Buried in complaint 3, "Make Chrome’s ‘Incognito mode’ actually incognito"
"One example: Just this week, my colleague Tatum Hunter reported that Google (as well as Facebook and TikTok) was sent personal information when patients use the Planned Parenthood website scheduling pages. The problem was marketing embedded in the code of the page — and Chrome does little to stop that kind of tracking."
You scheduled an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website could tell Facebook (June 29)
This is really an important point. The owner of a website or app has to comply with regulations, and HIPAA should apply to people seeking medical care, especially those seeking care that is politically or otherwise sensitive. This is literally what HIPAA was trying to prevent: disclosure of medical info to third parties without direct consent of the patient. A click should not be enough to consent.
Third party tags have no place in the DOM on these sites.
Chrome's Incognito mode is doing its job here, by making sure that the user is logged out of her Facebook account during that browsing session. What the tracking code does is a different matter altogether, and even Facebook has tried and failed to stop it from sending all sorts of sensitive data, including stuff that might well fall under HIPAA.
Only in part. Ultimately it's the browser that's sharing the data from PP to FB. It's not like PP is making a direct connection from their backend to FB's backend. It's Chrome that's connecting to FB.
Apple has demonstrated with Safari that browsers can fight this tracking if they want to. Google has no interest in doing so because their browser doesn't work for the user. It works for the likes of Google, FB, and yes, PP.
Most folks are unaware of the things that can happen, when a Web designer loops in a dependency.
The dependencies tend to bring friends. Lots of friends.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Many, many folks are incapable of designing sites without the dependencies, and these dependencies often add great value, so "don't do that" isn't really an option.
It's easy enough to say "set up a licensing board," but these tend to be a cure, worse than the disease. Incumbents will use them to prevent competition, and governments like to use them as a private piggy bank, like red-light cameras.
Paying for the dependencies makes sense (if I make my living on something, it’s only natural that I pay for my tools and raw materials), but the chains can be long, and there can be many parts that simply cannot be paid for, or will get stolen, or corrupted.
I think that we need to figure out some way to improve the dependency space, but there's no simple solution. Anyone claiming there is, is trying to sell something that is maybe a bit past its "sell by" date.
"There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
Yes, but unlikely what's happening here. I assume incompetence not malice on PP's part. That doesn't excuse this privacy leak. My point is that this isn't all on PP. I consider Google and FB malicious in sharing data in their zeal for dollars. I consider PP incompetent in protecting privacy in its marketing efforts, which yes, also needs dollars, but it's a non-profit and really not in its interests to share this information.
I have doubts it would win, however, as identifying PHI has several safe harbor clauses (such as unidentifiable at the ZIP2/ZIP3 level, etc.). IP addresses haven't been precise for a long time, to my understanding? (not my area).
> An individual who believes that the Privacy Rule is not being upheld can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR).[37][38] In 2006 the Wall Street Journal reported that the OCR had a long backlog and ignores most complaints. "Complaints of privacy violations have been piling up at the Department of Health and Human Services. Between April of 2003 and November 2006, the agency fielded 23,886 complaints related to medical-privacy rules, but it has not yet taken any enforcement actions against hospitals, doctors, insurers or anyone else for rule violations. A spokesman for the agency says it has closed three-quarters of the complaints, typically because it found no violation or after it provided informal guidance to the parties involved."[39] However, in July 2011, the University of California, Los Angeles agreed to pay $865,500 in a settlement regarding potential HIPAA violations. An HHS Office for Civil Rights investigation showed that from 2005 to 2008, unauthorized employees repeatedly and without legitimate cause looked at the electronic protected health information of numerous UCLAHS patients.[40]
> It is a misconception that the Privacy Rule creates a right for any individual to refuse to disclose any health information (such as chronic conditions or immunization records) if requested by an employer or business. HIPAA Privacy Rule requirements merely place restrictions on disclosure by covered entities and their business associates without the consent of the individual whose records are being requested; they do not place any restrictions upon requesting health information directly from the subject of that information.[41][42][43]
This is exactly what the Google Container add-on for Firefox protects against. It stops Google from tracking you across the web because your Google login does not exist when you visit other websites. It only exists within the container.
Unfortunately, it does not have Mozilla’s “Recommended” seal of approval. I assume Mozilla cannot do this because Firefox development is funded by Google, so Mozilla has to tolerate Google’s tracking to some degree.
I’m still using this add-on because I cannot imagine my web browsing life without it.
> This is exactly what the Google Container add-on for Firefox protects against. It stops Google from tracking you across the web because your Google login does not exist when you visit other websites.
I don't think that it does. I mean, it does help a little, but if you have Firefox with this add-on installed and visit websiteA which pings google's server and loads their JS which fingerprints your browser they have your device logged, the fact that you visited websiteA logged, your IP address logged, and a timestamp logged. When you visit websiteB 5 hours later (in a different tab, window, or session) and that site also pings google's server and loads their JS they get all that same information again and Google has successfully tracked you going to both sites.
These containers aren't useless, but they aren't preventing Google from tracking your online activity either.
Your best bet is to configure Firefox to not allow javascript (at least not by default and not got any domain owned by Google), to block all google domains at your edge, and never log into a google product. At that point, google isn't tracking you and you have no need for the add-on. That assumes that you're on a PC. If you're using an android device you might as well accept that any website you visit will be tracked by google no matter what else you do.
> google's server and loads their JS which fingerprints your browser they have your device logged
This is a big claim. Do Google’s ad-serving scripts really engage in fingerprinting? If yes, then there should be proof. Is there proof? I don’t think it’s possible for Google to do this covertly using JavaScript, so either Google does this and we have proof, or Google doesn’t do this.
Who knows what Google is collecting internally (especially with analytics). We'd need a whistleblower to tell us, so let's just pretend Google isn't fingerprinting devices or collecting device IDs. That still leaves them with your IP address, timestamps, and a list of the websites you visited. Does that make you feel better?
Your claim was about fingerprinting via Google’s scripts on other websites. Such a thing cannot be concealed. JavaScript code is visible. Even if the code is obfuscated, experts can still detect if fingerprinting is performed.
Maybe it's changed since it's been a long time since I blocked all that stuff entirely, but I thought the idea was that websites collected a bunch of data about you, your browser, and your activities (using JS) which all gets sent back to google. Google processes that data and delivers analytics reporting back to the website owners. If google were also using the data they collected to generate a device fingerprint to compare against data collected and reported at other sites you would never know. That'd be in addition to them logging the sites you visited and when as well as your IP address and user agent which they get just by remotely hosting those scripts.
Your IP address and a timestamp are enough to give google a pretty good idea who you are in many cases. If you log into any one of their services or use one of their products using that same IP address it's a pretty strong indicator. It takes surprisingly little "non-identifiable information" to figure out someone's identify. (for example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10933-3)
I'm pretty sure google has enough data to put 1 and 1 together the vast majority of the time.
That’s another big claim. If Google did this covertly, and it was found out, Google’s reputation would be in the toilet. That’s why I think they don’t do it.
I don't think companies care about their reputation at all. Fear for their reputation didn't stop DuPont from knowingly poisoning people. It didn't stop Gerber from selling baby food loaded with dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals.
Wasn't google caught illegally collecting hundreds of gigabytes of data from wifi networks already? They don't care.
If you're counting on fear of possible embarrassment or bad press to keep companies honest you're in for a bad time. Legal or not, if something will make a company money, they will do that thing.
I don't entirely follow the logic of this article: abortion is illegal in some states and Google knows your search and location history. So it seems like it's saying police will scour account data to target women with the intention of getting an abortion. How?
We know that at the federal level the government can dig into our Google profile data or that a police officer might ask you to hand over your phone. Short of a court order I don't see how our data is compromised like this article implies.
States can pass laws requiring, eg., google to provide location data relevant to the crime (in that state) of abortion.
It's also pretty trivial to "suspect" someone of a crime for "being in some area" and then get a warrent for the data.
Abortion being illegal in some states seems like it might be a shock to the privacy system that's needed. If US states are clearly abusing their citizens en-mass in a way most people disagree with, corporate american enabling this will not be seen positively.
> ... corporate american enabling this will not be seen positively.
I don't think this is true in red states or for the minority views that determine what is and is not illegal in this country, or at least it won't play out like you wish. Certainly I don't see this playing out along this optimistic path. Politicians in Texas and Mississippi will frame it as companies helping dutiful law enforcement investigate evil crimes and ergo it's fine that Google was tracking everybody all along. Single-issue voters would be happy to see abortion providers or seekers behind bars and couldn't care less if the fourth amendment was violated along the way.
Just look at how conservatives (ok, well, a good chunk of all mainstream politicians) and voters viewed the FBI vs. Apple conflict from a few years ago - it was "we have to make sure the cops can get the bad guys so of course the cops should have access to whatever information they need" not "I have a right to privacy - time to stop using these services until they respect it"
I think the implication is that local police would seek court orders for this kind of data. That’s not a particularly difficult step for them, and Google is unlikely to resist a lawful court order. Hence the need to make those lawful orders as fruitless as possible.
It's unfortunately kind of a backwards solution. Any convenience or technology can be exploited by an unjust government. Saying the solution for cruel abortion law is to stop carrying user data is like saying the solution for overarmed police is to stop manufacturing bullets, or saying that the solution for unfettered wiretapping is to tear up the telephone system.
A society is not going to backstop the lack of a virtuous government by regressing its technological resources. The right solution is to insist on a virtuous government and wield all power necessary to cause that to exist.
A court subpoena to Google for my calendar to figure out if I'm planning a trip out of town, or my Maps data to see if I've gone to an abortion clinic, is something that Google could choose to honor given the authority of the demaning court.
That possibility doesn't imply they should do away with offering Calendar, or with providing Map history; that's a feature the user takes advantage of to figure out where they've been (you'd be surprised how often I use that). The solution isn't to stop offering features; it's to fix the bad law.
