Prof. David Erdos has shared his latest (excellent) research “showing i) little UK GDPR enforcement, ii) worrying gap with formal law expectations & iii) limited accountability for this.”
A less polite version would be: the 🇬🇧 government has demonstrated how a law on the books it dislikes (the General Data Protection Regulation) can be undermined by the appointment of supine or actively hostile Information Commissioners. (As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher was against its predecessor Data Protection Directive from the start; not much has changed.)
I hope the European Commission is not going down the same route with the Digital Markets Act’s Art. 7 (on NIICS interoperability), which it was hostile to from start (early 2020) to finish (enforcement). Legislators learned from the GDPR that it is too easy for national regulators to be deliberately undermined by governments looking to attract technology firm investment (see also: Ireland and Luxembourg). The Commission therefore has a central enforcement role. So I’m especially disappointed by the flimsiness of its finally-published decision not to designate iMessage as a DMA gatekeeper NIICS. It hardly justifies the “exceptional” non-designation decision (Art. 3(5)), or “manifestly call[s] into question” the quantitative tests it meets [1]. I wonder if Meta now feels slightly foolish to have obeyed that provision in (somewhat) good faith 🫠
I still remember the jaw-dropping moment the new 🇬🇧 Information Commissioner in 2009 told a law conference (just about his first public appearance) he didn’t think data protection law should apply to the private sector. (He previously ran the advertising “self-regulatory” Advertising Standards Authority.) It’s fortunate indeed for GDPR enforcement it contains rights of private action, so effectively taken up by Max Schrems. Meanwhile, the Commission’s lack of legal action to force some member states to properly implement the legislation, enchantment with mass surveillance/data retention, and some of its adequacy decisions, are much less impressive than the Court of Justice’s judgments on Schrems’ two cases.
I was reminded last week talking to a BigTech competitor these much smaller firms have to be extremely cautious about upsetting a company they may rely on for key resources, and the Commission has spent most of its time preparing for DMA enforcement talking to those two groups. So perhaps Schrems’ None of Your Business, or something similar, will have to take up the rights of the individuals the legislation is ultimately supposed to help 🤷🏻♂️ Fortunately the DMA also contains rights of private action, as well as the ability of organisations to take representative actions (thanks to campaigning by consumer and digital rights groups in its final stages). As with the Schrems I and II cases, these apparently small issues can ultimately have enormous global impact [2].
[1] Where does the DMA talk about the relative intensity of use of one core platform service versus another? This provides two of three reasons for the decision! Who cares if iMessage for Business is lightly used, given it’s likely iMessage itself is used by many microbusinesses, very few of whom I imagine were part of the “corporate users of iPhone to whom the Commission reached out during the market investigation”? Really, the EC didn’t even bother with a large-scale survey, and/or demand data from Apple?
I also heard from an impeccable source Apple threatened to withdraw iMessage from the EU if it had been DMA-designated. The EC should not be rewarding such blackmail, even if it was highly likely to be a bluff.
[2] For now, we might have to rely on technology and philanthropy to improve messenger interoperability, such as this great project: a cross-platform, memory-safe OpenMLS library to enable interoperable, end-to-end encrypted messaging (E2EE) in multiple clients, combining “Matrix’s decentralized and federated infrastructure with Signal’s low metadata footprint.” 🎯
What’s happening with TikTok in the US is a strong reminder about the vulnerability of centralized platforms to censorship and surveillance. The Open Technology Fund notes Signal “provides a high level of metadata protection, but is centralized and thus easily censored. In addition, Signal cannot efficiently provide E2EE for large-group communications.” I hope Signal will move in this direction over time, as well as towards interoperability with other platforms implementing its own protocol (with metadata guarantees) as well as the IETF’s open Messaging Layer Security standard.
I can't accept that this is where we're now, but at least you can learn a lot about opensource, community, bureaucracy, funding, boardroom drama, conflict of interests and bigtech shills just by reading this.
« Quel rôle les grandes firmes technologiques américaines, qui s’exportent massivement dans le monde tout en ayant leurs sièges localisés dans la célèbre #SiliconValley, jouent-elles dans le carnage qui a cours actuellement dans la bande de #Gaza et qui est perpétré par l’armée #israél|ienne ? »
Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money by Zephyr Teachout, 2020
"[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing."
―From the foreword by Bernie Sanders.
When Spotify entered the podcast world, audio producer Alex Sujong Laughlin was wary — and with good reason, since back when she was a social media editor working at The Washington Post, she saw the devastating effect some private tech companies have had on media and journalism. She's sad to be proved right. "Spotify — along with many other companies — wants to create a closed ecosystem for the creation, distribution, and consumption of podcasts, bypassing RSS technology altogether because that would allow them to harvest more listener data to leverage with advertisers," she writes in this story for Defector. Luckily, she says it's not too late to take back our feeds. "You don’t have to understand the technology of RSS to choose to listen to your podcasts on an open app. You can just choose to do it." [Story may be paywalled]
I simply cannot understand how someone who claims to be a human being can find it perfectly normal to aggressively demand a multi-billion dollar bonus while at the same time laying off thousands of people. I do not have to be a socialist to find this behaviour disgusting.
