19 ms·

Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires

426 points by mikro2nd 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago
> YouTubers Actually it was adsense pubilshers and paypal customers who felt the burn first. They 'll be feeling some schadenfreude that their desperation is now everyone's
HenryKissinger 5y ago
> Losing your cloud account can cost you decades of your family photos. Losing access to your media account can cost you access to thousands of dollars’ worth of music, movies, audiobooks and ebooks. Losing your IoT account can render your whole home uninhabitable, freezing the door locks while bricking your thermostat, burglar alarm and security cameras. I keep all my personal data on my local machine, which I periodically back up to an external hard drive. My music library is a collection of raw audio files in my "Music" folder, which I play with Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player when WMP can't handle the format. I don't rely on a third party. Same with everything else. I don't use any Internet of Things device, and never intend to. I also don't use any Facebook or Apple product or service. If the major tech companies failed overnight, I would lose the ability to discover new music through YouTube, but my life wouldn't be affected otherwise. Shameless plug for /r/DataHoarders
- cube00 5y ago
  Unsolicited backup advice: 3-2-1 - make sure you have a copy offsite.
  - DesiLurker 5y ago
    I do a amazon glacier for most important data. but then I do have other cloud storage besides my home NAS. that said I wouldn't lose any sleep if all the FAANGs were to go offline for a while.
    - cube00 5y ago
      Just make sure you've fully done the sums on how much it will cost to get your data back out from Glacier. https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Yes, you do that... but many Average Joes and Aunt Marges don't... they buy a phone, click the default settings, and their data gets sent to the cloud... when the storage on the phone is used up, the phone recommends deleting old, backed up photos, and they click yes. Then they argue about trump/vaccines/... whatever, and get banned, and lose everything.
lbriner 5y ago
It's all very well that a company can disable your account without any recourse but I would be interested in someone with deep enough pockets to take legal action against an organisation that actually posseses your property. If a bank closed my account and wouldn't give me my money back and their "decision was final", I would be rightly outraged. I guess the problem is just the massive disparity between some Joe Schmo who cannot afford legal action and these multi-billion corporates who can actually afford to lose.
- m12k 5y ago
  Legislation like the GDPR is a step in the right direction, by defining and enforcing your ownership over your own data. It seems like we need another similar legislation to define our rights when we license IP - e.g. so I can't just lose my Steam or Oculus game library.
- Joker_vD 5y ago
  Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when you make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash, and it becomes an asset of the bank. In turn, you get the right to cash withdrawal, as specified in the terms and conditions. But money itself, those now belong to the bank and the bank can do (and actually does) with them whatever it pleases, without needing your knowledge, or consent, or approval, or whatever.
  - jlokier 5y ago
    > Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when you make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash You don't own the $10 cash bill in your pocket either. It's just a promissory note from the central bank. When you deposit that $10 cash, you're not surrendering legal title, you're transferring liability. Switching from one third party to another. Debating what that really means is where the discussion gets interesting. But rather philosophical. Pragmatically, you own money in a bank account the same way as you own it in cash. Have fun with the turtles all the way down!
    - 5y ago
nickdothutton 5y ago
The future did not turn out as we thought it would.
- lebuffon 5y ago
  And nostalgia is not as good as it used to be either. :)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
intended 5y ago
When this topic is applied at scale, I feel that the article is discussing "Tech giants don't want to recruit the people they need to handle customer support", with extra steps. Tech scales cheaply. People do not. The argument here, which I wholeheartedly support, is that people deserve transparency - we should know what happens to our data. The sum of human interactions, our actions as a group, our foibles, best natures and choices are sitting behind NDAs and firms that are essentially imperial, a state that no one wants. Firms like the power, but not the cost. But any more equitable state will require legions of people to respond to all of those complaints raised in a day. Which costs money. Making that information transparent, giving reasons, creating an appeals process (the santa clara principles) is expense. I bet that no firm wants to, and if forced to do so, they will shift the costs to someone else. Either firms that treat all of those escalations as fodder to churn through or upsell, or to tax paying citizens. Kafkaesque bureaucracy? If anyone is willing to take the other side of a bet, I'll bet that there is ONLY Kafkaesque bureaucracy here. Get more people, then you get more lopsided human bias influenced decisions. Get more automation, and then you have the current state of affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the unfeeling boot of an automaton on your account. "Which KPI defined the fate of humanity? Appeals addressed per second" Final point: In the real world, if you have open transparent rules, then it takes human time and physical action to appeal or tie up the system. In a digital system, open and transparent rules mean that someone will eventually automate a way to tie up your appeals que at no cost. Ban the user? New account shows up in 10 seconds. I have no idea how to address this last difference.
- naasking 5y ago
