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Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest. 503 all your servi

Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Atlassian, and other significant concerned companies, please band together and stage a digital protest. 503 all your services, just for the city of Canberra (where our politicians congregate to shout insults at each other and legislate favours for their corporate donors). A few days cutoff for Canberra will give enough momentum to bring us back from the current precipice, where many of Australia's software companies are realistically considering options for relocating out of Australia, and shifting all intellectual property to their newly created company headquartered in places like Singapore or Estonia or USA. And then reopen again in Australia as a satellite subsidiary branch owned or licensed by the newly created foreign-domiciled (and now non-taxpaying) parent.

levosmetalo 7y ago
Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet. If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win. With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.
- throwaway8879 7y ago
  Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut. Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    Let's be clear here - the government is not as yet doing anything. This is a report from the technocrats who run our competition regulator. Which recommendations actually make it into government policy once they've gone through the political process is a completely different question.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    If it doesn't involve taxes, welfare handouts and financial regulations the government sometimes do pretty well. One article is not much to go on, but it doesn't look like they are talking about taxing tech companies, but raising the transparency standards they must abide by. If the government isn't setting the standards for privacy, it is obvious that there will be no standard other than 'profitable for Google, good for America'. I would like to see higher standards than that in Australia. Going a little more to the root of this thread - if Google can raise enough political pressure to force the government to leave them alone that in itself would be evidence they have too much political power.
- novok 7y ago
  Its millions of lines of code that is bucketing various sessions and users into thousands of experiments where +10k lines are changing every day. I don’t think you’ll get that much value out of it. Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.
moksly 7y ago
I don’t think you can outrun this forever. Your Facebook feed, your LinkedIn feed and so on are all build to you specifically and once you reload it, there is no public record of what content has been pushed to you. This can be annoying, like when you spot an interesting LinkedIn post right as you’ve pushed up and you are never able of finding it again. It can also be illegal, like when you’re exposed to political campaigning that isn’t on public record. Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data. Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?
- ethbro 7y ago
  There are only two particularly feasible outcomes: (1) open, transparent algorithms & (2) open, transparent data. If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one. And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point. Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
  - majos 7y ago
    > Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge. What is an open algorithm? Pseudocode? Actual implementation code? A certificate from some third party auditor? A certificate from some formal verification system?
ajdlinux 7y ago
Sounds good - as a Canberran, I think I'd really benefit from an involuntary social media detox for a few weeks! This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society. I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.

levosmetalo 7y ago

Let's hope it passes through. As much as companies would like to keep this as their trade secret, I as an individual have right to know what is the company doing with my data, and how exactly it process it and based on what logic interacts with me. Especially since those companies trends to dictate one significant part of the life experience of a person living on this planet. If that would mean those company would just decide not to operate anymore on my country, I would still consider that as a net win. With great power comes the great responsibility, and those companies showed that we can't count on then bring honest and open to us unless we force them to.

throwaway8879 7y ago
Your government isn't doing this out of strong ideological principles in order to protect the freedom and privacy of it's people. Your government is salty because big tech gets to screw you over without giving the govt it's cut. Don't be fooled, big tech is not your friend, but neither is the government.
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  Let's be clear here - the government is not as yet doing anything. This is a report from the technocrats who run our competition regulator. Which recommendations actually make it into government policy once they've gone through the political process is a completely different question.
- roenxi 7y ago
  If it doesn't involve taxes, welfare handouts and financial regulations the government sometimes do pretty well. One article is not much to go on, but it doesn't look like they are talking about taxing tech companies, but raising the transparency standards they must abide by. If the government isn't setting the standards for privacy, it is obvious that there will be no standard other than 'profitable for Google, good for America'. I would like to see higher standards than that in Australia. Going a little more to the root of this thread - if Google can raise enough political pressure to force the government to leave them alone that in itself would be evidence they have too much political power.
novok 7y ago
Its millions of lines of code that is bucketing various sessions and users into thousands of experiments where +10k lines are changing every day. I don’t think you’ll get that much value out of it. Its like saying you have a right to toyotas cad files because you drive their car and trust it with your life. You wont be able to use it and it’s the wrong approach.

moksly 7y ago

I don’t think you can outrun this forever. Your Facebook feed, your LinkedIn feed and so on are all build to you specifically and once you reload it, there is no public record of what content has been pushed to you. This can be annoying, like when you spot an interesting LinkedIn post right as you’ve pushed up and you are never able of finding it again. It can also be illegal, like when you’re exposed to political campaigning that isn’t on public record. Tech may have been able to get away with this for a really long time, but almost every political leadership around the world is gearing up to fight it. The internet and the big tech companies have simply gotten too big to ignore, and maybe it’ll be tough for the first movers, but this isn’t only happening in Australia. The GDPR was Europes first serious response, but it certainly won’t be the last. I think they’ll respond by doing what governments always do, with heavy regulation, and that’s what I think we’re witnessing the start of. I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing. I prefer openness, and Facebook and Google aren’t transparent when they won’t tell you how their services build your results or who pays for it to look the way it does. I don’t think it’ll really break the internet or tech industry either, people are adaptive and someone will find a way to make a lot of money without selling everyone’s private data. Maybe that’s not going to be Google or Facebook, but do we really care about that?

ethbro 7y ago
There are only two particularly feasible outcomes: (1) open, transparent algorithms & (2) open, transparent data. If I were Google and FB, I'd be pushing like hell that regulators choose the first one. And honestly, it's going to need to happen at some point. Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge.
- majos 7y ago
  > Because there's going to be something that looks like a violation of the Fair Housing Act (f.ex., or any number of other laws promoting equality) and "Our algorithms handle it" isn't going to satisfy a judge. What is an open algorithm? Pseudocode? Actual implementation code? A certificate from some third party auditor? A certificate from some formal verification system?

ajdlinux 7y ago

Sounds good - as a Canberran, I think I'd really benefit from an involuntary social media detox for a few weeks! This is a policy area in which it's completely legitimate for government to exercise its powers. A digital economy dominated by a handful of American companies is not healthy for our own software industry or our society. I'll be looking out for the government's (and Labor's) response to this report - it will be interesting to see which recommendations they do and do not accept.