Comment by anoncow
4 months ago
>Online privacy expert Caro Robson said she believed it was "unprecedented" for a company "simply to withdraw a product rather than cooperate with a government.
That is such a self serving comment. If Apple provides UK a backdoor, it weakens all users globally. With this they are following the local law and the country deserves what the rulers of the country want. These experts are a bit much. In the next paragraph they say something ominous.
>"It would be a very, very worrying precedent if other communications operators felt they simply could withdraw products and not be held accountable by governments," she told the BBC.
It's also just false. Google pulled out of China many years ago because they didn't want to bow to the Chinese government's demands.
And they didn't just withdraw a product, they withdraw their entire business.
I wonder what the impact of Apple withdrawing from China will be. I know we are talking about UK, but this made me think.
Not only their sales will reduce, but hey Chinese manufacturing cuts down. By how much? Will it be impactful? I would think so but wonder if it is quantifiable.
Almost all iPhones are made in China. They cannot pull out without shutting down.
They make on average 60,000 ios devices there every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
6 replies →
Fake privacy experts like Caro Robson need to be held accountable.
I often notice journalistic pieces interview people and then use maybe 30 seconds' worth of material from a 20-minute interview. The "expert" could have condemned it in any number of ways until the topic of applying data protection laws came up and she said that companies need to be held accountable (could be about GDPR, could be about snooping laws) which the journalist then quoted, not out of malice but because everyone already condemns it and this is the most interesting statement of the interview
Anyway, so while I don't think we should condemn people based on such a single quoted sentence... I took a look at her website and the latest video reveals at 00:38 that she worked for the UK crime agency, which does sound like the one of the greatest possible conflicts of interest for someone called upon for privacy matters rather than crime fighting. Watching the rest of that interview, she approaches it fairly objectively but (my interpretation of) her point of view seems to be on the side of "even with this backdoor, a warrant needs issuing every time they use it and so there's adequate safeguards and the UK crime fighters and national security people should just get access to anything they can get a warrant for"
Assuming you’ve framed it fairly, that’s a pretty atrocious point of view for someone calling themselves a privacy expert to hold. A privacy expert should know that backdoors are dangerous to privacy even if you trust the people who are supposed to have the keys.
This is actually an increasing concern, that large multinational companies are so powerful that they don't have to obey governments any more, and can instead blackmail them by withdrawing products. Pornhub has done this in US states. Meta has threatened to do it in various countries. There has always been pushback to regulation from powerful companies, but punishing countries by withdrawing products seems to be used as a tactic more often recently. There are other tools of power companies use as well, like deciding where to create jobs and build facilities. Musk has used that, moving from California to Texas. Defence and oil companies use these tactics also.
I disagree but respect your opinion. Companies have the right to free speech. In the tussle between regulators and companies, companies are disadvantaged. If we can force companies to do the regulators bidding and not allow them to use free speech to act in their best interests, we would have global tyranny. The regulators and companies both acting towards their own goals with freedom allows us to have a world with balance.
I believe in this however I think we are testing limits of this approach with scenarios like the one with encryption. Ideally privacy needs E2E encryption. But concerns on misuse of such technology that governments raise are also not without merit. I wonder if this tussle between regulators and companies can end in any way in which privacy is not compromised. Mathematically it doesn't seem that there is a way to be safe and private.
> In the tussle between regulators and companies, companies are disadvantaged.
When society once again properly separates governmental powers, it will restore balance, and then companies will no longer need to fear "regulators."
In the US, businesses are supposed to be regulated by Congress. That way, if Congress does something foolish, we can vote them out.
But in the last 100 years or so, "administrative law"– that is, binding regulations created by the Executive branch– has become a huge part of law-making [1]. Widespread use of Administrative Law allows Congress to wash its hands of any real decision making.
It isn't supposed to be this way, and I think we will find our way out of it.
Your statement that companies are disadvantaged only rings true because Executive-branch regulators are not held to account. Lower-level staff generally do not rotate from administration to administration, and so they make tons of binding rules without oversight. Fortunately, SCOTUS recently overturned some of this [2].
The fundamental problem is that the separation of powers, which is where America's strength comes from, has been upended. Power has been collected, by parties on all sides, within the Executive branch. It's supposed to be, Congress writes law, Judiciary interprets law, and the Executive enforces law. The Administrative State, however, combines all three powers into one under the Executive. It gives itself executive agencies that can bind citizens, and its own courts (ALJs) to determine their fate. See [1] for a comprehensive review.
[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo174366...
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Google News pulling out of Spain..
>Online privacy expert Caro Robson
Ironic to refer to her as a "privacy expert" given her open hostility to privacy.
Governments forcing companies from other countries to do business in their country seems like the worrying precedent to me.
>"It would be a very, very worrying precedent if other communications operators felt they simply could withdraw products and not be held accountable by governments,"
This would actually be a very very very very VERY GOOD precedent if you ask me.
Facebook pulled something similar when Canada passed the Online News Act and instead of extorting facebook to pay the media companies for providing a service to them (completely backasswards way to do things), they just pulled news out of Canada. I despise Meta as a company, but I had to give them credit for not just letting the government shake them down.
Good riddance. Governments need to be reminded from time to time that they are, in fact, not Gods. We can and should, just take our ball and go play in a different park or just go home rather than obey insane unjust laws.
I love their products: whatsapp and facebook
Why?
"a product" and "cooperate" are doing so much work in that statement that they collapsed and look like ________ and ________
They re-emerged as "security feature" "add vulns to security features to make it an insecurity feature"