> Saying the solution for cruel abortion law is to stop carrying user data is like saying the solution for overarmed police is to stop manufacturing bullets, or saying that the solution for unfettered wiretapping is to tear up the telephone system
Depends on how compromised the “neutral” resource is. You can insist on virtuous whatever until you’re blue in the face, but they can keep waiting for your suffocation.
If we're talking realpolitik though, an electorate that lacks the power to overturn law that is only popular with 39% of the public certainly lacks the power to compel software megacorps to do anything, especially anything that benefits the existing power structure.
No. What we're saying is that if you build a gigantic surveillance and propaganda machine it will be used by the powerful to hurt the powerless.
The solution is not to build the giant surveillance and propaganda machine just because you perceive it is merely helping the powerful at some particular moment in time.
Your telephone example is also dead wrong. The solution is to use an e2ee voice communication platform in addition to reigning in the rampant abuse by cops and domestic spying. Or in a counterfactual alternate past hefore that was possible, it would be to break up the large telephone providers that anything like a clipper chip or bulk wiretapping at the exchange without a warrant is impossible to coordinate and keep secret.
Similarly the overarmed police would be far less of a problem if there wasn't a massive corporate arms industry.
An e2ee solution is no good if the government is unjust, they just declare end-to-end encryption illegal and start arresting people the moment the signal hits the wire. Similarly, one can't expect an unjust government to reign in wire tapping, nor can one expect an unjust government to break up a telephone monopoly to enforce decentralization of potential surveillance threats.
And that's the problem with trying to solve an unjust government in this way. For any technological countermeasure, you can just imagine that the government is sufficiently unjust to render that countermeasure's use itself a threat to the user.
Yes, and having the richest and most powerful companies, all their employees, and all their shareholders on the opposite team with the systems required for opression and surveillance already built is a non starter.
Your social solutions must be stable. And a solution with a giant centralised surveillance and social manipulation machine just waiting for someone even eviller to take control isn't a viable one.
Technical solutions aren't stable with the wrong social and political conditions, but social and political solutions are not stable with the wrong material conditions.
If I take you at your word, then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist and a technical and material environment where the type of tracking and censorship they do is impossible to implement unilaterally. But one of the major barriers to getting there is the existence of google so we have to fight on both fronts.
How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses.
> then we both want the same thing: a legal and social environment where google cannot exist
Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities).
Larry Brin's "The Transparent Society" makes the excellent case that with the surveillance genie out of the bottle, you don't fix the way it can be abused by trying to cram it back in. Rather, the solution may be more surveillance... The wives and mistresses of politicians seek abortions too...
> How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses.
The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government towards being more oppressive.
> Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities).
With the exception of the last, those are all examples of surveillance capitalism that would be solved with the same legal and technological structures. The overwhelming majority of current commercial software would have been considered malware or a virus in the 90s. Real privacy laws (rather than half measures or controlled opposition like gdpr) that prevent gathering any data that isn't essential and pro-cash rather than anti-cash policies would solve these.
Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.
> Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.
I don't think you have fully grasped the position of the people who support the laws that ban abortion. From their point of view they're photographing murderers. Capitalism doesn't enter into it; they are volunteering their time to do this. It's not a failure of privacy law from their point of view, and they think that normalizing murder was a failure of social norms.
So long as these laws stand, all of society's technological advancements (communications technologies, surveillance technologies, transportation technologies) are turned against women because the society is turned against women. The solution is to correct the laws.
One way mentioned in the article: geofenced subpoenas. E.g. Ohio police tell Google to give them the information of all the people who went to an abortion clinic in Indiana (the geofenced) because they are suspected of a crime, then the Ohio police can check the list of those people and see if any of them fall under their jurisdiction
How many surveillance-state abuses have we said this about in the last 21 years? Always the answer is “yes in theory, but in practice the state does it anyway and courts usually defer to its judgment”.
A few years ago, not far from where I live, a pregnant woman was given a water bottle by her ex boyfriend. The water tasted bitter, so she spit it out. She took it to the police. Her ex-boyfriend had ground up an abortion pill and put it in her water.
How did he get the pill? From a website that sold the pills to “pregnant women” who couldn’t get them legally, no questions asked.
The police seized the website owners assets, and her client list.
She was sentenced to probation, but decided to spent her time in probation smoking pot, and so got a slightly longer probation with more drug tests.
The police had no problem hunting down a black market purveyor at abortion pills using DNS and email.
In this area abortion is now illegal. If this same situation had happened now, that list of clients would become a list of future defendants.
I heard the police did check the client list to make sure the site wasn’t primarily a way for men to force women to have abortions.
If you told me in 1996 (first year on the internet, quite a hopeful young lad) that in the future, $MEGACORP would know where I was within meters every minute of every day, I would have told you it was a dystopia, regardless of what they planned to use that data for.
This is a digital dystopia that we sleepwalked into.
My (someone uncharitable) interpretation of the article is:
- People who thing big corps and the government are their friend are not worried about data privacy.
- The government suddenly made a change that made a lot of people realize that is is not necessarily their friend (aka they are no longer comfortable with the government have access to there entire life's worth of data).
- Now we have to end surveillance capitalism because it is dangerous...
I agree with the conclusion, but it is depressing that it has taking this long for people to reach it.
Either you agree with Google collecting data in a way that facilitates enforcing the law, or you don't. You can't be picky about Google facilitating the laws that you happen to like or not.
The danger is that by calling upon Google to solve these issues, we concede more and more power to them. Google is a tech company with about 140k employees, about 1/5 the population of San Francisco. Do we want this tiny minority of people to have such a huge influence on which laws get enforced (eg Google giving police data about people selling weed over Gmail) and which laws don't (eg Google deleting data about visits to abortion clinics).
Laws should be determined by lawmakers, not tech companies.
The law against abortion still exists regardless of what Google does. There's no law that that says Google must collect data of who searches for abortion clinics (I presume/hope). It's not Google's responsibility to enforce or facilitate a law.
Companies make that decision all the time - they routinely break laws where they believe the cost/benefit analysis works in their favor. I see no issue with them actually taking a moral stand against an unjust law. All of us should be doing the same rather than just shrugging our shoulders and accepting that states are just allowed to legislate away basic human rights now because that's what the Founding Fathers would have preferred.
> All of us should be doing the same rather than just shrugging our shoulders
Isn't that why we vote ?
Americans have been shrugging their shoulders for a while, fix the root cause, don't ask google to protect you from your own government. idk, seems like a pretty basic train of thought.
No one voted for the repeal of Roe v. Wade - abortion rights are supported by the majority even in many states where abortion is now illegal. The same is and will be true for the pending repeal of gay rights under the same legal principle. The majority of voters didn't even vote for the President who stacked the court.
So no, it's not. It's a reason some people vote, because only some votes actually matter. For everyone else it's a rigged system designed to cater to a specific political demographic minority at the expense of the majority, and they'll take Google "protecting them from their own government" over being forced to give birth in a state for which rape and incest aren't legal exceptions, sometimes even at the risk of the mother's life (as has already occurred in Texas.)
We don't only have to accept a single solution, we can accept that activism is a legitimate form of political action in the face of unjust laws as well as pursue (unlikely) solutions through legislation.
And besides, regardless of the context, less surveillance and less data retention by tech companies is a good thing. If Google doesn't need to collect and retain this data then they shouldn't. Either way, it isn't a case of corporations superseding government authority, but exercising their own freedoms to conduct business under their own terms, as well as allowing the end user more control over their data.
You guys still have a democracy and only have to follow your own country's laws. Don't just give that power away to some faceless megacorp just because you just happen to dislike a couple laws.
> You can't be picky about Google facilitating the laws that you happen to like or not.
This is silly, because there's nothing magic about it being law that makes it just, especially in a highly politicised environment. People argue about ignoring law they don't like all the time, especially in the future tense.
Then the issue is the law, not Google's enforcement of that law.
If you disagree with a law, change it.
Don't ask a private company to decide to ignore the law...
> We know there’s zero chance Google will overnight exit the lucrative personal data business. And frankly, Congress has been asleep at the wheel on protecting our data rights for decades.
Google is part of the state apparatus. Congress is not asleep, it is lobbied by this and other companies. This naive idea that you can just ask Big Tech companies to find two cents in their moral bank is old and tiresome. Control of Congress must be taken back before any real change can be effected.
Don't forget the courts and executive. Without consistent (or at least truly random) enforcement laws are worthless paper or selective tools to punish those without power.
It seems more reasonable solutions already exist, like not logging in to Google when doing searches you want to keep anonymous. Google probably still logs stuff (IP, user agent, and search term) but it gives you plausible deniability and you have the option of using a public WiFi or VPN if you don't want your IP address logged. Or more simply, just use DuckDuckGo instead.
How well do you think that's going to go if you are charged with murder? It doesn't matter a damn what /you/ (or me, or anyone) think about the ethics of the situation. Plausible deniability is going to be a very weak crutch to be relying on when charged with something with an equivalent consequences to a charge murder. Defence of google policy on that basis is really a non-starter, imho. I imagine google won't actually do that themselves they'll just remain silent with PR drafted press releases talking about just how important something or other is to them with the usual total lack of substance.
Are google's socially progressive positions purely marketing and they'll drop and and all of them like a hot brick if it might cost them some money or market share? Are we the baddies?
I don't organize my life around the unlikely event that I might one day be falsely accused of murder. I don't estimate that it is worth the cost and I suspect most people share that view, as evidenced by Google's massive user base. I understand that some people do and I respect their decision.
> Plausible deniability is going to be a very weak crutch to be relying on when charged with something with an equivalent consequences to a charge murder
I wasn't aware that abortion was prosecuted so harshly. If that's the case, then you should indeed not rely on plausible deniability and instead, use Tor and/or DuckDuckGo.
I am still defending Google's policy though. Google shouldn't cater to a minority of users (e.g. users that plan to commit murder-level crimes) to the detriment of the majority.
> I don't organize my life around the unlikely event that I might one day be falsely accused of murder.