  > Get more automation, and then you have the current state of affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the unfeeling boot of an automaton on your account. You seem to be taking as given that they have to be making these decisions to boot people off. You can have all of the inexpensive automation and little customer support costs you want and it works just fine, as long as you don't try to enforce a Kafkaesque set of terms and conditions to begin with.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    And then you end up with antisemitic child trafficking porn ring on your platform, people ( rightfully ) hate you for it, and there's legal trouble. There have to be content rules. Once they're there, various interest groups ( advertisers, religious nuts, "concerned parents") will exercise pressure to add their "demons" in those rules.
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Let's see. So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services, and possibly your main point of contact. Then you mention something innocuous, I don't know, a cucumber maybe, on YouTube in a comment, and now your account is gone because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang or a secret pedophile ring slang, and you got reported into oblivion. Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too. The hoops you have now to jump are worse than changing spelling of your legal name or changing the fucking citizenship. Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off". Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place. The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. They've made it extremely difficult, at least. They got, in some sense, bigger than many individual governments in regulating information channels. And yet they dodge all responsibility on the premise of being "private companies". What a wonderful world to be living in.
- CA0DA 5y ago
  > just self-host your email I have a personal domain name that I host email through Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any delivery issues.
  - zensavona 5y ago
    You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.
  - naturalauction 5y ago
    On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I’ve been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting sooner, your average user can’t be expected to deal with the hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.
CA0DA 5y ago
Most of the problems mentioned can be solved with a little bit of teaching - teach these "average users" how to get their data (email, photos, etc) backed up in a usable way and use a personal domain name as their email address, and most of these problems go away.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their" computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They literally have NO mental model of that. A personal domain? They have no idea how to do that, no understanding of why you'd want to do that outside of "marketing reasons" (which don't apply to the vast majority,) wouldn't know what to do with one should they obtain one, and would not be capable of managing said domain once they have it. Don't believe me? Go and look at an ordinary user's email inbox. ALL the emails they've ever sent/received are sitting there. Filing/folders? They've no idea what those are or how to use them. If an email makes it into a folder (by mistake: fat-fingered or a misclick of the mouse) it's GONE for them. Literally no idea that it might still be around, and still less notion of how to go looking for it. So every email ever sits "safely" in the inbox and "search" is a linear eyeball scan by date. I little teaching? I believe not. A lot of teaching? Perhaps. Might have some small effect, and even then you'll not get through to a large minority. This is not intended to dis those people or imply that they're stupid -- far from it -- just that they've never developed/been taught the mental skills these sorts of abstractions demand, and there's no way to make that happen at scale. It's a massive, persistent, pervasive UI/UX failure, and a pisspoor reflection on our "industry"s priorities.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    > I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their" computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They literally have NO mental model of that. It's probably something that should be taught in schools, early-on, when people have the neurological flexibility to absorb it. Sure, the technology will change after you get out of school, but I'm pretty damn old, and filesystems and the client/server model haven't changed a whole lot since I was in middle school. When I was in school, they didn't really have computer classes, and I think the generation after me basically got "how to use Microsoft Word", when what we all really needed was education in the fundamentals.
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
EFF points to DRM as a driver of vendor lock-in. I would point to opaque, often proprietary standards for dynamic, user-hostile data formats. Word processing documents come to mind. DOCX and DOC never have been fully cross-vendor compatible as far as I can tell. And the leading word processor doesn't transparently support a format that is. The situation is improper it's an anti-social moat for the dominant software vendor to construct.
- pornel 5y ago
  Server-side software is even stronger than DRM. DRMd software, at least in theory, could be cracked or run under emulation. You can't crack GMail to run your own version of it.
jrexilius 5y ago
What magnifies this problem is that unrelated, offline companies are more and more frequently requiring you to use these tech products in order to do business. On United, you can't buy a drink on the airplane without installing an app (only available to serfs of the apple or google empires). You can't attend a Cubs game in Chicago, again, without an app (no physical tickets, before pandemic). You can't see a menu at a restaurant without a smartphone and personal internet connection. Order carryout only through an app, etc.
- mc32 5y ago
