> Yet, with the exception of FAccT, I have seen practically no serious discussion in the ACM community of its relationship with surveillance-capitalism corporat

> Yet, with the exception of FAccT, I have seen practically no serious discussion in the ACM community of its relationship with surveillance-capitalism corporations. For example, the ACM Turing Award, ACM's highest award, is now accompanied by a prize of US$1 million, supported by Google. Indeed. Let's take a look at who sponsors the some of the top ACM conferences: The Web - Facebook[0] CHI - Facebook[1] KDD - Facebook[2] CCS - Facebook[3] You get the drift... This one is especially amusing: The AIAA/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society - Brought to you by Facebook[4] and Google Deepmind[5]. Not to mention how much money Facebook gives to academic research labs. Funding PhD students and academic research is laudable, but the things they've funded over the last decade have gone directly to improve their surveillance efforts. It's been said that the greatest tragedy in computing during the 2010s was the number of brilliant minds devoted to ranking ads on web pages. And it's not just that it's a few of them, and that there are enough resources to multitask and research all the things. No, it is a zero sum game. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon etc. suck up all of the available oxygen in any room. Their concerns are what everyone focuses on, at the exclusion of other things that could serve us better. [0] https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2021/index.html https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2021/index.html [1] https://kdd.org/kdd2021/sponsors https://kdd.org/kdd2021/sponsors [2] https://chi2021.acm.org/for-sponsors-exhibitors-and-recruiters/sponsoring/list-of-sponsors https://chi2021.acm.org/for-sponsors-exhibitors-and-recruite... [3] https://www2022.thewebconf.org https://www2022.thewebconf.org [4] https://www.aies-conference.com/2021/ https://www.aies-conference.com/2021/ [5] https://www.aies-conference.com/2022/ https://www.aies-conference.com/2022/