Do you routinely provide or receive a procedure that's considered by fundamentalist Christian politicians to be tantamount to murdering infants? If so, you should probably consider the possibility that one of those politicians will come for you and claim you've committed murder. They have the power to do so, and now the law is finally on their side. It's no longer an unlikely prospect.
No, what I'm saying is that it's easy to pretend this isn't a problem that affects you if you aren't regularly engaging in the kind of routine activity that is now being labeled "murder". What was routine lifesaving medical care for you yesterday is now being described by political religious fanatics as infanticide. This was background noise in the past because their point of view was not supported by the law. Now it is and I fully expect them to use their newfound power to oppress women seeking lifesaving medical care.
Maybe you think that is insane, but a lot of people thought a 10 year old living in a state that would force her to give birth was so insane it must be fake news. Or that it's insane a doctor would be investigated for helping a 10 year old receive lifesaving medical care she required. But here we are. Your threat assessment is outmoded by recent events.
I can think of no group more dangerous than religious fanatics bent on protecting "innocents" in the name of God.
> Now it is and I fully expect them to use their newfound power to oppress women seeking lifesaving medical care.
I fail to see how an abortion is lifesaving medical care, can you explain what you mean by that?
If you're referring to ectopic pregnancies, it looks like the majority of abortions are not due to an ectopic pregnancy. The only source I could find that actually reported the number of abortions due to ectopic pregnancies only covered 1981-1991[0]. It looks like the number of ectopic pregnancies was consistently around 80-100k whereas there were around 800k-1million abortions per year.
In addition to this, I don't know of any laws that have been passed in any state banning abortions that save the life of the mother. I would love to read up on some laws that prohibit this, not an article from NYT, or Washington Post, or some other political news agency. If you know of any, please let me know because I would like to be well informed and change my mind if that's the case.
> I can think of no group more dangerous than religious fanatics bent on protecting "innocents" in the name of God.
And I can think of nothing more dangerous than a political group oppressing and killing people unable to defend themselves in the name of "reproductive rights".
I would seriously like to see actual laws that are passed or trying to be passed to ban abortions that save the life of the mother. If you can show me evidence of that I would be willing to reconsider the consequences of overturning roe v wade. But right now, it looks like the only thing happening is states have the power again instead of the federal government.
Edit: I reread your comment and it looks like you're referring to rape. Rape and incest laws also haven't been discussed yet. I don't see any Republicans targeting victims of rape and incest, and I'm sure if you talk to most of then they are OK with exceptions in these cases. Unfortunately, once again, the vast majority of abortions are not due to rape and incest.
There were around 140k abortions due to rape in 2019.[1] If every single rape resulted in a pregnancy, and every single victim aborted that pregnancy, that would only account for 22% of abortions (around 640k abortions in 2019[2]). It's highly unlikely that this is the case, which means the vast majority of abortions are not due to rape and incest. It doesn't matter anyways, because even if Republicans pass laws allowing victims of rape and incest, and ectopic pregnancies to abort, I have a feeling you still won't be happy.
> I don't see any Republicans targeting victims of rape and incest, and I'm sure if you talk to most of then they are OK with exceptions in these cases.
Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Louisiana all have laws with no exceptions for this. That’s a majority of the states who have bans in place. So no, republican-controlled legislatures are mostly not okay with those exceptions.
I think it's interesting how medpagetoday reports these laws compared to how the laws are written. As just one example, medpagetoday says this about Missouri:
> As of June 24, Missouri's trigger ban is in effect. It prohibits all abortions, except "in cases of medical emergency" for the pregnant person, meaning death or a irreversible impairment to a major bodily function. There are no exceptions for rape and incest.
If you read the linked trigger ban it reads:
> No abortion shall be performed or induced upon a woman, except in cases of medical emergency. Any person who knowingly performs or induces an abortion of an unborn child in violation of this subsection shall be guilty of a class B felony, as well as subject to suspension or revocation of his or her professional license by his or her professional licensing board. A woman upon whom an abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subsection shall not be prosecuted for a conspiracy to violate the provisions of the subsection.[1]
(emphasis mine)
A couple things to note, the law does not explicitly forbid abortions in the case of rape and incest. It doesn't mention them at all. As laws usually get developed, there will likely be some court case that rises because of an event where rape or incest has occurred and the medical provider gave an abortion. After the case, some precedent will be set. As of right now, there is no precedent or explicit laws about this specific scenario.
Second, the law specifically notes that the medical provider is liable, not the woman. The reason I'm pointing this out is because the way medpagetoday makes it sound, it looks like the woman will be liable and they make it look as if states are actively writing laws to force women to carry a child born of rape or incest which is blatantly false. The law does not mention this at all.
The same thing is true of the Oklahoma law quoted in that article:
> Every person who administers to any woman, or who prescribes for any woman, or advises or procures any woman to take any medicine, drug or substance, or uses or employs any instrument, or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless the same is necessary to preserve her life, shall be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment in the State Penitentiary for not less than two (2) years nor more than five (5) years.[2]
And from medpagetoday:
> There are no exceptions for rape or incest.
This is true, there are no exceptions for rape and incest, and there's also no law explicitly saying that a woman is forced to carry through this. This is why I'm hesitant to believe any sources like the one you quoted. They take the laws, find a way to twist the law in a way to make it sound worse than it is, then present that as the truth. When the reality is, like all laws, there is gray area that will be explored as more court cases rise.
> So no, republican-controlled legislatures are mostly not okay with those exceptions.
Or, if you actually read the laws, it seems like rape and incest just aren't mentioned and haven't been dealt with yet. Seems like a bit of misinformation on your end or something, but at least they linked to some of the laws so we can find out what they actually say ;)
First, let me say that I appreciate that you've at least expressed a willingness to change your mind. That's more than I can say about myself.
Second, I must impress upon you that I'm not here to do your research for you. It seems like you're in a media bubble, and given that you've preemptively restricted me on the sources you're willing to accept, it seems like you want to stay there, so I won't try and post any sources for you lest they be rejected outright because you consider them biased. By the fact that you've posted links that presumably you found using Google, I think you are perfectly capable of finding information yourself if you're so inclined.
To address your specific points:
> If you're referring to ectopic pregnancies, it looks like the majority of abortions are not due to an ectopic pregnancy.
This sounds like a utilitarian argument where you are weighing numbers and coming out on the side with the most "lives saved". You appear to be weighing the lives of 80-100k women against 1 million abortions that you consider innocent people killed who cannot defend themselves (are the women not innocent? When were they found guilty?), and coming out on the side of the fetuses/embryos (I note that you do not distinguish between viable and unviable abortions).
But your moral calculus doesn't mean ectopic pregnancies aren't life-threatening to women. Since you're aware of what ectopic pregnancies are, your claim that you fail to see how abortions can be lifesaving doesn't follow. You do in fact see how they are lifesaving, but you value other lives more. I'm not going to fault you for that, as I in fact value my own life, the life of my mother, nieces, and sister more than that of any nascent lifeform inside of them. That's my morality, thank you for telling me yours.
> I don't know of any laws that have been passed in any state banning abortions that save the life of the mother.
The problem with this is that the laws are very gray, and that's a huge problem when on one side you're saving a life, and on the other you're viewed as someone murdering a baby. This causes doctors and hospital lawyers to err heavily on the side of not performing an abortion unless the mother's life is critically at risk. The implication here is that if an ectopic pregnancy has a heartbeat, doctors are afraid to do anything until it ruptures, which puts the mother's life at extreme risk for a pregnancy that isn't even viable in the first place.
You can see how this played out in Ireland, causing them to reverse their total ban, but we're going in the opposite direction here with the same predictable consequences. If you want to find examples of such cases already in America, look to Texas, and Michigan where women are fleeing to and having abortions of their ectopic pregnancies, due to their own state refusing to treat them because of a detectable heartbeat.
> And I can think of nothing more dangerous than a political group oppressing and killing people unable to defend themselves in the name of "reproductive rights".
There are 0 political groups in the United States forcing women to have abortions. The whole point of being "pro-choice" is that it's up to the individual and their doctor.
> I would seriously like to see actual laws that are passed or trying to be passed to ban abortions that save the life of the mother. If you can show me evidence of that I would be willing to reconsider the consequences of overturning roe v wade. But right now, it looks like the only thing happening is states have the power again instead of the federal government.
This is the "there is no slippery slope" take. The idea that power has just been returned to the states is belied by the former Vice President calling for a national abortion ban the day of the court's decision. They couldn't even pretend it was about states' rights for a single day. Since then the sentiment has been echoed by the Republican Majority Leader of the Senate. House Republicans have done the same.
Moreover, if you want to see how extreme things are about to get, take a look at Idaho, a state under total Republican control. The GOP party there just voted this weekend on their platform, and they decided overwhelmingly (412-164) to not support an exception for the life of the mother. That's the direction they are headed. Again, that party controls the entire state, so there's nothing stopping them from implementing that platform into law.
> I don't see any Republicans targeting victims of rape and incest, and I'm sure if you talk to most of then they are OK with exceptions in these cases.
Are you really sure? Because this seems to not be the case to me. I mean, have you not been paying attention to the national debate about the 10-year old who had to travel out of Ohio to get an abortion? She had to do so because Ohio does not have an exception for rape or incest. Her life was at risk, but there are Republicans out there now saying she should have carried the baby and if her life was threatened at some point during the pregnancy she could have aborted then. Again, this girl is 10. The situation is so monstrous that right wing media wanted to pretend that it didn't happen, or that terminating the pregnancy isn't technically an abortion somehow.
Pro-life groups wanted to paint people who get late-term abortions as murderers who commit infanticide, but now you have to deal with the consequence of raped, pregnant children carrying children of their own, and a political party that supports that.
Honestly, it really surprises me that you call fetuses "people unable to defend themselves" but don't see how many pro-life advocates won't allow exceptions for rape and incest. Their logic is that the circumstances of the conception don't change the fact that the fetus is a person unable to defend itself. Your point of view is logically inconsistent, and that's why pro-life advocates are now taking the logically consistent (but extreme) position of banning such exceptions outright. According to the Texas governor, their plan is to "end rape" which is not something that he has the power to do.