  That seems like a pretty big gap in accessibility.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    In some countries they refrain from it for heavy demographic component of the elderly. But if it was not for that, which some would call the small part in the issue: no cash etc.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  I must presume that at that level of direct interaction the evidence of losing customers, and the accompanying insults, will be clear. I also once wanted to go to the theatre to see a company I had been dreaming of seeing for decades. They only sold ticket online. I told them my insulting part, I used «dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire [and] by a combination of violence and sarcasm» [M. Palin], I left, as duly.
jeffbee 5y ago
Cory Doctorow has been in the slippery slope warning business for a solid twenty-five years now, but has he ever been right about, well, anything? None of his old predictions stand up. Did DRM silence journalism around the world, or did it simply stop few people from ripping movies, which are objectively now more widely available to more people than ever? Did digital rectal thermometers lead to a massive government database of, uh, rectal temperatures? No? Why does anyone take this guy seriously? He runs this online doom and gloom business to flog his dystopian fiction novels!
- annadane 5y ago
  Wondering if this comment is typical of people posting on this site and I'm getting depressed thinking it might be
- uniqueid 5y ago
  I like Cory Doctorow quite a bit, but he's wrong a lot of the time. His views suffer from a combination of two flaws: 'magical group-think' might describe them. Despite this, his tech opinions are worthwhile because he keeps his finger on the pulse, and even his bad takes are representative of a large number of people in tech.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    I used to think he had some points, and for that matter I used to belong to the EFF before I got fed up with them, but after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers of digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I realized that this is just a crank.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers of digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I realized that this is just a crank. While that's a funny example, it is hard to draw a sharp distinction between various categories of medical devices that range from CPAP machines to pacemakers to continuous glucose monitors, all the way up to MRIs and external beam therapy devices. Ultimately, if you own a device -- and it is hard to argue that you don't own something that is attached to, or implanted in, your body -- a whole set of rights should apply to your ability to inspect and control the associated data, hardware, and software. Any rule that excludes the manufacturer of a digital rectal thermometer from requirements to honor those rights becomes a huge loophole that will be exploited ruthlessly.
Causality1 5y ago
We need public utility alternatives to FAANG. Everyone deserves an email address that can't be taken away from them just as much as they deserve a mailing address.
robbmorganf 5y ago
If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading some of the history of how traditional utilities (electricity, water) came to be regulated: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf Perhaps like cities traded franchises in exchange for access to digging up roads, we can trade franchises in exchange for access to privileged information. If you don't want to play by the rules, then please enjoy a total ban on storing PII or confidential data.
uniqueid 5y ago
Moderation decisions should be transparent, rules-based, and follow basic due process principles. That is not so far from what we have already and it is a spectacular failure! No, moderation decisions should be transparently arbitrary (as opposed to rules-based), and offer no 'due process' whatsoever. I would prefer a social media ecosystem with dozens of players and a philosophy more like this: Remember you are a guest on our server; we can kick you off if we think you're a liability to our reputation; and if we do kick you off, you won't be getting any months-long court of appeals because we owe you nothing but an archive of your data. Don't be an idiot.
- naasking 5y ago
  > That is not so far from what we have already and it is a spectacular failure! We have nothing like a transparent, rules-based system based on basic due process. The rules are vague and broad, the transparency is basically nil, and due process does not exist at all. People are banned and then rules are invented post-hoc to justify them, there is no discovery, and corporations have total authority to do as they please without restriction. In what non-authoritarian country does this resemble anything like a legal system?
  - uniqueid 5y ago
    Twitter, FB, etc still try to do rule-based moderation. Sometimes they later discover there's problem content that the rules don't cover. They still think they need to do (corporate) soul-searching and provide justifications to the public when they moderate. Since the way they moderate is awful, they often lie or reverse course when doing so. They still have these complicated appeals boards and processes. But since it's absurd to have some committee deliberating about most 'tweets' these processes are slow or seldom-used. So I consider what they do 'not so far' from what the essay recommends because it's the same paradigm, just terribly implemented. My opinion is that it's not desirable, and maybe impossible, to implement moderation well using this paradigm. If a guy walks into a hotel and takes a crap in the lobby, the hotel doesn't check a flowchart before kicking him out; the hotel doesn't need any justification aside from 'he defecated in the lobby', and if the guy petitions the hotel to crap - on a later occasion - in the lobby again, the hotel won't assemble a committee to tell him 'no'
paulpauper 5y ago
Facebook,amazon, twitter, youtube and google are free/cheap to hundreds of millions of users. If they started offering the same customer service that utilities, offer presumably prices would have to go up a lot? My solution: get off google and other platforms. I use proton mail. Use duckduckgo (even though it may not be as good as google at finding things). use Instagram (which although owned by Facebook is not as heavily censored). Use substack instead of blogger. Also, do not question the official media narrative about covid or the 2020 election. Doing that will get your accounts killed fast. make sure your covid and vaccine posts are compliant with the CDC and WHO
