash these quasi-states, as they largely managed to do in Colombia. Saudi Arabia is not interested in rapid social change, many many countries are doing the best they can to resist the destabilizing effects of Western technology on their traditional cultures. China has their Great Firewall. North Korea is closed off completely. Maybe they have a point. But the West can't put the genie back in the bottle, we can't go back to a world before the Internet. And the elites in these traditional societies are perfectly fine profiting off of the tech when it's convenient for them. So I don't really have much of a problem with Apple deciding to stick their neck out, or with us placing a moral onus on them, to stop facilitating the exploitation of humans.

killjoywashere 8y ago

Google shut down support for Project Maven, which was just running code in their cloud at retail prices. If you can impose your morality in a way that prevents the defense of the constitution of the country in which your company is incorporated, I don't see what the issue is with imposing your morality on a dictatorial foreign government.

int_19h 8y ago

US public opinion. Why? Because Apple and Google are both American companies, and their respective stores are hosted in US. If Saudis don't like it, they can roll their own, without our assistance, and without us profiting from any of it.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> If Saudis don't like it, they can roll their own, without our assistance, and without us profiting from any of it. Be careful what you wish for. They have the money to do it. Cornering a market isn't that hard if you're doing it for strategic reasons rather than to turn a profit. And then what? We have to petition the Saudis to approve our apps? Maybe it would be better if we didn't have a central party that controls everything for everybody, regardless of who it is.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running. Thus, to prevent them, you will need regulation - which stops at the border. Saudi government will have their own, and you can be sure that it'll be the kind that enables what they want to do. On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running. That would be an argument if people were given the independent choice, but the choice is tied to the phone you buy. It's not much of a choice if both of the major platforms are tied to a walled garden and the alternatives are esoteric enough that most people aren't even aware they exist. And it is regulation keeping them that way. Third parties would sell iPhones modified to add competing app stores if there weren't laws preventing it. To say nothing of the lack of antitrust enforcement as yet -- markets don't work when there is insufficient competition. > On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets. Then they would reciprocate, oil prices would skyrocket and the dollar would fail as the reserve currency, both because of the oil market and because other countries wouldn't want to accept it if US foreign policy becomes to seize them back from a country where they were used to make trillions in purchases over decades. You could say "and we could nuke them" with about the same probability of that actually happening. And what would you even use to justify it, while we continue to do business with China and a dozen other countries with similarly problematic records?

JackPoach 8y ago

I agree. It's kind of pointless to demand from FB, Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants that they both don't interfere with freedom of speech and other freedoms and do promote various kinds of favorable social agendas at the same time. Also, KSA is backward as fuck, I just don't see how it's Google's fault that someone wants to live in the dark ages.

watwut 8y ago
But ... the app is designed to prevent the freedom. The function of notifying is literally for the purpose of stopping women who don't want to live like that by people who force them to live in the "dark ages".
- JackPoach 8y ago
  So, in other words, you are willing to ask Apple and Google to proactively police their apps, if they are designed to prevent freedoms on not. You'll probably need to ban any app related to Koran or Bible, because they condemn certain types of sexual preferences. Anything Catholic, Mormon, Scientology, got to go. So, when do you stop? How about apps used by Pentagon (Pentagon kills people)? Or banking apps that charge exhorbitant fees and 'prey on the poor'. It's a really fine line. Again, you can with both want and not want for the tech giants to police behavior of others.
  - watwut 8y ago
    There is no thin line between app with catholic content or Koran and app that notifies male guardian of a women who is trying to cross the border. Nor between bank app that pays on poor. This app is not preying on vulnerable women trying to convince them to go back. There is also difference between policing apps that are designed "designed to prevent freedoms or not" and between policing apps that do in fact prevent basic freedoms. This app is sending message to another person so that he can stop physically stop her and punish her. You can choose to ignore bank app and bible. You cant choose to ignore saudi police coming for you, because male guardian was notified. But for that matter, sexual content is already heavily policed. It is not like the app stores ever claimed to be anything goes zones.

terminus 8y ago

> If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N? I agree that not every situation is this easy to decide but this one -- women as chattel -- seems rather staightforward. Corporations claim free speech rights (via corporate personhood) all the time. Not using those rights in this case seems to be quite a statement.