> There were around 140k abortions due to rape in 2019.[1]
[1] shows the total number of rapes reported to law enforcement. We know in fact that around 80% of rapes are not reported to law enforcement because they are worse than useless at defending the victims of rape and prosecuting the perpetrators. Often reporting a rape to law enforcement results in re-victimization and ostracism.
At any rate, it doesn't matter to me if the majority of cases are due to rape or not, just like it doesn't matter to pro-lifers that 99% of abortions are not late term. Nevertheless, late term abortions are constantly held up as a moral mirror to try and force the issue into a black and white area. Pro-choice advocates have made the moral calculation and have concluded that: yes, late term abortions are not what anyone wants, but if we weigh the life of the mother and the almost born fetus, we will leave it up to the mother to decide, because she has the most at stake.
Now the shoe is on the other foot; pro-life advocates must explain why a 10 year old rape victim is be forced to carry that baby under the laws they passed. It doesn't matter how many there are in proportion to the whole. The debate is one of morality, and so it's taken to logical conclusions.
> even if Republicans pass laws allowing victims of rape and incest, and ectopic pregnancies to abort, I have a feeling you still won't be happy.
No, I won't be happy, because I don't want anyone telling me what I can do with my body - especially when it's based heavily on their theology, one to which I don't ascribe (and which contradicts my own).
Finally, I will conclude with a utilitarian argument you may appreciate. There are over 1 million miscarriages every year. If a fetus is a person, then a miscarriage is not merely common and natural bodily function, but instead the tragic death of a child. This makes miscarriage the number one cause of death for Americans, accounting for 30% of all deaths every year. Miscarriages are more deadly to Americans than heart disease, cancer, or COVID.
Are we as a nation responding in a way that is proportional to those statistics? Are pro-life advocates and their political apparatus working as tirelessly to end miscarriages as they are to end abortion? I don't see that happening at all, and I think that gives away the whole charade.
> First, let me say that I appreciate that you've at least expressed a willingness to change your mind. That's more than I can say about myself.
If this is the case, then I don't see the need to continue this debate. I appreciate your thorough response, but unfortunately it's not compelling enough, in my opinion, to change my mind.
> No, I won't be happy, because I don't want anyone telling me what I can do with my body - especially when it's based heavily on their theology, one to which I don't ascribe (and which contradicts my own).
That's fine, I genuinely hope you're not in a conservative state in this case :)
> If a fetus is a person, then a miscarriage is not merely common and natural bodily function, but instead the tragic death of a child.
And yes this is true. My sister miscarried and it was, and still is, a significant event in her life. Her husband, her, and their kids still mourn the day that her child was miscarried, and I don't know of many women who aren't somewhat traumatized by miscarriages, unless they were already planning on having an abortion.
Anyways, once again I appreciate the response and wish you the best. It seems like we're both set on our predefined opinions, which is fine. I think it's ok to disagree, and ultimately this debate probably won't result in any sort of significant change haha. Thanks for the conversation though :)
I will never change my mind to believe that I have the right to force you to use your body in a way that you don't want, and you should thank God every day that more people don't think the way you do.
Don't underestimate the risk of courts in some jurisdictions 'discovering' that previously legal-seeming things were illegal and applying that reason retroactively.
GLS is built into Android (via Google Play Services). The data collected is "anonymous". Just like the anonymous person that is in my house motionless from 12-8am every night.
This is a genuine question. I never did log into google for any searches, and I switched to DuckDuckGo some years ago with no fuss. It seems to me like a practical thing anyone might do if they don't want Google to track them.
Saving the search history by default is probably a better UX for most users. You get autocompletion, it helps Google deliver better results, helps show more relevant advertisements, etc. Defaults are usually chosen to satisfy the most common use case. The use case described in the article (hiding searches from law enforcement) is relatively rare and shouldn't serve as the basis for a default, in my opinion. For users who value their privacy more, there are alternatives like DuckDuckGo.
My take: Ok so for the "crimes" that we do not currently like Google should not log to protect us.
That is naive.
The article is naive. Now when a class of people is affected they realize the issue with Google collecting data or providing location history information (incorrect or not) to the authorities.
Google has a history of actively i) resetting opt out settings, ii) making location tracking de facto mandatory on android, iii) pushing for AMP (which pushes their ampanalytics), etc.
Time to actually push for privacy.
How about: "Hey Google, to protect people, stop tracking anything." (Which for Google would imply to stop existing per se.)
Google, like other industries, where build on the ideas that what they did was more or less harmless. As we learn more about what massive data collection entails, we also have to reconsider the laws surrounding it.
Google will never stop on their own, as you say that would mean that they'd stop existing. It's the same with oil or tobacco companies, and few would cry foul if Philip Morris would be forced to shutdown.
I no longer believe that tracking and data collection can be done safely and it's time to dismantle those business that rely on it. Give Google, and others, five to ten years to close down their data collection business and after that they can stop existing if they can't cope.
What power can we imagine will cause them to stop existing? What power can we imagine will compel them to stop collecting data?
It certainly won't be the law. The entire situation we're in right now is considering how data collection by Google assists the United States government in enforcing the law. The master's tools will not be used to tear down the master's house.
Comparing google to big tobacco is very flawed. Big tobacco has essentially one product, and that product is always harmful.
Google on the other hand has a variety of products. Even when it comes to their biggest product i.e. ads, they'd still make a shitton of money without tracking and storing everything in perpetuity. Would they make less? Very likely.
But they will not "stop existing", even if they were forced to stop all tracking tomorrow. They can still sell ads not based on the users tracking history, but based on other context that doesn't require a huge data store, but ephemeral information at most (e.g. "user is searching for term x RIGHT NOW, and has a German IP RIGHT NOW"). And of course they can still make money from the "play store tax", money from users of their APIs, cloud and services.
If we actually prohibited tracking now, far beyond what even the GDPR does, advertisers would still spend money, like they did in the print and television days as well. And google controlling a large part of the market already with an iron grip (search, youtube, android) would still come out ahead of the competition.
That actually a completely fair observation, this should only be targeted at the part of their business that does data collection. Google could do very well without their large scale tracking.
Tracking and data collection must bring in a significant amount though. It's a rather large liability and attack vector for lawmakers and critics. If it was just a few percent of overall profit, it would sense to just dump that business unit.
Generally the whole targeted ad business is a little weird. If it works so well as we led to believe, then way aren't there fewer ads. It seems reasonable to assume that a highly targeted ad would be more successful, but also more expensive to buy. You'd need few of them of reach your target customers and I as a consumer should see fewer ads. That's a little besides the point though.
so just to rephrase:
"google should stop collecting data because it might be compelled by law to provide it to the government. the government should compel google to stop collecting that data"
More like Google will be/is compelled 100% by any random state court or not-a-court-but-cops-directly-because-we-decided-warrants-are-for-suckers to provide data (you don't need a warrant for "give me who you think was there" queries -- that is a different wtf). So Federal lawmakers should make it clear that Google (and any Google) should not be doing any of this.
Might as well use the whole branching of the government and make use of the checks and balances for mankind's good and welfare.
And if one needs more convincing I would point them to look at the whole 19th and 20th century history.
It'd be great if the code processing highly sensitive personal information were open source, which seems like a whole lot higher priority than the printer drivers that got Stallman hot and bothered in the 1970s. Holy crap did we miss his message over trivialities.
There's an interesting contradiction at the heart of US law regarding free speech. Does the first amendment give you the right to merely voice your opinions, or does it give you the right to amplify those opinions via mass media?
Citizens United pretty thoroughly says it's the latter. But calls to reign in Fake News and to force tech companies to censor their users contradict this.
First Amendment prevents the government from restricting speech. It says nothing about letting other private individuals/companies promote your speech.
Good example of how surveillance capitalism is a cancer in society that no one is safe from. I am really tired of people telling me that they have nothing to hide! The historical record if full of examples of folks who had "nothing to hide", but suddenly became the target of oppression or exploitation.
Privacy needs to be everyone's concern because by the time you realize you have things you need to keep private, it will be too late!
It's a bit bizarre that this is the route that folks are becoming aware that privacy has been decimated in the last decades. I'll take it I suppose. Yes, everyone deserves privacy until a lawful warrant has been issued. Not the current reality unfortunately.
If you want to know what a privacy dystopia looks like, check the Yandex search engine (from Russia), where you can do reverse image search with face detection.
Google anonymizes reverse image search with people in them. You get generic results like "person in t-shirt".
Google hides the lost of existing privacy and makes tools that expose it only available to corporations, states, and insiders-- for good and bad uses. In this case, yandex is exposing the loss of privacy and making the tools to benefit from its beneficial use available to everyone.
Hiding the loss of privacy makes it harder to resist, it doesn't make it go away.
I used to think that any such sliding into a country like Gilead would happen fast, and the population would not allow it to happen, at least not to such a crazy degree. But lately, it certanly feels like we're all frogs in a slowly boiling pot, which is slowly turning into Gilead.
> Google provides useful products, and in exchange we might be targeted with annoying ads. Big whoop. Until now.
Enter a cage willingly, with barely any complaint, for minor convenience, then cry when you're taken to the slaughterhouse. It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.
> Four ways to build civil rights into Google products
A laughable chapter of the article, void of any actually effective suggestions, such as compelling Google properties to stop blocking the Tor network (duckduckgo and yandex allow Tor), or using free software that is actually under the user's control.
The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others. That's why they want to build "civil rights" into products, and not "user freedom". That's why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.
> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic
Which warnings? I ask the question earnestly. As a developer with a clear sense of how the internet is structured, what browsers are and are not capable of doing etc I know the warnings myself. But for the population at large? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything that’s explained the consequences of pervasive advertising infrastructure to non tech inclined folks, much less something placed somewhere that people will actually see it.
Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on them to the extent that you’d be able to detect a visit to an abortion clinic. Or that period tracking apps are sending data in a way that can be later bought on a free market and tied to personal identification.