dalbasal 5y ago
OK so WTF is the game-plan?!! The game is all about controlling users, gaining rights in a standard take-it-or-leave-it "bargain." These companies rarely sell you anything just for revenue. It's always a play to aggregate data, aggregate users, create network effects and dominate their emergent properties. There's usually no value to data, for example, unless its aggregated. I think consumers might need to "unionize^" in some fashion. It may not resemble a trade union at all, but consumer rights, increasingly, resemble labour rights issues. . Youtube is a great example. There are multiple classes of users/consumers: watchers, youtubers, advertisers. All of them are completely expendable, and youtube's relationship with all of them is 100% take-it-or-leave it. No one is important enough to speak to the boss. It's actually not hard to see how youtubers would unionize. It might even resembles a labour union quite a lot. If enough youtubers users strike, for example... Advertisers I dunno. In some industries/segments, adwords and FB are basically a tax. The norm is spending >10% of your gross on advertising. OTH... it's hard to see them being a factor. I don't even have a mental model of how an organized usership might look, but data aggregation probably needs to be a part of it.
specialist 5y ago
Once platforms become economically important, they must become open markets. That means rule of law, tort, fair and impartial adjudication, etc.
trothamel 5y ago
I sort of think that the right solution of like this is to force platforms to make a choice. Platforms like youtube or facebook should be allowed to choose to be common carriers - carrying all (or perhaps all legal) content without being responsible for that content. Or they should be publishers, and treated like publishers - which means taking responsibility for what they publish. I don't think the current regime, where the platforms act as publishers but don't take responsibility for what they publish is all that tenable.
- shuntress 5y ago
  But there are both. Youtube is a platform that will host anyone's videos. Youtube is a publisher that chooses which videos to display (and where to display them). Are you essentially saying you would be satisfied if videos that violate Youtube's terms of service (without being illegal) were only available by special direct link and rendered on a page containing no "related" videos? That way Youtube as a platform will still host any legal video uploaded by anyone regardless of it's content while Youtube as a publisher does not publish anything that goes against their terms of service.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    I don't see a problem with forcing companies to pick a lane. If YT wants to publish its own content split it out into YouTube Publishing Inc., and the platform treats it like any other content.
    - shuntress 5y ago
      This is the type of thing people mean when they say "legislation has not caught up to technology". Where do you define the boundaries? How do you enforce it? If the boundary is "Platforms host video. Publishers distribute video.", who is going to make sure they every video sent through YouTubeThePublisher.com is loaded from some other domain that is not controlled by YouTubeThePublisher. I agree we need some kind of regulation to foster a healthier competitive environment but it is a complex problem that lacks a single simple solution.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I appreciate the EFF putting together some concrete proposals for changing the status quo. This is the necessary next step to merely identifying the existence of the problem that it seems like most channels I see rarely get past.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
I spend too much time thinking about and tweaking my digital life on platforms. I am a long time paying customer for all of Proton Mail's services, and sometimes I assign my domain to Proton Mail. Sometimes, when I will be doing lots of traveling, I instead use a secure forwarding service to send everything to Gmail because I like calendar integration, etc. better. Speaking of Google: I let them permanently track my activity on GCP (a service that I love), Google Play Books + Movies; I let them keep usage data on YouTube for 3 months; everything else I configure for keeping no data. Re: losing data when leaving a platform: I have never even thought of backing up my data from Twitter or Facebook because my posts have little meaning except for advertising new versions of my books and sharing cool tech papers, etc. that I discover. No need to archive any of that. When I go swimming in the nearby Verde River, I can enjoy swimming through the water without wanting to save any. Same applies for social media. BTW, a great way to control use of social media and other platforms is to use the https://freedom.to https://freedom.to service. Very inexpensive, easy to configure, and is very effective for thoughtful time management. EDIT: I do fairly frequent backups of Gmail and ProtonMail, and keep local copies of my GitHub repos on multiple computers. My iPhone pictures go automatically to iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Photos - funny that my life history in photos is to me the most important thing to backup.
somewhatbetter 5y ago
There is absolutely no problem with those companies. The problem is the user. You. Stop blaming others.
hmsshagatsea 5y ago
Am I the only one who doesnt use cloud services/iot for these very reasons? Never felt “right” handing all my personal photos and messages to Apple or M$, and owning an appliance or gadget that’s connected to the big bad internet just seems like a privacy violation waiting to happen.
contingencies 5y ago
Business doesn't welcome competition or oversight. Competition is for losers - Peter Thiel (2014 speech at Harvard) ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup Rights have to be regulated in to existence or actively fought for. These days the populace is so zoned out on Tiktok and home delivery the chances of a popular movement are precisely zero unless it's toward a new TV serial.
morpheos137 5y ago
If you don't have power or water you might die. If you don't have youtube or facebook you'll survive.