Pristina 8y ago
>seems rather staightforward. So your entire argument is based on your personal subjective valuation that it is straightforward. The idea that a homosexual should be thrown from a bridge onto an oncoming train is as straightforward to a good many people as this is to you. What you are invoking here is really 'US public opinion' or its related 'western world public opinion' circa. 2019. If this is basically all the substance of your argument, then your position is no better than the moslem over there that thinks blasphemer should be beheaded.
- terminus 8y ago
  Are you seriously saying that there are two sides to the whether women are chattel or not? What's funny is that your specious analogies try to equate this argument -- for more freedom for the Saudi women -- to others where people's freedoms are being restricted. Might I suggest you have another go at remedial logic.

ulfw 8y ago

> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Yet all adult apps are banned, just because as US companies morals when it comes to sexual content are just very Disneyesque in that country. Even for 18+ year olds.

Mindwipe 8y ago
Yep. The point at which Google and Apple don't both ban apps even aimed at sexual minorities like kink people (even just dating apps) is the point they can cry that they don't make moral judgements. They do, and they've decided that consenting adult's sexual preferences are worse than an app that allows a dystopian regime to track the movement of women so abusive men can control them. That's messed up.

sschueller 8y ago

Pornographie is legal in the US, yet you won't find any of those apps in the app stores. Either you are neutral or you take full responsibility of what you offer in your walled garden. You can't have it both ways.

megaremote 8y ago
No, it is not full or none, that is ridiculous. You are allowed to have a line that you will not cross.
- sschueller 8y ago
  Not if you want neutral carrier protection under the law. As soon as you start to pick and choose you loose that protection and you are liable for illegal content on your service. What would phone service be like if the carrier could decide who gets to use it and who doesn't? They are not held responsible for criminals using phones but if they decided who gets to use it they would be liable.
- xanipher 8y ago
  How is it reasonable that "this line that you will not cross" is pornography and not "an app that tracks and controls Saudi Arabian women"?
  - Codestare 8y ago
    It's reasonable because it's their own decision to make. What you (or any of us) think about it in moral or ethic terms, is irrelevant.
  - x15 8y ago
    It would be ironic if the USA government tried to regulate or fine Google on this, while at the same time selling heavy weaponry to SA.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  And they do. But what exactly is that line. Prurient content that empowers people? Banned. Content that literally allows control over non-consenting individuals based on their gender? Accepted. This is like a serial killer who campaigns against littering. They have a line they won't cross, but we shouldn't accept it.

stickfigure 8y ago

Serious question: Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks? I think it's pretty reasonable for the court of modern political opinion to pass judgement on the more egregious examples of injustice in the world. Yes, morality is relative, but there's a strong majority opinion on this - especially in the countries that build the technology platforms we're talking about. Apple & Google should yank the apps, and we should hold their feet to the fire until they do.

xyzzy123 8y ago
Ouch. There’s been a lot to think about over the course of this thread. I think South Africa is a good example because there were wide ranging trade sanctions against them during Apartheid which could have supported actions such as yanking government apps as a matter of international agreement. Overall though I don’t think it’s a good idea for FAANG companies to unilaterally wade into foreign policy or cultural influence even more than they already do. Other commenters have made some good points that the platforms are already very not neutral, pointing to adult apps and arbitrary TOS violations as app store death penalty. I agree that this is true but I remain broadly opposed to the idea that we must stop others from running code that we don’t like. Overall it doesn’t seem like the right mechanism to do politics.
wongarsu 8y ago
> Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks? Yes (but only begrudgingly). Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation. That means within their borders they can do as they please, even if we don't like what they do. We fought one of the most devastating wars in history (the 30 years war [1]) trying to control what other people think, and at the end everyone agreed that sovereignty is a great concept [2][3]. Using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms is in stark contrast to the idea of sovereignty and signals to everyone else that that kind of behaviour is ok. That's how you get cold and hot wars. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years'_War 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty

watwut 8y ago

We blame companies for helping catch Chinese or Saudi etc dissidents too. We blame them when they help catching human rights activists. Generally speaking, tolerance goes from here to there.

mk89 8y ago

>Under Saudi law, every woman has a legal "guardian" who can restrict her travel to specific airports and routes, and get automated alerts when they cross borders. What neutral argument do you really wish to have? The fact that their legal system is messed up won't make me say "oh, but by law you are not allowed...".