This is a failure of regulation, education and a media beholden to tech giants. I think we in the tech industry have some reflection to do as well. We understand the implications better than most yet many of us dutifully completed our work tickets to add tracking pixels to every page of the company site. We can’t do that then turn around and say “what, you mean you didn’t know that a Facebook Like button tracks every web page you look at even if you don’t click on it?!” and expect to be taken seriously.
Placing the blame at the feet of individuals that aren’t equipped to understand is a mistake, IMO.
I recently watched the 1998 Will Smith movie "Enemy of the State" (lawyer targeted by the NSA finds himself entangled in a terrifying web of surveillance). The point of the movie was clearly to emphasize the importance of privacy and the dangers of mass data collection and surveillance.
What is most wild about the movie is that much of the tech (and government policies) seemed a bit far-fetched (Hollywood-style exaggeration) for 1998. However, now, after 20+ years of the Patriot Act and the advancement of global connectivity (read smartphones) it actually came across as pretty tame and unsurprising. The ramifications of society's decent down the rabbit hole have been clear for awhile to anyone willing to pay attention...
In Enemy of the state they could hide from the every present satelites by
1) Not looking up or going in side
2) Throwing away any phones you have
Good luck with that. You might not even have a phone, that person taking a photo you just walked past does, and the facial recognition works just fine. Even if they don't know your name, they can track you. It was sort-of covered in the film - the CCTV in the garage etc, it's just far less manpower intensive now
I spent 20 years talking to friends and familly around me, and they don't care. They won't even try Firefox if they are used to chrome. Not even that small effort.
We had the US mass spying revealed in the press, with the PRISM program exposed. The public mostly carried on as usual.
Snowden got persecuted, giving the issue a lot of publicity. He wrote a very good book explaning why surveillance is dangerous. Again, most people didn't flinch.
A lot of people on HN reported trying to talk to people and get blank stares. "I have nothing to hide". "I don't care if people are collecting my data".
This is not just a failure in regulation: people don't give priority to problem that are not a pain right now. It's too abstract. Not to mention they have other problems that are a pain right now, and are armed with limited time, resources and knowledge.
Same problem with climate change. Their life is fine now. They can't care about the impact of their consumption in x year when they have to think about a loan, their health, the kids getting in trouble at school, their boss being pushy lately and the lattest form they have to fill.
There is also the cost of trying to avoid tracking product at the individual level.
I won't use Apple since it's locked down. So I use android. But I can't sign in into a google account or it will track everything. So I can't use the app store and many app won't work.
I can't use the best app provider like gmap and waze, have to sandbox youtube which mean it's mostly suggesting terrible content as it assumes I'm the average human.
I have a collections of extensions on web browser and several Firefox containers to isolate everything. Something I spent a lot of time to learn, master and configure.
I use Linux because Windows is tracking you, and MacOS is a golden cage. So I can't buy the best laptop CPU out there, which is the M2, and have terrible battery life.
My friends harassed me to have a FB account. Then an insta account. Then a whatsapp account. So I have to accept to miss out on things, and their nagging about it for every communication.
Now I am willing to accept all that because I think there are things more important in life than being part of a group chat or having the latest trendy thing.
But it's a hard sell for a many, espacially since, once again, "their life is fine right now".
>Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on them to the extent that you’d be able to detect a visit to an abortion clinic. Or that period tracking apps are sending data in a way that can be later bought on a free market and tied to personal identification.
They were aware. It just wasn't until these moments that it affected them personally, and they started to care.
>Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on them to the extent that you’d be able to detect a visit to an abortion clinic. Or that period tracking apps are sending data in a way that can be later bought on a free market and tied to personal identification.
"People" were utterly certain that their phones and computers were listening to every conversation they had, then big tech was advertising the products that they thought about back at them.
But the location tracking software they have enabled to find their phone/keys/bag/friend couldnt possibly be used to see where their phone/keys/bag/friend is ...
I cannot express how unsurprised I am at this - it's simply too stereotypically American. Americans, as a general rule, seem to distrust their government - instead placing their trust in large corporations. This is true from an individual level, all the way up to societal - though I'll admit it becomes more hit-or-miss the closer we get to the individual level.
This is borne out in everything from private prisons, to the medical industry, to ID cards, to your acquaintances that trust Facebook more than their elected officials.
This all comes from somewhere. It's not like we woke up one day and decided to distrust government. The entire movement to infiltrate government and make it ineffective so people will support dismantling and privatizing it is just the tip of the iceberg. Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can trust your government--your post makes it sound like you're not in the US; if you are, you need to pay more attention--because it's not fully captured by private interests that make it work against the public.
This can be called manufactured ignorance. Those who have been informed sometimes practice willful ignorance. I have also come to accept that perhaps a majority of people want to be watched and controlled just as they want to be ruled by powerful people. It is hard for some of us who are not that way to understand and accept.
> Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on
Is this right? For a long time now, every time I visit a restaurant I get a notification from Google suggesting that I should write a review. That should be sufficient to raise the alarm bells for even non-tech folks no?
The fact that Google collects information that can be subpoenaed is NOT the top risk here. Not even close.
It is the fact that if you search for anything abortion related, the top search results are dominated by fake abortion clinics. Who far outnumber real ones. A woman won't know that it is fake until after she has provided them with all of the information that she shouldn't have. And since they AREN'T licensed medical facilities, they have no requirement to keep her data private. For example in Texas they can immediately turn her information over to law enforcement to collect the reward for turning in someone who is trying to get an abortion.
If Google can figure out which clinics are fake and get them off their site (including not letting them advertise), that would do a LOT to help.
> For example in Texas they can immediately turn her information over to law enforcement to collect the reward for turning in someone who is trying to get an abortion.
It is frankly insane to me that the ones claiming the highest moral ground created a vigilante system driven by ruining people's lives when they are at their most vulnerable.
This sounds a little like the incremental addiction to fossil fuels the world has developed. It's "the market" and "blame consumers" when we know damn well that consumers don't choose fuel sources and consumers didn't grease the palms of legislators and regulators for more than a century.
You make a good point. I can see how my post could be interpreted as blaming regular consumers for the mess we're in. And while consumer apathy and ignorance disgust me, you are correct, journalists and media that are supposed to be guiding us should shoulder the majority of the blame.
I would blame Google, but that's like blaming the fox for killing the hens, instead of whoever left a hole in the hen house.
Journalism bears some responsibility (insofar as it’s become addicted to cheap social media traffic and digital ad revenue), but I think the context doesn’t justify disproportionate blame.
In particular: social media companies understood, very early on, that they could use their position to squeeze traditional media by cutting into its advertising. It was a classic industrial takeover, including the incumbent’s mockery of the newcomer until it was too late.
They probably deserve some blame for not seeing how the wind was blowing, and reacting accordingly. But I would place more blame on digital ad markets and all of the perverse incentives associated with them, all of which originate somewhere in the grimy junction between VCs and traditional advertising.
I wouldn't be so quick to paint the big ad networks as natural phenomenon like foxes, that just need to eat.
After all, foxes don't need to eat 23% more hens year after year for decades. Their stomachs are only so big.
It's partly the atmosphere of hyper-growth--"growthism" it is sometimes called--that has given rise to this situation. And it is partly because big tech has been gaslighting us about how all this tracking and ad personalization is good for consumers--which it isn't. It benefits advertisers and ad networks, not consumers.
I am getting confused in this whole analogy, TBH, but if chickens were clicks or ad impressions, it seems like foxes have developed an appetite for pigeons, larks, hawks, eagles, rabbits, squirrels, shrews, groundhogs, muskrats, cats, small dogs, mice, rats, and other foxes. They seem to have a bottomless pit for a stomach and are telling us that it's always been that case that foxes were the dominant life form and that we should be grateful for the services they are providing.
But the journalists too are just following the incentives that are provided to them. Don’t they deserve some of that “but that’s like blaming the fox for killing the hens, instead of whoever left a hole in the hen house” blanket pardon you’re handing out, here?
Oh that wasn't a pardon. Maybe the fox analogy was poorly chosen, since foxes are cute and have their place in the ecosystem. I should have said Google is like cancer, and media are the negligent doctor that takes too long to send you to therapy.
The entire world is full of holes, and always has been. We shouldn't be lauding the foxes that use every hole they find. Unethical activities should be called out, not downplayed and dismissed.
> we know damn well that consumers don't choose fuel sources
That's not entirely true. Where I live people have a choice of energy provider which includes much more costly "100% renewable" options. Guess how popular that choice is.
I don't know where you live, so it's impossible to say what you actually mean. But if you are referring to the choices for electric power, these are almost certainly new developments that have been forced by legislation mandating giving consumers a choice, which is only a small walkback of the past century of promotion and even subsidizing energy producers that use fossil fuels. Energy production is a deeply non-free market. Even in recent times with the rise of solar, it's often the case where it's illegal (or sometimes merely inconvenient or uneconomical) to sell power back to the grid.
You don’t say where you live, but in the United States, in addition to ‘titzer correctly says, these “100% renewable” providers that are piggybacking on the established providers’ grids are mostly a flavor of adjustable-rate scam.
We’d all be a hell of a lot better off if your camp didn’t casually and routinely believe that failure to contact FSF or advocate for Tor is evidence of a conspiracy against computing. I swear free software people have a really great idea and philosophy and absolute garbage ideas of how to promote the idea and convince disagreeing viewpoints. We badly need to start coming around to the seemingly-crazy understanding that there’s a huge middle ground between where you are and would prefer us to be, and unfettered, apocalyptic corporate exploitation dooming us all. It’s tiring to live this Sith existence that free software people push: “with us or conspiring against.” And we all know it’s RMS who sets that tone and has inspired all of you to religious battle. The problem is you’re showing up to battle with civilians most of the time, including here, in this thread, right now.
You mention nearby that you didn’t mean for this post to come off as blaming the consumer. That’s weird, because typically when I’m blaming someone for something, I use adjectives like “myopic”, “apathetic”, and “willful” to describe their behavior that I find disagreeable. Your entire post is blaming the very people you’re trying to convince; when called on it, you quickly rush in with oh no, not blaming the consumer, and not even blaming Google (!?).