426 points by mikro2nd 5y ago

> YouTubers Actually it was adsense pubilshers and paypal customers who felt the burn first. They 'll be feeling some schadenfreude that their desperation is now everyone's

HenryKissinger 5y ago

> Losing your cloud account can cost you decades of your family photos. Losing access to your media account can cost you access to thousands of dollars’ worth of music, movies, audiobooks and ebooks. Losing your IoT account can render your whole home uninhabitable, freezing the door locks while bricking your thermostat, burglar alarm and security cameras. I keep all my personal data on my local machine, which I periodically back up to an external hard drive. My music library is a collection of raw audio files in my "Music" folder, which I play with Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player when WMP can't handle the format. I don't rely on a third party. Same with everything else. I don't use any Internet of Things device, and never intend to. I also don't use any Facebook or Apple product or service. If the major tech companies failed overnight, I would lose the ability to discover new music through YouTube, but my life wouldn't be affected otherwise. Shameless plug for /r/DataHoarders

cube00 5y ago
Unsolicited backup advice: 3-2-1 - make sure you have a copy offsite.
- DesiLurker 5y ago
  I do a amazon glacier for most important data. but then I do have other cloud storage besides my home NAS. that said I wouldn't lose any sleep if all the FAANGs were to go offline for a while.
  - cube00 5y ago
    Just make sure you've fully done the sums on how much it will cost to get your data back out from Glacier. https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html https://www.arqbackup.com/aws-glacier-pricing.html
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Yes, you do that... but many Average Joes and Aunt Marges don't... they buy a phone, click the default settings, and their data gets sent to the cloud... when the storage on the phone is used up, the phone recommends deleting old, backed up photos, and they click yes. Then they argue about trump/vaccines/... whatever, and get banned, and lose everything.

lbriner 5y ago

It's all very well that a company can disable your account without any recourse but I would be interested in someone with deep enough pockets to take legal action against an organisation that actually posseses your property. If a bank closed my account and wouldn't give me my money back and their "decision was final", I would be rightly outraged. I guess the problem is just the massive disparity between some Joe Schmo who cannot afford legal action and these multi-billion corporates who can actually afford to lose.

m12k 5y ago
Legislation like the GDPR is a step in the right direction, by defining and enforcing your ownership over your own data. It seems like we need another similar legislation to define our rights when we license IP - e.g. so I can't just lose my Steam or Oculus game library.
Joker_vD 5y ago
Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when you make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash, and it becomes an asset of the bank. In turn, you get the right to cash withdrawal, as specified in the terms and conditions. But money itself, those now belong to the bank and the bank can do (and actually does) with them whatever it pleases, without needing your knowledge, or consent, or approval, or whatever.
- jlokier 5y ago
  > Oh, but those are not your money, strictly speaking: when you make a deposit, you surrender the legal title to the cash You don't own the $10 cash bill in your pocket either. It's just a promissory note from the central bank. When you deposit that $10 cash, you're not surrendering legal title, you're transferring liability. Switching from one third party to another. Debating what that really means is where the discussion gets interesting. But rather philosophical. Pragmatically, you own money in a bank account the same way as you own it in cash. Have fun with the turtles all the way down!
  - 5y ago

nickdothutton 5y ago

The future did not turn out as we thought it would.

lebuffon 5y ago
And nostalgia is not as good as it used to be either. :)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

intended 5y ago

When this topic is applied at scale, I feel that the article is discussing "Tech giants don't want to recruit the people they need to handle customer support", with extra steps. Tech scales cheaply. People do not. The argument here, which I wholeheartedly support, is that people deserve transparency - we should know what happens to our data. The sum of human interactions, our actions as a group, our foibles, best natures and choices are sitting behind NDAs and firms that are essentially imperial, a state that no one wants. Firms like the power, but not the cost. But any more equitable state will require legions of people to respond to all of those complaints raised in a day. Which costs money. Making that information transparent, giving reasons, creating an appeals process (the santa clara principles) is expense. I bet that no firm wants to, and if forced to do so, they will shift the costs to someone else. Either firms that treat all of those escalations as fodder to churn through or upsell, or to tax paying citizens. Kafkaesque bureaucracy? If anyone is willing to take the other side of a bet, I'll bet that there is ONLY Kafkaesque bureaucracy here. Get more people, then you get more lopsided human bias influenced decisions. Get more automation, and then you have the current state of affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the unfeeling boot of an automaton on your account. "Which KPI defined the fate of humanity? Appeals addressed per second" Final point: In the real world, if you have open transparent rules, then it takes human time and physical action to appeal or tie up the system. In a digital system, open and transparent rules mean that someone will eventually automate a way to tie up your appeals que at no cost. Ban the user? New account shows up in 10 seconds. I have no idea how to address this last difference.

