Surveilled — Issue 61: Section 230, App Store Wars, and Excel Bugs
Surveilled
Issue 61
A weekly summary of what I’ve found interesting at the intersection of economics, finance and technology.
Big Stories
Politics vs Tech—2020 is very clearly the year where the simmering conflict between global tech companies and politics erupted, pretty much everywhere at once. This week, Facebook and Twitter decided to limit the spread of a very tenuous New York Post story about Hunter Biden. In response, and perfectly on cue, the FCC announced that it will look to reinterpret the protection offered to social media platforms under the famous section 230, which could spell trouble for pretty much every website with user-generated content.
Separately, Apple asked activists’ favourite app Telegram to remove posts with personal information on Belarus officials, who might become the target of violence in the ongoing democracy protests. Obviously this again triggers all sorts of questions on the extent of the gatekeeping powers of platforms and how they should be run. In this case, it is also compounded by the fact that under Apple’s current App Store rules, Telegram would not be allowed to even explain why they have to remove the posts.
Facebook Does Not Like Criticism—In issue 59, I mentioned the “Real Facebook Oversight Board.” Well this week their website was forced offline because one of Facebook’s vendors flagged them to their ISP as a phishing site. After a bit of back and forth, it appears that request was sent in error, but the tone-deafness of Facebook’s spokesperson on Twitter is sadly characteristic of the company.
App Store Wars—Microsoft published a set of principles for its Windows app store, and made quite a show of highlighting how much fairer they are than, say, Apple or Google. Of course, there is a catch: the guidelines only apply to the Windows app store, not to the Xbox one. The latter is of course the one to compare with the iOS and Android app stores, everything the Windows guidelines allow is also possible on macOS.
Six Links
”Five Eyes” Governments Plus India and Japan Call for Encryption Backdoors—This is really the bad idea that refuses to die. Unfortunately, with goodwill towards tech companies evaporating fast in political circles, I fear we’re getting closer to the day where it will be mandated. Read
Google Provides Date to Law Enforcement Based on “Search Keyword” Warrants—There couldn’t be a better illustration of why full, end-to-end encryption is necessary. If the data is there, the powers that be will not be able to resist going on fishing expeditions, and coming up with all sorts of spurious connections. Read
Major Online Learning Platform Is Connected to a ‘Cult’ Whose Leader Has Been Accused of Violence and Abuse—These kinds of situations have always existed of course, but technology has vastly increased the reach and penetration of potentially tainted products like this, and that realisation should really drive the design of more robust frameworks and systems. Read
Local Business Finder Yelp Now Flags “Racist” Businesses—The motivation behind this is undoubtedly well-intended and social pressure is a valid tool to enact change, but on the other hand, public shaming is a slippery slope. See also the debates on whether tech companies should be the final arbiters of truth. Read
England Lost 16,000 Covid-19 Patients Because of a Spreadsheet Bug—This is of course farcical, but people would be surprised how much of the world’s critical infrastructure runs on Excel, beginning with the financial system. Read
The Patron Saint of Hacktivists Paints a Bleak Future—Great conversation with Cory Doctorow on the publication of hist latest book, and how his early optimism about the internet ushering in an era of new possibilities for activism has now almost turned to defeatism before the vast scale of the surveillance we find ourselves under. Read
That’s it for this week’s edition. As always, thanks for reading and please forward this to anyone who you think might be interested, it would be much appreciated.