> That’s why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.
How do you think this conversation goes? Is it something like this?
“The people are dangerously close to understanding true freedom. We cannot have that and we must convince them that Google policing is in their best interest. If we call FSF that’s what they’re going to tell us, so we absolutely can’t do that. Let’s call the safe option at Harvard.”
Because (former investigative journalist here) it isn’t. The conversation you’re annoyed about actually goes like this:
“The last five hundred times we tried the FSF we got lectured about why our computing choices suck and we make bad decisions about using computers. Let’s go to a person we’ve worked with before who is able to break this down in a way that I, and my readers, will understand. Bonus: I don’t have to Google why forgetting ‘GNU/‘ in the last article destroyed my comment section.”
It’s so weird and depressing because everybody in free software is brilliant, for the most part, but just can’t see how alienating and frustrating this kind of thing is for the majority of people who aren’t them.
You kind of have a baby/bathwater situation, eh? You'd throw the baby out just because the bathwater has a lot of evangelists you personally find unpleasant to communicate with. Doesn't seem to matter that they're fighting for _your rights_ just that you don't like them. I guess your post directly leads to OP's post in that sense, because my first thought after reading yours was, "you reap what you sow" which is more or less what OP wrote. So maybe we'd be a hell of a lot better off without your attitude?
Yes, thank you for elaborating, but I did understand their point. The issue is that OP hasn't thought far enough ahead (or doesn't care) and as a result, as GP and myself have now said, a situation where you reap what you sow occurs.
Let me elaborate now: The people who are willing to get the message out about FSF ideals are currently the people who are doing it. So unless OP or yourself can provide the means to do that better than what is being done now, what you get is what there is right now. So then, if at that point, you hear about a good idea (like what the FSF fights for) but turn away from it (throwing out the baby) because you don't like the source of that idea, then, as was already said, you reap what you sow.
Except they aren’t doing it. What we have to show for decades of FSF activism is enough of a rejection of GPL that other licenses filled the gap, and that gap basically created cloud computing by letting the very companies RMS detests offshore their engineering to the detesters without any risk. So in one interpretation, the ideal software model but maybe not the ideal license envisioned by FSF is a major component of the transfer/takeback of computing as a concept from individual to corporation (and then bigger corporation) and the creation of pan-surveillance culture. Which is incredibly ironic given the ideals of the FLOSS community. That’s what we’re reaping, in my estimation.
Vexing yourself with the legal provenance of the BIOS in your laptop ignores all that, and this state of computing been slowly growing in that technofetish blind spot for about thirty years. And now the community with said, massive blind spot is saying “see what you reaped by not listening to us?” Come on. We did. It’s a safe bet I’ve been thinking about this longer than you’ve been in the job market, and I’m not saying that to tout my experience, but it’s equally frustrating to level some criticism at the FLOSS world and get accused of shortsighted/myopia/blah blah which was exactly my bone to pick with OP. That’s the only argument path. FLOSS is perfect, and if you disagree, you just don’t see it. That’s not a society. That’s a belief.
I’m not saying that’s the fairest take. (Please give me a better one that isn’t “people just don’t listen,” and I may be convinced.) Maybe if everything Posix were GPL we wouldn’t be offshoring our computing responsibilities to companies who built platforms with these tools, I don’t know. This has been the background noise of my entire adult life, though, and yeah, I’ve had enough reaping of the current state of affairs.
I assure you wholeheartedly that I care. I just disagree with you. Stop confusing the two.
They ARE doing it, you just don't think it's effective. If you can do better, do it! If you can't, or don't want to, well, ... we reap what we sow. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
My experience is that journalists do the first using the vocabulary of the second:
They phrase objections to viewpoints and ideas that are forbidden in the language of decorum, so they can claim to be upholding propriety and good society rather than censorship.
That attitude (and your post) are why trust in media has collapsed — you’re no longer doing the hard work of bringing us the fire of truth, you’re just having a pleasant chat with your friends.
While I agree with some of what you said about the free software community, I think you're ignoring GP's larger point, and somewhat derailing the conversation by focusing too much on one sentence of a long comment.
Perhaps you could post a substantive rebuttal to the heart of GP's comment:
> they remain willfully blind to other threats ...
> The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others.
In other words, what about broader issues with censorship, surveillance, and corporate control of the Internet outside the context of abortion?
I didn’t rebut either of your quotes because they’re both ascribing intent to the actions of others with very limited information. I’d be rebutting their interpretation of events, not the events (and I’d also be doing it with the same limited information).
Fair enough, those claims could use some evidence. The author of this article once wrote:
> As more of the Internet permeated our lives, so has the expectation that tech companies share a responsibility for content that’s akin to food companies’ responsibility for public health.
It could also mean that they share responsibility because of their lobbying efforts.
Laws could have been enacted a long time ago and surveillance expectations could have remained strongly on individual privacy instead of fighting like:
> Let’s go to a person we’ve worked with before who is able to break this down in a way that I, and my readers, will understand.
That will have an anemic opinion that is close to your own, and works for an institution that is as establishment as they come [1]. How can you "speak truth to power" when you get your commentary and opinions from one of the seats of that power?
I’d love to respond substantively on this topic, but every followup I’ve written so far in this thread has been immediately flagged, so I’m not inclined to risk the time. (I’m sorry for that. That’s not your fault.)
I could fly off on a tangent about how that’s a conspiracy to suppress my view, but I think it’s more productive to look at that as a misunderstanding of the role of the “flag” button. Maybe that’s my substantive response I’d leave you with: when presented with opportunity to presume the worst in people, find the middle if you can?
> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic
99% of people I interact with have absolutely NO idea of the ramifications of the apps and services they use. Their understanding of technology ends at "click app icon and scroll". I think that (probably because you're in tech) you seriously overestimate the degree to which the vast majority of people can be said to have given "informed consent".
Hell, even among my friends with PhDs and whatnot a majority does not understand.
> But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others.
This brings to mind a useful test: Consider a hypothetical, in which instead of a majority-Republican-appointed Supreme Court allowing states to ban abortions, a majority-Democrat-appointed Supreme Court allowed states to ban guns. If you'd want Google to continue collecting data on people visiting gun stores and machine shops in that case, then don't pretend privacy is why you want them to stop doing the same thing in this case.
> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.
I took years before I realized Google was spying on me and following me around on different sites. I did get no warnings, until I realized what they were doing and visited sites that warned about it.
It is just in the recent years "big tech" spying is a thing in the mainstream after like a decade of free reign. An ordinary person received warnings like 15 years after they made their Gmail or Facebook account.
> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.
This is what governments and NGOs are for.
Individual initiative is not enough to address systemic issues like pollution, or food/car/airline/workplace safety for example.
You can't just blame the average person for not running their own mailserver, growing their on food etc.
Surveillance capitalism is now a political problem like monopolies/oligopolies creating pollution and so on
> Individual initiative is not enough to address systemic issues
I couldn't agree more. But before we can have the software equivalent of a food safety agency, people have to stop shrugging off food poisoning with "they probably deserved it".
> Enter a cage willingly, with barely any complaint, for minor convenience, then cry when you're taken to the slaughterhouse
I don't think it's fair to characterise Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and plenty other Google "products" (Pay, Music, Android, Android TV, Android Auto, Calendar, Podcasts, etc.) as "minor convenience". Some of them were literal game changers, and some still are (YouTube, Google Maps, even if they're finally starting to get decent competition).
Similarly, characterising Google's knowledge about one's habits and interests for the purpose of serving ads (that are also, at least sometimes, more interesting for the user) as "entering a cage" is hyperbolic to say the least.
Yes, having a corporation know you very well for monetisation is bad, but it's not a cage from which you're going to be slaughtered. And even today, many people would prefer, if they even have the choice, to have free access to Maps, Gmail, YouTube and all the rest instead of paying 5-20 $/€/£ each/month, or having to buy into Apple's expensive walled garden and its own massive issues and fleecing.
> Similarly, characterising Google's knowledge about one's habits and interests for the purpose of serving ads (that are also, at least sometimes, more interesting for the user) as "entering a cage" is hyperbolic to say the least.
If you don't think it's a cage, try saying no to the data collection of google and others.
Where I live it cuts you off from most community events and organisations. It cuts you off from second hand markets. It cuts you off from many events. It is starting to cut you off from access to banking services (for now limiting features, but the stranglehold will get tighter once attestation hits PCs). And during covid it got you passed over on the vaccine waiting list without a google/apple only app and then forced you to choose between submitting to google and awkwardly standing out the front of any shop demanding they follow the law and let you sign in manually in order to buy anything while you get lumped in with anti-vaccers.
It has already repeatedly been used to round up protestors and dragnet people for criminal investigations when they had nothing to do with it. Now abortion, and it wil, only get worse.
Has anyone in the world ever been sent to prison for getting an abortion based on Google location data? Or is this all still hypothetical? (Seriously curious)
I don't know, but I don't see this as a problem that is specific to Google or abortion. China can serve as a cautionary example of where surveillance leads.
It's more akin to pollution than slaughter. Most of the people selling their privacy are not significantly harmed by it. It's a group downstream that get it worst.
Purchasing and search history suggest that you had a pregnancy magically disappear in a red state? Buy a book that is critical of Islam in a Middle Eastern country? Search for the long term health risks of giving minors hormone therapy in Canada? Congratulations, the ad services have now flagged you for possible wrong think / criminal investigation. Hope not having to print out Map Quest directions was worth it.
> The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others. That's why they want to build "civil rights" into products, and not "user freedom". That's why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.
There's a strong authoritarian zeitgeist built into the identity politics proposals of papers like the WP. It's been like this for years - stories about "hate online" and "what are corporations going to do about it." Proposals around racial justice always end up with laws to compel something from someone.
The goals might be benign, but they should follow principles that we've already agreed by consensus as a society / culture rather than via compulsion and radical 'rethinks'.