naasking 5y ago
> Get more automation, and then you have the current state of affairs - no nuance, no clarity and the unfeeling boot of an automaton on your account. You seem to be taking as given that they have to be making these decisions to boot people off. You can have all of the inexpensive automation and little customer support costs you want and it works just fine, as long as you don't try to enforce a Kafkaesque set of terms and conditions to begin with.
- sofixa 5y ago
  And then you end up with antisemitic child trafficking porn ring on your platform, people ( rightfully ) hate you for it, and there's legal trouble. There have to be content rules. Once they're there, various interest groups ( advertisers, religious nuts, "concerned parents") will exercise pressure to add their "demons" in those rules.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago

Let's see. So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services, and possibly your main point of contact. Then you mention something innocuous, I don't know, a cucumber maybe, on YouTube in a comment, and now your account is gone because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang or a secret pedophile ring slang, and you got reported into oblivion. Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too. The hoops you have now to jump are worse than changing spelling of your legal name or changing the fucking citizenship. Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off". Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place. The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. They've made it extremely difficult, at least. They got, in some sense, bigger than many individual governments in regulating information channels. And yet they dodge all responsibility on the premise of being "private companies". What a wonderful world to be living in.

CA0DA 5y ago
> just self-host your email I have a personal domain name that I host email through Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any delivery issues.
- zensavona 5y ago
  You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.
- naturalauction 5y ago
  On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I’ve been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting sooner, your average user can’t be expected to deal with the hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.

CA0DA 5y ago

Most of the problems mentioned can be solved with a little bit of teaching - teach these "average users" how to get their data (email, photos, etc) backed up in a usable way and use a personal domain name as their email address, and most of these problems go away.

mikro2nd 5y ago
I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their" computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They literally have NO mental model of that. A personal domain? They have no idea how to do that, no understanding of why you'd want to do that outside of "marketing reasons" (which don't apply to the vast majority,) wouldn't know what to do with one should they obtain one, and would not be capable of managing said domain once they have it. Don't believe me? Go and look at an ordinary user's email inbox. ALL the emails they've ever sent/received are sitting there. Filing/folders? They've no idea what those are or how to use them. If an email makes it into a folder (by mistake: fat-fingered or a misclick of the mouse) it's GONE for them. Literally no idea that it might still be around, and still less notion of how to go looking for it. So every email ever sits "safely" in the inbox and "search" is a linear eyeball scan by date. I little teaching? I believe not. A lot of teaching? Perhaps. Might have some small effect, and even then you'll not get through to a large minority. This is not intended to dis those people or imply that they're stupid -- far from it -- just that they've never developed/been taught the mental skills these sorts of abstractions demand, and there's no way to make that happen at scale. It's a massive, persistent, pervasive UI/UX failure, and a pisspoor reflection on our "industry"s priorities.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > I believe you're underestimating just how poor the "average user"s understanding is of what's going on in "their" computers... they literally have no concept of "where" their photos/email/etc. is stored or backed up: in the cloud, on device, synchronised,... it's just a single black box. They literally have NO mental model of that. It's probably something that should be taught in schools, early-on, when people have the neurological flexibility to absorb it. Sure, the technology will change after you get out of school, but I'm pretty damn old, and filesystems and the client/server model haven't changed a whole lot since I was in middle school. When I was in school, they didn't really have computer classes, and I think the generation after me basically got "how to use Microsoft Word", when what we all really needed was education in the fundamentals.

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago

EFF points to DRM as a driver of vendor lock-in. I would point to opaque, often proprietary standards for dynamic, user-hostile data formats. Word processing documents come to mind. DOCX and DOC never have been fully cross-vendor compatible as far as I can tell. And the leading word processor doesn't transparently support a format that is. The situation is improper it's an anti-social moat for the dominant software vendor to construct.

pornel 5y ago
Server-side software is even stronger than DRM. DRMd software, at least in theory, could be cracked or run under emulation. You can't crack GMail to run your own version of it.

jrexilius 5y ago

What magnifies this problem is that unrelated, offline companies are more and more frequently requiring you to use these tech products in order to do business. On United, you can't buy a drink on the airplane without installing an app (only available to serfs of the apple or google empires). You can't attend a Cubs game in Chicago, again, without an app (no physical tickets, before pandemic). You can't see a menu at a restaurant without a smartphone and personal internet connection. Order carryout only through an app, etc.

mc32 5y ago
That seems like a pretty big gap in accessibility.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  In some countries they refrain from it for heavy demographic component of the elderly. But if it was not for that, which some would call the small part in the issue: no cash etc.
mdp2021 5y ago
I must presume that at that level of direct interaction the evidence of losing customers, and the accompanying insults, will be clear. I also once wanted to go to the theatre to see a company I had been dreaming of seeing for decades. They only sold ticket online. I told them my insulting part, I used «dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire [and] by a combination of violence and sarcasm» [M. Palin], I left, as duly.