thanatos_dem 8y ago
I think the parent poster’s point is that that’s a very western perspective of morality. Imagine if the tables were turned, and the apprent promiscuity promoted by apps like Tinder was deemed immoral by a country that’s more conservative. Should that app be pulled globally as a result? To them the fact that we allow so much casually dating could be (and in middle eastern cultures often is) viewed as “wrong”.
- mk89 8y ago
  I understand completely the parent's point of view, because I am confronted with hundreds of people like that on a daily basis. To be honest? I am tired of justifying insanity, despite the legal point of view, and despite the fact that tables are not turned. I am not a lawyer and I am not sitting at a round table, and I have opinions. And my opinion is that due to this "oh, by law, or by religion" we are throwing away every sort of freedom and respect our parents and grandparents fought so hard so that we could today give them for granted. Tell me one woman in this world that likes to be treated less than a car to rent (take a look at the website, you even have to justify where to go and for how long. Basically with car2go a car is treated with more respect than a human being). But as someone might argue, it's not up to me to judge. Thankfully I live in a country that treats everyone with respect.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    When you are employed by a company, you are treated 'like a car to rent', yet nobody seems to have an issue with it. At some point in the future, people will look back at this time and consider it immoral that companies could rent people by the hour. Likewise, people in many non-western cultures do not have any issue with having a guardian 'look after' you, in return for a payment to your family. If the people don't see an issue with it, why should some foreign company come in and decide to ban it?

megaremote 8y ago

We have to have a line somewhere. Google and Apple aren't IBM helping the Nazi's.

JetSpiegel 8y ago
IBM had the Nazis as a client, while the modern companies have the Saudis as investors. The power structure is inverted.

vr46 8y ago

This appears to be an ethical issue, not a moral one.

dgzl 8y ago

I generally like to assume that other people have the same rights that I do.

michaelmrose 8y ago

Just because you can't define an objective standard doesn't mean all ethical systems are equally good. Personally I would take what is acceptable in the US/Europe over what's acceptable in the middle east.

jaabe 8y ago

I think you're spot on with your UN suggestion. I mean, didn't we (the world) establish the concept of human rights, exactly as an answer to this problem of bias? I think we could go a long way, if we simply required our technology to abide by the international human rights convention. Of course this might be a problem for a lot more Apps than the Saudi women's-tracker.

deathanatos 8y ago

Honestly, I think this is what the Prime Directive really gets at. The mistake was "interfering" (hosting) in the first place.

avip 8y ago

For apple we could use the precedent https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/ https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-ba... as surely this app is offensive to not less than 50% of customers.

edoloughlin 8y ago

If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality Just... wow. This app is literally designed to allow men to enforce morals on women.

mscasts 8y ago

They already block porn because it's sensitive in the US. Games where you shoot people in the head or drive people over is okay though. I can't see how this differs.

908087 8y ago
Are you saying you don't see the difference between video games, and an app that is meant to harm/control actual living human beings?
- mscasts 8y ago
  No that is not what I am saying. I am for the ban of this app since they already block less offensive things like porn. It would be double standard to allow a muslim app to control real human beings but block porn.

glangdale 8y ago

This is a typical argument from 'neutral principles'.In this kind of thinking, the notion of 'being fair to everyone in a principled fashion that is easily and mechanistically describable' is more important than say, the notion of 'not oppressing women, even if the Saudis think it's OK'. This is itself a value judgement and comes down to your opinion. Like the old joke about turtles, it's opinions all the way down. It's also fairly obviously absurd; there are countries where public opinion and even the legal system are pretty much OK with rounding up gays and beating them up, or worse. You have to have a pretty hefty commitment to neutral principles to think that Apple and Google should be OK with the "Let's Beat Up a Batty Boy" app because it's OK in some country...