The obsession of the last few years with regulating 'misinformation' and 'hate' online should be a big red flag here.
> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.
The problem is, the very same data that anti-abortion fundamentalists or the police in the pointless "war on drugs" use against the population are what makes many services possible or usable in the first place.
A real-time traffic map only works with a large number of devices transmitting location and movement data that are then evaluated to detect a traffic jam. An app to help fertility or contraception only works with people entering very detailed data about their periods. Cell phones only work by having the phone register at each cell during roaming around.
Boycotting Google or deleting your period app is a stopgap solution - the real fix is we all need to get the right to privacy enshrined in our Constitutions, Basic Laws (the German equivalent) and international treaties, in a way that matches the reality that our phones and computers are direct extensions of our minds. We don't allow police to use brain reading (=polygraphs) as evidence in court, so tell me, why the fuck should we allow police to use digital representations of our brains?
Oh, and we all have to literally fight for the separation of church and state that basically all Western nations have in their constitutions to be actual reality. Fuck churches, fuck religion - the immense amount of influence both have on politics is completely unhealthy.
But as this current crisis clearly shows, the problem is not privacy invasion by FANGs. The problem is government privacy invasion, everywhere. And there, sorry to say, Google is not the problem. Perhaps some changes to their policies is warranted, but a total turnaround? Why?
Hospitals and doctor's effectively report on women's periods, contraceptives and pregnancies when women visit. This is not optional, this is important for correct diagnosis and care for women, as well as for emergency care for women when necessary (many drugs and life-saving treatments, including emergency ones, MUST NOT be used during pregnancies, not because religion, but because they would harm the baby, or mother, or both). And unlike Google searches, Facebook chats or Amazon orders, medical provided information about periods has actually been used to convict women getting abortions.
Something similar goes for social workers providing women with feminine hygiene products.
The first thing we need is for police to stay away from medical records, and to go back to outlawing doctors, and any medical and social services (esp. mental care of any kind) giving any information to the police.
But that would this information is inaccessible to law enforcement and the next time some teenager disappears for a week we'd need to show backbone ... The next divorce proceedings we need to show backbone, and WHATEVER mental health history any of the partners have needs to stay out of it. We need to make police, justice, some medical procedures and social work harder, and accept the costs that will come with that.
> Google is not the problem. Perhaps some changes to their policies is warranted, but a total turnaround? Why?
But it is the problem. Google legally collects the data, but that means the information is only one law away from becoming accessible and directly used against individuals.
There are many checks in place—practical, legal, and cultural—to keep law enforcement from collecting such data.
FAANG’s surveillance tech has created a backdoor to circumvent all but the legal checks.
That’s an awful place to be in, especially in the world of parallel construction.
> Twelve years [after Katz v. United States] the Supreme Court held that a pen register is not a search because the "petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company." Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 744 (1979). Since the defendant had disclosed the dialed numbers to the telephone company so they could connect his call, he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed. The court did not distinguish between disclosing the numbers to a human operator or just the automatic equipment used by the telephone company.
> But as this current crisis clearly shows, the problem is not privacy invasion by FANGs. The problem is government privacy invasion, everywhere. And there, sorry to say, Google is not the problem.
I literally said that boycotting Google and period apps is a stopgap solution and the real fix is to get rights to privacy enshrined in constitutions?
Just to note that separating medical records from government's prying eyes would also include (lack of) vaccination status and would neuter most 'red flag' laws that restrict gun access based on mental health.
Vaccination status is something between the patient and the doctor, the police have no need for that information.
Red flag laws are both blatantly unconstitutional and have been wildly misused in their short time in existence, the only people I see defending them are mostly those who see it as an inch towards a complete personal gun ownership ban, which is what they really want.
Doctor/Patient confidentiality used to be sacrosanct, and it is no longer, and realistically I know many people who refuse help because of this. The Defund the Police folks are right, America needs more social workers, not more police powers.
> Red flag laws are both blatantly unconstitutional and have been wildly misused in their short time in existence, the only people I see defending them are mostly those who see it as an inch towards a complete personal gun ownership ban, which is what they really want.
The US has a problem with gun violence that puts all other civilized nations to shame, and it is per 100k second in the world when it comes to firearm suicide [1]. The problem is, getting any sort of federal gun control that actually reduces the amount of gun violence passed in Congress is impossible. Even right after yet another completely preventable massacre - firearm death is the most common source of child deaths [2].
So, yes, states need to be able to institute limitations on gun use, and "red flag" laws that use either known records of mental health issues or (domestic) violence citations are a reasonable compromise between privacy and the right of children to go to school without getting shot dead.
Gun violence in the US is insane, and of course you could not have gun violence without guns. Yet other places, of comparable economic status (Switzerland, Austria,...) also have high gun ownership, without having the insane rate of gun violence. So there must be more to the insanity than just 'guns'.
The US Constitution, the German Grundgesetz or the French Fourth Republic's Constitution all prescribe some sort of laicism - even the Turkish Constitution does so, following Atatürk's work many decades ago.
It's time for societies to actually follow their principles and constitutions and get religion out of the way in politics - but most certainly not to roll back centuries of progress in ridding the world of religion. Erdogan's Turkey is rapidly devolving into a horrible mixture of nationalism and radical Islamism in order to secure Erdogan's grab on power, and the US is on its best way to follow suit, with fanatic Evangelicals banded together with neo-Nazis and generic anti-semites having taken power in the GOP.
The article appears to be saying that there is something fundamentally new happening because Google/Big Tech are now potentially able to facilitate the implementation of law the writer disagrees with.
It's obviously a useful example of the potential for where (say) privacy rights may be superceded by other (eg legal) considerations but framing it as a clear and new moral wrong in the context of a massively contested ethical argument over abortion is simplistic.
What’s the point of this comment? It’s an opinion piece, so we know it reflects the author’s opinions.
You don’t have to agree with them on abortion, or even privacy. But backbiting on privacy solely because it appears in the context of an abortion argument is bizarre.
The article gives the impression that privacy doesn't matter otherwise.
In the author's words, Google's behavior "has suddenly become dangerous", suggesting privacy didn't matter before and would stop mattering again if not for abortions.
The charitable reading is that the author sees a direct link between a lack of privacy here and imprisonment and forced birth for women. That’s a material sense in which Google “has suddenly become dangerous” for the target audience of the Washington Post.
It’s manifest to every reader of this site that adtech has always been dangerous. But it should also be manifest that we’re not the sole audience.
It's also perfectly fair to criticize the author for ignoring the dangers that only affected other people until now.
Framing the issue solely in the context of abortion suggests Google's response should be to stop tracking a few health and pregnancy related data points and otherwise carry on business as usual.
I could be misunderstanding what you mean, but do we actually have evidence that the author has ignored the dangers of adtech until now? All we have is this one topical opinion piece; we don’t know either the contents of their mind or their opinion piece history (unless you bothered to look it up; I didn’t.)
I read this opinion piece as: “here is a topical example of the danger of surveillance capitalism.” The language if imminent danger reflects both the topic and the intended audience, not the more oblique and unlikely claim that privacy violation is okay so long as it doesn’t trample on this one specific issue.
> What’s the point of this comment? It’s an opinion piece, so we know it reflects the author’s opinions.
Well yeah, it's an opinion piece so OP is going to criticise their opinions and how they are framed.
Take the following:
> "This is a moment I’ve long worried would arrive. The way tens of millions of Americans use everyday Google products has suddenly become dangerous. Following the Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, anything Google knows about you could be acquired by police in states where abortion is now illegal [...] There is something Google could do about this: Stop collecting — and start deleting — data that could be used to prosecute abortions."
Now what he is effectively saying is - Google should destroy evidence of a particular crime (a crime I suspect most of us believe shouldn't be a crime, but is now a crime nontheless).
He isn't arguing Google should delete evidence of all crimes - just this specific crime.
So presumably we are arguing that Google should be able to decide which crimes are 'good' and 'bad' and then destroy evidence of things that it thinks shouldn't be crimes?
Once more - I personally agree with the author on abortion and don't think abortion should be illegal - but it's a really weird twist to ask Google to effectively intentionally and automatically detect when someone might be breaking a specific law, and then specifically delete just the data that they think could be evidence of law-breaking so that law enforcement can't get the evidence. I can't imagine this passing the sniff-test with prosecutors in terms of tampering/destroying evidence.
I mean if we are arguing for a blanket ban on law enforcement having data from Google then that is fine and a viewpoint I can understand - but only arguing for limitations in the context of abortion is the thing that seems strange.
Should they delete evidence if you crash your car so the police can't see if you have been using your phone when driving? Should they delete the evidence of who was at the congress riots? Should they let investigators trace if a suspect was at a particular location during a murder trial? It becomes a bit of a slippery slope trying to work out where the line is.
> it's a really weird twist to ask Google to effectively intentionally and automatically detect when someone might be breaking a specific law, and then specifically delete just the data that they think could be evidence of law-breaking so that law enforcement can't get the evidence.
To leave with only this interpretation of the article involves ignoring both the headline and the four suggestions that it argues for, which don't concentrate on abortion, but clearly call for rules that would protect women who have abortions to also be applied generally, to 1) all searches and history (possibly qualified with "health-related" exclusions by default in the spirit of HIPAA), 2) all location data, 3) 'incognito mode' in general, and 4) all chat and private messaging.
Abortion is what motivates him (or at least what he decided to hang the article from), but that's clearly one of the few issues that motivates wealthy elites because it has the potential to affect them or someone they love. Any truthful angle that gets anybody riled up against ubiquitous surveillance is good.
It actually argues for the scope of data deletion to be data specifically around sexual reproductive health, for the explicit purpose of deleting evidence of abortions for Roe vs Wade.
I agree that the other points are more broad - but I also think that these issues have to be looked at via more than a single lens. Just using the lens of 'abortion' for these data privacy issues leads to a much more limited scope of discussion than is ideal.
