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.