jeffbee 5y ago

Cory Doctorow has been in the slippery slope warning business for a solid twenty-five years now, but has he ever been right about, well, anything? None of his old predictions stand up. Did DRM silence journalism around the world, or did it simply stop few people from ripping movies, which are objectively now more widely available to more people than ever? Did digital rectal thermometers lead to a massive government database of, uh, rectal temperatures? No? Why does anyone take this guy seriously? He runs this online doom and gloom business to flog his dystopian fiction novels!

annadane 5y ago
Wondering if this comment is typical of people posting on this site and I'm getting depressed thinking it might be
uniqueid 5y ago
I like Cory Doctorow quite a bit, but he's wrong a lot of the time. His views suffer from a combination of two flaws: 'magical group-think' might describe them. Despite this, his tech opinions are worthwhile because he keeps his finger on the pulse, and even his bad takes are representative of a large number of people in tech.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  I used to think he had some points, and for that matter I used to belong to the EFF before I got fed up with them, but after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers of digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I realized that this is just a crank.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > after I saw him speak in San Francisco about the dangers of digital rectal thermometers, that was the moment when I realized that this is just a crank. While that's a funny example, it is hard to draw a sharp distinction between various categories of medical devices that range from CPAP machines to pacemakers to continuous glucose monitors, all the way up to MRIs and external beam therapy devices. Ultimately, if you own a device -- and it is hard to argue that you don't own something that is attached to, or implanted in, your body -- a whole set of rights should apply to your ability to inspect and control the associated data, hardware, and software. Any rule that excludes the manufacturer of a digital rectal thermometer from requirements to honor those rights becomes a huge loophole that will be exploited ruthlessly.

Causality1 5y ago

We need public utility alternatives to FAANG. Everyone deserves an email address that can't be taken away from them just as much as they deserve a mailing address.

robbmorganf 5y ago

If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading some of the history of how traditional utilities (electricity, water) came to be regulated: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9986/c9986.pdf Perhaps like cities traded franchises in exchange for access to digging up roads, we can trade franchises in exchange for access to privileged information. If you don't want to play by the rules, then please enjoy a total ban on storing PII or confidential data.

uniqueid 5y ago

Moderation decisions should be transparent, rules-based, and follow basic due process principles. That is not so far from what we have already and it is a spectacular failure! No, moderation decisions should be transparently arbitrary (as opposed to rules-based), and offer no 'due process' whatsoever. I would prefer a social media ecosystem with dozens of players and a philosophy more like this: Remember you are a guest on our server; we can kick you off if we think you're a liability to our reputation; and if we do kick you off, you won't be getting any months-long court of appeals because we owe you nothing but an archive of your data. Don't be an idiot.

naasking 5y ago
> That is not so far from what we have already and it is a spectacular failure! We have nothing like a transparent, rules-based system based on basic due process. The rules are vague and broad, the transparency is basically nil, and due process does not exist at all. People are banned and then rules are invented post-hoc to justify them, there is no discovery, and corporations have total authority to do as they please without restriction. In what non-authoritarian country does this resemble anything like a legal system?
- uniqueid 5y ago
  Twitter, FB, etc still try to do rule-based moderation. Sometimes they later discover there's problem content that the rules don't cover. They still think they need to do (corporate) soul-searching and provide justifications to the public when they moderate. Since the way they moderate is awful, they often lie or reverse course when doing so. They still have these complicated appeals boards and processes. But since it's absurd to have some committee deliberating about most 'tweets' these processes are slow or seldom-used. So I consider what they do 'not so far' from what the essay recommends because it's the same paradigm, just terribly implemented. My opinion is that it's not desirable, and maybe impossible, to implement moderation well using this paradigm. If a guy walks into a hotel and takes a crap in the lobby, the hotel doesn't check a flowchart before kicking him out; the hotel doesn't need any justification aside from 'he defecated in the lobby', and if the guy petitions the hotel to crap - on a later occasion - in the lobby again, the hotel won't assemble a committee to tell him 'no'

paulpauper 5y ago

Facebook,amazon, twitter, youtube and google are free/cheap to hundreds of millions of users. If they started offering the same customer service that utilities, offer presumably prices would have to go up a lot? My solution: get off google and other platforms. I use proton mail. Use duckduckgo (even though it may not be as good as google at finding things). use Instagram (which although owned by Facebook is not as heavily censored). Use substack instead of blogger. Also, do not question the official media narrative about covid or the 2020 election. Doing that will get your accounts killed fast. make sure your covid and vaccine posts are compliant with the CDC and WHO