avip 8y ago
You did not address anything OP raised. Maybe read this https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/ https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/ (it's short, concise and relevant) and try to articulate your stance here - who should have the authority to take these subjective moral decisions? [edit: sorry it's not short at all, but self-repeating so just read a few and you're done]
- glangdale 8y ago
  I reread everything from OP, and everything from my post, and think I addressed it well enough. Both OP and many of the critics of Cloudflare are casting around, like the philosophical equivalent of a dog with a bucket on its head, hoping that the uninteresting question of "is there some magic neutral principle that will allow us to operate from day to day without making subjective moral decisions" (narrator: "there isn't") will be conveniently resolved with some appeal to local law, free speech absolutism, slippery slope fallacies, catchy Latin slogans, etc. My stance here is that everyone has to make these subjective moral decisions all the time and that the hope that we can pull a neutral principle out of our ass and Resolve Everything is itself a moral decision and not exempt from moral criticism. It's just yet another value judgement: specifically in the Cloudflare case, it's that "the abstract neutral principle of free speech and the idea that companies shouldn't interfere with who they host" is more important than "maybe we shouldn't let those assholes from the Daily Stormer go about their business with impunity". I'm OK with you believing that if you want to, but it's just as much of a subjective moral decision to prioritize a quest for neutral principle over making your own ad hoc moral decisions (which you will wind up doing anyhow). In short, it's subjectivity all the way down, so you may as well 'fight your corner'.

colechristensen 8y ago

Taking down "blasphemous" content is immoral. More generally, allowing religiously-based morals to restrict the freedoms of those who aren't willing participants is immoral. Building and distributing or in any way being involved in the technology to track women in SA makes you directly responsible for the abuse that happens as a result. Technology companies have a responsibility that comes with the power they enable, true it is very difficult to exercise properly, but in some cases it is very clear what is right and wrong.

posterboy 8y ago

For servers based in the USA or for crimes such as slavery facilitated by entities from the USA, yes USAmerican moral is the guidance. It's difficult to keep up segregation in a world growing together. I mean segregation of morals, though quite ironically the ambiguity works swell.

zeeed 8y ago

A lot of posts seem to imply that there is some sort of moral or neutrality or higher ground to be assumed by an App Store. That is not so. App stores are, at best, opinionated, some more than others.

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago

You don’t need a bright and fast rule that covers every imaginable case. You can just decide the easy cases, like this, and you lose absolutely nothing in the process.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

>If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? Apple and Google are, and their moral guideline is money. They are in the business of making money. If the content seems close enough to illegal and small enough revenue to not be worth investigating it, or if the content is legal but costs more to host than it brings in due to backlash, it will be censored. I would even guess that content that is illegal but brings in enough money won't be banned (unless a court order comes in that isn't worth the cost to fight). One can just look at Reddit's history of banning content and see that it bans things not based on morals or laws but on when it stopped being a revenue generation. The allowed their most popular sub-reddit for years until moral outrage grew due to a news investigation, and then banned it under the guise of being illegal and protecting minors (despite the content not being illegal, as the federal government wouldn't have allowed to continue operating had it been). Don't Apple and Google already block plenty of legal content they don't want to deal with? Consumers should force them to explain why they are willing to deal with this specific content.

snarf21 8y ago

I think we have to take a different stance. If you think a company is anathema for some position they take or product they offer, then stop supporting them. Boycott all Apple and/or Google products. Sell their stock out of your retirement holdings. Shed a light to others explaining why they should care and hope they do the same. I also agree (as posted below) that a good place to start is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We've collective agreed that this is a minimum line and should require all companies and countries to meet or exceed these requirements.

gyaniv 8y ago

I don't think the neutrality argument works here. Because by having this app Google and Apple are clearly siding with the Saudi government. The neutral thing to do was not to allow this app, but to also not allow an app that for example, helps women get out of Saudi Arabia. This app helps clearly helps the Saudi government, and the men that choose to oppress their women (not all of them do), control the Saudi women. It makes this task easier and so helping it (by giving it a place and spreading it in your app store) isn't neutral.

wonthegame 8y ago

I think the stockholders would understand that SA is absolutely wrong and both should yank the app. This app goes against human decencies and rights and that overrides the legality.

anonlastname 8y ago

I support the Google play model- if you want to have your app on the Google Play store it has to conform to certain standards, but the operating system allows you to install arbitrary APKs

writepub 8y ago

This is less about morals than it is about modern Western Civilization, and human rights. Given how Google and Apple are products of modern Western Civilization that benefits from human rights, it's a fair demand to expect these companies to call out blatant violations by powerful Nations on the same. After all, if Saudi Arabia is unapologetic about Khashogi, or women's rights and defiant enough to break ties with Canada, Google and Apple can be defiant with the current international human rights council head!

buboard 8y ago

You mean, ios App store and Google play are neutral?

appleflaxen 8y ago

it's the golden rule: would you want this app used against you? if not, then it should be taken down.