It's a valid debate. Most people in developed countries would clearly disagree with an argument that privacy is beneficial merely inasmuch as it might protect those who e.g. seek abortions late in the 2nd trimester-- which used to be considered part of a pregnant woman's "right to privacy" under Roe (though a lot less clearly so after Planned Parenthood v. Casey which introduced a revised standard) but is very much banned in much of the Western world! The ethical concerns over abortion are extremely real, far more than those involving privacy in a more everyday sense.
There are ethical concerns about abortion - eg whether knowingly giving birth to a sick child is ethical - but the part that’s being discussed isn’t ethically complicated at all. It’s the same situation as with anti-vaxers - on one side there’s a clear consensus, and the other side is a coordinated stupidity, in this case the Church.
To have a proper abortion debate we first need to get rid of political correctness. We need to stop pretending that certain religions are anything more than fairy tales and that they “deserve respect”.
> The article appears to be saying that there is something fundamentally new happening because Google/Big Tech are now potentially able to facilitate the implementation of law the writer disagrees with.
Wrong. People have been warning for 2 decades that corporate surveillance can enable "turn-key" dictatorship.
Although technically an idiot who carried his phone with him and took
almost no forensic precautions the police officer Wayne Couzens who
murdered Sarah Everard probably had various levels of access to
digital privilege that allowed him to plan the abduction and killing.
At least that's the discussion my class brought up recently when we
were talking about LOVEINT and stalking by people who operate CCTV
cameras and so on.
Why do we persist with this incredibly naive assumption that
behind digital power are actors who deserve an assumption of
benevolence first, and the odd rogues are just bad-eggs?
When it comes to this abortion issue, Google are in a privileged
position of power and should be handled accordingly.
Surely, if we think "zero trust" is a fit way to conduct
cyber-security, it also applies to civic security? Shouldn't anyone
who handles public data be positively vetted to within an inch of
their sanity and themselves be placed within panopticon of radical
transparency?
Protecting any vulnerable group, including women, from digital harms
requires a change of mind-set, a new kind of digital literacy.
The murders that justified the universal collection and permanent storage and indexing of the DNA of anyone arrested or suspected of a crime were committed by a cop who was never forced to give up his DNA, and who was discovered through the search of DNA collected by a private company that uses it to sell novelty racial classifications.
In the future, the cops could bust an "illicit" gay club, and sample the place for DNA to find likely homosexuals to round up. They wouldn't need any better data than they currently have.
> quite a lot of women who would not want to have an abortion performed
There are certain situations such as ectopic pregnancy where there is no chance of a successful live birth and the life of the mother is in danger which are now classified as abortion, and prosecutions are happening for the life-saving treatment in these cases now.
Which is definitely something that needs fixing. Yet, I also see plenty of advocates for REALLY late abortions and such, along with people being proud of getting abortions.
"Legal" is a pre-requisite for "safe", and comprehensive sex education is a pre-requisite for "rare". Nobody's getting abortions just for the sake of it, I assure you. Since there's no appetite for compromise or even fact-based discussion from the anti-side, here you are.
> "Legal" is a pre-requisite for "safe", and comprehensive sex education is a pre-requisite for "rare".
Legal can have different extents. For example, no questions asked for the first 12 weeks, questions asked next 12, under VERY specific conditions on the last 12 weeks. Another extent could be no questions asked, period. And yeah, proper sex-ed is pretty important.
> Nobody's getting abortions just for the sake of it, I assure you.
Sure, nobody is getting pregnant just to have an abortion. A, IMO, worrying amount of cases use abortions as a replacement for contraception.
> Since there's no appetite for compromise or even fact-based discussion from the anti-side, here you are.
What if, just what if, everyone in Texas and other backward places starts ddos-ing government by searching for and visiting abortion clinics? Houston, Dallas, Austin n San Antonio have a population of ~6M. Even if 1% of them do a search and visits once per week, that is 60k cases to investigate. Per week.
I don't understand how "the leader of all progressive countries" could fall back into the dark ages by taking away rights that make sense.
A country where consuming cannabis is not outlawed but abortion is.
What is wrong and how can that country be put back on track?
You got it reversed. AFAIK, there are no federal laws prohibiting abortion but there are federal laws prohibiting the use and sale of cannabis. Some states chose to criminalize abortion, but not all do. And many states chose to basically ignore the federal laws on cannabis (I'm not sure exactly how that one works, to be honest).
States aren’t required to enforce federal law, and the federal government can’t force states to help enforce federal law, as it’s unconstitutional.[1] If the feds want to enforce the marijuana ban and the state doesn’t volunteer to help, the feds would have to use e.g. the FBI or DEA to enforce the law. The feds don’t have the capacity to do that nationally, though, so it mostly goes unenforced, except maybe for large busts where it’s worth it for the feds to put the effort in.
But Federal funds can, and are, withheld if the States don't enforce Federal Laws.
EG: Universal 55 MPH speed limits & 21 yo drinking age come to mind.
The US has never been progressive. Chattel slavery was active until the 40s. Child marriage occurs frequently. Thousands of children of asylum seekers and immigrants have been separated from their parents and 'lost'. Politicians may only be christian, or in a very small minority muslim.
There are small progressive pockets, but that is all.
And end gerrymandering at the state level. Picking Michigan as I'm familiar with it, there's a ridiculous bias in the state legislature toward Republicans. Comparing the 2006 and 2010 state senate races is probably the best comparison. In 2006, the popular vote was 55% R and 45% D, with the reverse in 2010. In 2006, a 10% lead toward Republicans gave Republicans a 26 to 12 majority in the state senate. In 2010, a 10% lead toward Democrats gave Republicans a 21 to 17 majority in the state senate. These maps were found by a federal court to be illegally gerrymandered in 2019, but unfortunately, was overruled following similar cases at the Supreme Court[2][3] that year.
Changing the EC would require a national constitutional amendment.
If you're looking to make the presidential results look more like the national vote, there is an easier step that only requires changing your state.
End winner-takes-all EC allocation in your state, and allocate proportionally. This would give red and blue minorities in a state a say (and even third parties!) and reduce the impact of a handful of votes in "swing states".
The problem with allocating the state's electoral college votes proportionally is that there's no advantage in doing so on a state-by-state level. For each individual state, the result is having a much smaller influence on the election overall. There's a first-mover problem, where it would result in a better end state, but any state that makes this allocation is shooting themselves in the foot.
Instead, there's a better solution in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[0]. All states in the compact give the entirety of their votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote on the national level, but only once the NPVIC has sufficient electoral votes to be the deciding factor. This way, the electoral college still exists, doesn't require a constitutional amendment to change, but effectively becomes a rubber stamp. Because it only takes effect once the NPVIC controls the majority of electoral college votes, it avoids the first-mover effect.
> For each individual state, the result is having a much smaller influence on the election overall
So do it in small groups. You just have to convince a comparable set of red and blue states, and it'll be easier to convince them that you'll both win some and lose some than to convince the red states to make themselves irrelevant. Such is the nature of compromise--find common ground, both sides win and lose a little.
Of course, if you solely care about the fact some votes count less than others--which was the underlying argument against the EC--then just having your state allocate proportionally improves the lives of your fellow citizens now, and it's for the greater good.
> Instead, there's a better solution in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact[0]
This is just a constitutional amendment with less steps and slightly lower threshold.
It's not coincidence that blue states are in it and not red. The red states will not sign on to this because it would make them irrelevant. A blue state would not allocate their EC votes proportional to their state results because it would reduce the blue party's influence, even though it would be fairer to their citizens.
sigh. The Supreme Court was never intended to be as polarized and partisan as it is today. The framer's thinking on lifetime judicial appointments was that it would give them independence from politics, never needing to be concerned about elections.
If you look at the history of votes on Supreme Court nominees, the hyper-partisan divide, splitting along party lines, is an anomaly. We're in a new era. The last 4 nominees[1] just barely squeaked by, while historically, nominees usually got 60, 70, even 80+ votes in the Senate. What we are seeing now is very, very different. It used to actually be based on qualifications, and now it's 100% ideological and politics.
A party "controlling" the Supreme court. What a crappy reality we are in now.
edit: [1] I should say 5 nominees, because Garland didn't even get a vote for an entire year because the Senate majority quashed it in order for the next President to nominate someone else. Blatant theft of a constitutionally-enumerated power allotted to the President, if you ask me.
> A party "controlling" the Supreme court. What a crappy reality we are in now.
Absolutely. But the problem of partisan courts is endemic in the US Judicial system. Encountering Far-left or right judges at all levels is fairly common.
It doesn't matter which side started packing the courts because now it is a race to see who can do it the fastest. By luck, planning or whatever the conservatives did it at the highest level. The liberals really shouldn't say anything because they are also doing the same thing at every level.
In general, we need to get away from Courts, especially at the Federal level, writing laws. In fact, anyone who is not elected (including the bloated, highly partisan admin fed/state agencies) should not be writing law.
Keep the Senate the way it is, but elect Senators through proportional representation: each voter votes for a party, and that party gets as many Senate seats as its percentage vote share. Parties can choose the Senators they seat by any method that they officially publish before the election. This could be, for example, by having an internal election/primary that results in an ordered list, or even something strange like a rotating lineup of Senators, or the weekly winner of a contest.
People who cling to the Senate system because of the inordinate representation it gives to white, small states would happily give that up for the guarantee that they could get at least one neonazi Senator. We would have to deal with the fact that both Kim and Kanye would have a Senate seat, though.
The US government didn’t end up formed this way on accident. It is to avoid a “winner takes all” situation where 51% of the country dictates all laws, policy to the other 49%.
My understanding is that it was largely as a way to appease slave states and provide reassurance that there wouldn't be abolition at the federal level, not to provide an idealized balance between states.
And even if it were for that purpose, having a "winner takes all" that requires 51% to achieve would still be better than the current system, which still allows for a winner-takes-all state but with much less than 51%. Checks and balances were designed under the assumption that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches would be balanced by a constant struggle against each other. They didn't account for political parties, which can result in multiple branches of government being controlled by an overarching party, effectively negating those balances.
