Google sued for 'clandestine tracking' of UK iPhone users' browsing data
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Instead of empowering common folk and accelerating our potential as a species what is happening is our thoughts, interests, fears, relationships and most intimate secrets gradually become a commodity in the hands of a few powerful companies.
The trend is clear and I am really fearful for my children's future.
It's really depressing to watch the world change into something many of mankind's greatest thinkers feared the most.
Over my 20 or so years in IT, it's devolved into scummy rent-seeking and a consumer hostile VC hot mess.
How does one even build a workable definition of "common" without aggregating data somewhere to build averages?
Then there is the issue that they don't realize what companies can do with their data. They thinks it's all relatively innocent and don't realize it can be used for things like price discrimination.
So users might be partly responsible, but big tech is still doing a lot of un-consented to tracking.
* whose fault is it? Tobacco manufacturers' for making products which cause cancer, or the common folk's for agreeing to smoke cigarettes without "giving a fuck" about their health?
* whose fault is it? Pharma companies' for making drugs with terrible side-effects, or the common folk's for taking those drugs without "giving a fuck" about their health?
There are many examples, but in all of them the government stepped in and stopped the abuse of the big companies, just like it must do for Google, Facebook & co which take advantage of the common folk's inability to understand the very complex mechanisms those companies designed to deceive them.
Pretty simple.
It is unrealistic to assume that the average person is going to know everything they need to to protect themselves against such a company, especially when they have billions in revenue and armies of lawyers to weasel their way through the spirit of the law.
Protecting the consumer comes in the form of regulation and precautionary principle. Regulate the ever-loving shit out of companies like Google in my opinion.
Publicly traded companies may have a responisibility to their shareholders, but they also have a responsibility to society, which I consider much more important.
Companies like Google and facebook continue to be glorified inspite of their creepy obsession with stalking everyone 24/7 and legitimizing surveillance.
If privacy laws worked it would not come to this. Without regulations depending on goodwill and ethics in the face of greed has never worked. It just leads to a self serving clique who will handwave and legitimize anything for profit.
This article has practically no details about the actual accusation.
I'm actually a little surprised it wouldn't be over the statute of limitations, but i also don't know all the filing details here.
« If this happened in 2011, why is the claim only being brought now?
In 2015, three individuals brought a claim against Google claiming their privacy rights had been breached by Google using the Safari Workaround. That case, Vidal Hall v Google, settled on confidential terms, but the Court found that the claim raised serious issues which merited a full trial. That case opened the door to holding Google to account by bringing an action on behalf of the millions of iPhone users affected by Google’s actions and claim the compensation they may be owed. »
The current case seems to have been filed in November 2017.
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/11/30/google-sued-over...
Given that the way it occurs is by allowing Google to more accurately profile the users, I'd say yes.
So, some users had their browsing habits illegally harvested, stored, analyzed, and sold to an unknown number of parties for an unknown number of purposes, many of them adverserial in nature to the well-being of the individual. So what?
But even under a civil-court "preponderance of evidence" standard, wouldn't you have to prove some material harm to be eligible for damages (not just the potential of the data perhaps maybe being misused possibly)?
There might be some precedent in the space (cigarette ad campaigns were severely curtailed during the "Big Tobacco" crackdown in the US), but ads in general? Good luck.
I assume ads targeted towards children would be a good case study.
Second the problem statement I made above itself shows harm.
The fact that consumers have to worry about who got their private information, what was done with it, what harms happened that they aren't aware of, such as not getting a job, housing discrimination, loan discrimination, etc. is itself a harm.
That these things happen, in general, is eminently provable and that fact causes worry, anxiety, and changes in behavior which is itself a harm.
Probably not. But how about a fine? Something in the 5 - 10 Billion € range?
That may help to cool a few hot heads who think pulling off shit like that is a good idea.
to me, this seems like the wrong question.
in a broad sense, it makes more sense to ask how harsh the penalty should be. generally, for actions like this, the penalty is expressed as a monetary forfeiture.
whatever the penalty is, the relinquished funds have to go somewhere, and those who can demonstrate being harmed seems like a sensible destination.
It merits Google being punished. And really, the only way to punish a large company is by fining them.
IMHO this clearly breaks their "Don't be evil" principle.
"And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Last updated April 5, 2018"
They have a right as anyone else not to be discriminated against or presented in a bad light.
I applaud the courage of Google to increase diversity by appealing to and allowing evil persons in it's midst.
Not enough companies are addressing this issue!
