5 ms·
Refusing to acknowledge egregious top-down decisions which threaten or violate either one's well-being or some perceived fundamental right has a much worse effe
by crocodiletears 5y ago
Refusing to acknowledge egregious top-down decisions which threaten or violate either one's well-being or some perceived fundamental right has a much worse effect on public trust.
"Why didn't you tell me this was going on?"
"You're simply too stupid to handle the idea that your betters might occasionally be untrustworthy"
- zepto 5y agoHow are you going to argue that it’s bad for parents to be informed when strangers send sexual imagery to their children?
- crocodiletears 5y agoYou argue the applications of the technology further down the line. Remind them how facebook's safety features turned into tools for censorship.
- zepto 5y agoCan you think of a time when that kind of argument has ever worked? I remind you that people made that argument about Facebook and it didn’t.
- crocodiletears 5y agoRaising awareness won't stop any of this. It's inevitable. We have the technological capacity and institutional interest required to implement it, it will be done, and it will be endemic. Raising awareness is about letting people know so that they might take the necessary precautions if they consider themselves to be at risk of its abuse, and degrades their faith in the institutions that support it.
- zepto 5y agoIt doesn’t matter whether they are aware. They can’t take precautions. There are no technical solutions that people can use, and technologists seem to be uninterested in working on them. Apple’s solution is the best on offer. Raising awareness about Facebook’s problems hasn’t harmed Facebook.
- crocodiletears 5y agoThey can take precautions by not using iOS devices. The goal isn't to harm Apple, it's to make the knowledge available to those who need it, and have the will to avoid it. That could mean anything from watching what they put on their iPhone, to putting them down the track of using degoogled android variants on select phones, to ditching cell phones all together depending on their needs. Knowing that your phone is watching, reporting, and potentially moderating the content in it is information which is valuable in and of itself. Even if it only has utility to a fraction of the population. We find ourselves in the tightening noose of a latent authoritarian technocratic surveillance society. Few people have anything to fear from it, or the resources to escape it. But some do, and should be given every piece of information that might help them moderate or escape it.
- zepto 5y agoAndroid has been doing this all along, so not using iOS devices will not help. As I said, there are no good solutions.
- crocodiletears 5y ago* drop your phone * don't store images on your phone * use a rom like Graphene, don't install a cloud storage or Google Play Services Those aren't great solutions, but they're options.
- zepto 5y agoThey are options that almost nobody can or will use, so they won’t have any impact. If your goal is to inform a small minority of expert users that they should protect themselves against corporate/government encroachment, by the looks of the comments here, I’d say you’ve already succeeded.