Comment by filoleg
6 years ago
>This is a common sentiment: distrust in the US government.
No, this ain't just it. Even if I trusted the current US government (which is already a shaky premise to begin with), I cannot be sure I will trust the US government that will be in place in 10 years or 20 years. And once you give them that power, there is no easy way to put it back in the box.
So, for me at least, it is less about distrust and more of a "freedom" or "systems" sort of an argument. I am ok with the government issuing some sort of an "advisory list" of potentially invasive apps. But no, I don't want government to essentially preventing me from using certain apps due to "privacy concerns", if I am aware of the risks and still want to proceed.
This is the same argument I'm hearing from people who refuse to wear masks. Unfortunately, the freedom of some is a security risk for others.
Any government is only as good as the trust people place in it. A trusted government invites trust-worthy candidates, is held to a higher standard of transparency, etc. If you want a government that you can trust, you may want to write to your congress-people and ask, for instance, that they ban corporate funding of elections (through those ridiculous dinners), Super PACs, etc. By the people, for the people, after all.
It isn't similar at all. What are the serious downsides of the mask requirement? I guess a little bit of inconvenience, but there is nothing fundamentally terrible that it can directly lead to, which isn't the case with app bans.
Like, first they made us wear masks, what's next? Kind of literally nothing, there is nowhere further to push this specific requirement towards. And the requirement itself is very specific and leaves no room for ambiguity. This law doesn't give the government any power to make arbitrary decisions. Neither does it require trust in the government. It is just a very specific one-off thing. The effects of this law remain within the specific scope of what this law was intending to do and have no room to escape.
With app bans, you can easily imagine tons of "worst case" scenarios, where they ban arbitrary apps they don't like or don't want people to use. Why? Because the right to ban apps includes a lot of room for ambiguity. It gives power to the government to decide which apps they want to ban, based on their own criteria that don't need to align with reality or what people want. Given how digitized our lives are these days, this is an insane amount of power that can be used fairly arbitrarily. And it relies solely on your trust in the government acting in the interests of their populace at all times.
P.S. Mind you, my sentiment on app bans by the government doesn't apply to app bans for super specific scenarios, like certain app bans on work devices for groups of people with access to classified info. For example, banning WhatsApp and TikTok on work devices for active military and people working on classified contracts for the government? That's a fair game, because the reasoning makes sense, and there is way more at stake than just "personal data" or something like that. And the devices aren't even personal, in the first place. And, it is something you can sort of choose to do by working on classified projects. You have agency over this and can take concrete steps to avoid this ban affecting you. Blanket banning apps for everyone in the country? Yeah, I am not a fan of this.
No it isn't comparable at all. Mask requirements are far less exploitable for other purposea than censorship. The far out worst case for abuse is considering an uncovered face public nudity.
You would think that mask requirement is far less exploitable but I hear from libertarians that the government is not allowed to do so (granted, this is state government we're talking about).
This conversation we're having is a little moot, however. The US has already banned online communities advertising sex work, despite them being a great resource for workers looking to better filter their clientele.
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