Apple‘s behaviour here is clearly the protectionism of an ecosystem monopolist that’s just as misguided, thinly disguised as privacy feature.
Some prior art was when Microsoft made the Do-Not-Track header opt-out instead of opt-in in order to get a consumer edge. The ad industry as a whole decided to ignore the flag just for IE, but there wasn‘t ever a legal case on that disregard of intended behavior IIRC.
I‘m not sure though who‘s more evil here and if this kind of circumvention was fair game or went too far.
Has Google ever claimed that the code had an innocent purpose and the privacy-bypass was purely accidental in nature? The descriptions of the code imply that not breaking Safari's privacy features required much less and much simpler code than what was in place.
If they didn't, then it wasn't so much as having it "pointed out" as "found out".
The context at the time (as best I recall) was this came on the heals of the wifi-snooping street view cars that cracked weak wifi encryption and recorded traffic, so maybe people weren't in the mood to listen to any defense.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/may/15/google-ad...
"Move fast and break things", including user privacy settings
I have a set of ethics, probably mostly derived from my upbringing and environment.
Would a module and a few lectures at college change my ethics? I don't see how it could...
1) a shared understanding of what is definitely acceptable and what is definitely unacceptable (e.g. accepting a $1000 dinner from a vendor in a location with plenty of $100 or $50 dinner arrangements is unacceptable in many industries). Courses and training will at least define the lines for the industry in question. In finance, for example, ethics training includes issues like soft-dollar arrangements.
2) a set of procedures for inquiring about and responding to ethical quandaries. Many companies in the post Sarbanes-Oxley era have a chief ethics officer and a clear reporting chain specifically to define and standardize company ethics and to ensure that lower-level employees can make informed decisions.
The lectures focused around:
- Regulatory compliance (codes of practice, state laws etc) - Legal responsibilities (I.e liability, disclosure, whistleblowing etc)
We were given different case studies to research each week and we spent time in class Tutorial groups discussing the case studies the next week: I.e. What ethical issues were involved and what an engineer's responsibilities could entail in each case. The Tutor mostly asked leading questions and class argued about possible responses.
Some particular cases I remember we discussed were: Genetic Modification, Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion, CFC's, Asbestos and Kansas City Walkway Collapse.
Once it was implemented, the NSA took him off the project and put other people on to remove the controls.
Apart from a plethora of open source projects to build its websites Google is using Android to hoover user data and open source should not be used to support a surveillance state.
This is a can of worms and probably not enforceable but it's worth it just for taking a stand.
Silently removing the Don't Be Evil principle may have been subtle, but I'm sure it was a loud and clear message to everyone at Google, especially as it happened right after many protested the company's work on autonomous killer robots (okay, okay, the "killer" part will be added later, so that Google can plausibly claim utter ignorance).
Those who protested Google's work with the Pentagon specifically mentioned the Don't Be Evil mantra. And now Google is getting rid of it. I think that clears everything up about the type of company Google is turning into.
I search it and get a hit for "don't be evil"
Also pretty sure a company whose bread and butter is pervasive tracking doesn't break a user opt-out method by accident.
So it's the consumers who were violated. But were they compensated?
This is what the libertarians in your life are complaining about.
Additionally, the state pursuing issues like this helps 'keeps the bastards honest' and prevents more consumers from being violated in the future. It's like how a murderer going to jail doesn't result in the victims from being compensated.
Often there is a separate case for compensating the successors to the victims.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-pays-17m-to-settle-safa...
(which is from 2013) just a lawsuit in a different country over the same set of facts.
Not arguing that Google was right to do this, but some of the “pessimistic about our civilisation” arguments on this page seem slightly overblown IMHO.
It's getting like reddit around here, where the most controversial comments about SV misdoings are usually the most objective.
US tech giants are behaving unethically and in some cases illegally. As soon as the countries in which they do business decide enough is enough, people (Americans I assume) cry out about protectionism.
How about just follow the fucking law in the countries in which you do business?
Google acknowledged the bug that was fixed back in early 2012!! this lawsuit is a money grab, most of them are.
There is also something to be said about the general societal ill of feeling entitled to compensation for the slightest of perceived harms.
(2) This is not an imaginary slight, a corporation wrote a piece of code with a clear intent to bypass a security setting on a user's device. Would the roles be reversed, charges would be brought against human without the need to prove harm or harmful intent -- DCMA is broad enough for that. Why should GOOG be less burdened by its unethical behaviour?
this seems almost non-sequitur. either way, it is the court's purpose to ascertain harm and any consequent penalties (if any).
Here in the US, that's a non-starter.