dalbasal 5y ago

OK so WTF is the game-plan?!! The game is all about controlling users, gaining rights in a standard take-it-or-leave-it "bargain." These companies rarely sell you anything just for revenue. It's always a play to aggregate data, aggregate users, create network effects and dominate their emergent properties. There's usually no value to data, for example, unless its aggregated. I think consumers might need to "unionize^" in some fashion. It may not resemble a trade union at all, but consumer rights, increasingly, resemble labour rights issues. . Youtube is a great example. There are multiple classes of users/consumers: watchers, youtubers, advertisers. All of them are completely expendable, and youtube's relationship with all of them is 100% take-it-or-leave it. No one is important enough to speak to the boss. It's actually not hard to see how youtubers would unionize. It might even resembles a labour union quite a lot. If enough youtubers users strike, for example... Advertisers I dunno. In some industries/segments, adwords and FB are basically a tax. The norm is spending >10% of your gross on advertising. OTH... it's hard to see them being a factor. I don't even have a mental model of how an organized usership might look, but data aggregation probably needs to be a part of it.

specialist 5y ago

Once platforms become economically important, they must become open markets. That means rule of law, tort, fair and impartial adjudication, etc.

trothamel 5y ago

I sort of think that the right solution of like this is to force platforms to make a choice. Platforms like youtube or facebook should be allowed to choose to be common carriers - carrying all (or perhaps all legal) content without being responsible for that content. Or they should be publishers, and treated like publishers - which means taking responsibility for what they publish. I don't think the current regime, where the platforms act as publishers but don't take responsibility for what they publish is all that tenable.

shuntress 5y ago
But there are both. Youtube is a platform that will host anyone's videos. Youtube is a publisher that chooses which videos to display (and where to display them). Are you essentially saying you would be satisfied if videos that violate Youtube's terms of service (without being illegal) were only available by special direct link and rendered on a page containing no "related" videos? That way Youtube as a platform will still host any legal video uploaded by anyone regardless of it's content while Youtube as a publisher does not publish anything that goes against their terms of service.
- infogulch 5y ago
  I don't see a problem with forcing companies to pick a lane. If YT wants to publish its own content split it out into YouTube Publishing Inc., and the platform treats it like any other content.
  - shuntress 5y ago
    This is the type of thing people mean when they say "legislation has not caught up to technology". Where do you define the boundaries? How do you enforce it? If the boundary is "Platforms host video. Publishers distribute video.", who is going to make sure they every video sent through YouTubeThePublisher.com is loaded from some other domain that is not controlled by YouTubeThePublisher. I agree we need some kind of regulation to foster a healthier competitive environment but it is a complex problem that lacks a single simple solution.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I appreciate the EFF putting together some concrete proposals for changing the status quo. This is the necessary next step to merely identifying the existence of the problem that it seems like most channels I see rarely get past.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

I spend too much time thinking about and tweaking my digital life on platforms. I am a long time paying customer for all of Proton Mail's services, and sometimes I assign my domain to Proton Mail. Sometimes, when I will be doing lots of traveling, I instead use a secure forwarding service to send everything to Gmail because I like calendar integration, etc. better. Speaking of Google: I let them permanently track my activity on GCP (a service that I love), Google Play Books + Movies; I let them keep usage data on YouTube for 3 months; everything else I configure for keeping no data. Re: losing data when leaving a platform: I have never even thought of backing up my data from Twitter or Facebook because my posts have little meaning except for advertising new versions of my books and sharing cool tech papers, etc. that I discover. No need to archive any of that. When I go swimming in the nearby Verde River, I can enjoy swimming through the water without wanting to save any. Same applies for social media. BTW, a great way to control use of social media and other platforms is to use the https://freedom.to https://freedom.to service. Very inexpensive, easy to configure, and is very effective for thoughtful time management. EDIT: I do fairly frequent backups of Gmail and ProtonMail, and keep local copies of my GitHub repos on multiple computers. My iPhone pictures go automatically to iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Photos - funny that my life history in photos is to me the most important thing to backup.

somewhatbetter 5y ago

There is absolutely no problem with those companies. The problem is the user. You. Stop blaming others.

hmsshagatsea 5y ago

Am I the only one who doesnt use cloud services/iot for these very reasons? Never felt “right” handing all my personal photos and messages to Apple or M$, and owning an appliance or gadget that’s connected to the big bad internet just seems like a privacy violation waiting to happen.

contingencies 5y ago

Business doesn't welcome competition or oversight. Competition is for losers - Peter Thiel (2014 speech at Harvard) ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup Rights have to be regulated in to existence or actively fought for. These days the populace is so zoned out on Tiktok and home delivery the chances of a popular movement are precisely zero unless it's toward a new TV serial.

morpheos137 5y ago

If you don't have power or water you might die. If you don't have youtube or facebook you'll survive.