— #economy#society#BigTech#SomeBillionaire#SomeCarCompany
"The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing #bigtech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web #browsers from a #choicescreen."
"We Need To Rewild The Internet" https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/ "Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, ready to extend the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know what happened next."
Many users pay for LLM subscriptions. But the margins are small, because what companies can charge for these services is barely above the cost of running them. There is also a lot of competition between different providers. The amount of investment is just completely disproportionate; it is a thousand times too high.
Why do you think that is?
There is just a ton of hype and outlandish expectations. Newspapers are running headlines like, «all jobs will be replaced soon» – «The 2028 U.S. elections will no longer be run by humans.» There is talk of artificial general intelligence. But these LLMs are more similar to large databases.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to a program that could solve all conceivable tasks. Do you doubt that LLMs are a step in this direction?
I don't believe that LLMs bring us any closer to human-like or general intelligence. These exaggerated expectations are also due to prominent studies which claimed that AI-models performed better than humans in law and math exams. We now know that language models simply memorized the right answers." https://www.nzz.ch/english/google-researcher-says-ai-hype-is-skewing-investment-ld.1825122
#Amazon#WorkersRights#Labor#EU#Monopolies#BigTech#Antitrust: "At the hearing in the European Parliament in January, where Amazon's chair remained empty, we got a glimpse into horrible working conditions through testimonies of employees.
One particular story sticks in our mind — of a worker who witnessed an accident and was later fired, to prevent any negative impact. There are reports about every break being closely monitored, about cameras in front of the bathroom door, about workers being treated like robots, slaves, numbers.
There must be no place for such exploitation in Europe. The multinational must respect European rules and values if it wants to do business and make profit in Europe. We must make Amazon pay decent wages and ensure workers' rights — to treat employees like humans, not robots.
With this mission in mind, the Socialists and Democrats are on Friday (12 April) organising a Europe-wide Amazon action day, coordinated by UNI Europa, the European Services Workers Union, to meet Amazon workers and UNI Europa affiliated trade unions in Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands — and discuss how to empower employees so they can stand up to Amazon's exploitation."
Wählen ab 16: Chance oder Gefahr für die #Demokratie?
Erstmals dürfen in Deutschland auch Jugendliche ab 16 Jahren ihre Stimme bei der #Europawahl abgegeben. Der Absenkung des Wahlalters ist eine langjährige Debatte über die Vor- und Nachteile vorausgegangen.
Ist Wählen ab 16 sinnvoll? Und wie könnte sich das abgesenkte Wahlalter auf die Europawahl auswirken?
#BigTech hat mit #DarkPattern, #Framing, #Gamification, #PrivacyWashing usw. eine ideale Basis geschaffen, die #Extremisten nutzen um uns noch stärker von einander zu isolieren und gegenüber Mitmenschen misstrauischer zu werden. Wenn ich einem Freund anbiete bspw. ein Chatkonto auf einem Server von mir zu erhalten, wird unterstellt, dass ich sie/ihn ausspionieren und abhängig machen wollen würde. Bei #GAFAM ist sowas irrelevant. :yayblob:
#CommunitySpotlight: Are you concerned about #BigTech, but still cannot fully escape them? Do you use (or just learned about) alternative frontends for popular services?
Check out #LibRedirect on #Codeberg, a browser addon which redirects many proprietary sites to alternative viewers.
Lately, Microsoft is starting to annoy me, for example by being irritatingly obtrusive with their Edge browser, and by integrating generative AI, trained with an overwhelming amount of stolen work from artists, writers, et cetera, without compensating them.
Of course, all Big Tech corporations are guilty of the mass-scale intellectual property theft. 👎
Sure, too many choices can be overwhelming. But regardless of the number of options, context is paramount. Context makes decision-making that much easier, especially when the decision has an everyday impact.
And, with the web browser being an integral part of your everyday digital life at work or otherwise, it should be obvious that you're able to make an informed choice and pick from the best options given to you.
❌ However, this isn't the case for most of you.
Our CEO, Jón von Tetzchner @jon shared with Reuters that if you're using an iPhone, you see the list of browser choices only when you select Safari, with no additional information.
"The process is just so convoluted that it's easiest for (users) to select Safari or potentially some other known name." - Jon.
🇪🇺 This has prompted the European Commission to start a non-compliance investigation against Apple, in light of the recently enforced DMA (Digital Markets Act) to investigate whether Apple may be preventing you from truly exercising your choice of services, for example, with their design of the browser Choice Screen.
The fact that after EU passed Digital Markets Act, non-Chrome/Safari browsers begin to increase their share, shows that even a watered down law can make a difference. That's not to say it's all over – on the contrary, it's important to push further and make sure Apple/Google truly give people the choice – but the signs are so far positive https://www.reuters.com/technology/eus-new-tech-laws-are-working-small-browsers-gain-market-share-2024-04-10/