Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks women

Now, the bar to being a halfway decent and ethical ISP is not really so high these days. You have to actually go to extra effort and make things intentionally more complicated to fuck with your customers' traffic.

In North America, at least, part of that includes not censoring content and not even contemplating doing something like the Saudis do. I can guarantee you that if the C-level executives at my company were asked to implement something that was grossly in violation of the US constitution/bill or rights, Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, or similar concepts upholding the rule of law, they would refuse.

I feel for the people who run telecom and ISPs in Saudi Arabia, who need to implement technical solutions at the whim of a corrupt hereditary monarchy.

I debated whether it was even worth my time to write this comment, since your argument is weak and theoretical. Reality is that major ISPs don't cut each other off for arbitrary reasons. But I'd bet $5 you're not involved in the practical day to day logistics of things like establishing 100GbE PNIs between major ASes.

Thus, to prevent them, you will need regulation - which stops at the border. Saudi government will have their own, and you can be sure that it'll be the kind that enables what they want to do.

On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets.

Again, you can with both want and not want for the tech giants to police behavior of others.

What's funny is that your specious analogies try to equate this argument -- for more freedom for the Saudi women -- to others where people's freedoms are being restricted.

Might I suggest you have another go at remedial logic.

What would phone service be like if the carrier could decide who gets to use it and who doesn't? They are not held responsible for criminals using phones but if they decided who gets to use it they would be liable.

This is like a serial killer who campaigns against littering. They have a line they won't cross, but we shouldn't accept it.

This is a confusing stance.

This stopped being true some years ago. You can build any app you wish from source and Xcode will sign it and you can run it on your iOS device—no approval or payment required.

It’s worth pointing out that the BMW approved roads have much better fatality statistics than the unapproved roads, and there’s almost guaranteed to be an approved road that goes within minutes of where you want to go anyway. Oh and some of those approved roads are exclusive to BMW and they’re really well made.

Or you can get the Jeep Cherokee, which drives really well on that dirt track.

The fact that you're talking in hushed tones of reverence about the glorious principle of sovereignty in a discussion of Saudi Arabia is really just the icing on the cake.

On the other hand, not using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms signals that their norms (and the behaviour they cause and justify) are ok. And that's how you get millions of women horribly mistreated.

Sovereignty may be a great concept, but not when you use it to justify and normalize abuse. I feel like that should be condemned and not tolerated under any circumstances.

Sure, but no western agent is obliged to comply with the moral standards of Saudi Arabia, or any other country to that matter.

Apple, Google are complacent because they want to do business in Saudi Arabia. They're favoring profit over enforcing western morality within their operations abroad, and will continue to do so as long as they don't get too much scrutiny.

I wish people could see injustice as unjust even if they are not in the targeted group.

There’s a thing called human rights and we should all stand up for them.

This way they have complete control of praticing their own norms and policies on their platform without large foreign compines saying what they should and shouldn't do.

Would you be willing to make the same argument you're making for a similar app that allows parents to supervise their children?

Parents get broad supervisory powers over their children. That seems pretty universal and uncontroversial.

Would it depend on the age of the child in question?

Of course. The exact age of majority is not agreed upon even among the most progressive societies. I think we can all agree that parents should be able to make travel decisions for a 12yo. A 17yo is more complicated.

does the consent of the supervised woman matter?

This is a specious line of argument, since the app is being used against women who do not consent.

Tell me one woman in this world that likes to be treated less than a car to rent (take a look at the website, you even have to justify where to go and for how long. Basically with car2go a car is treated with more respect than a human being). But as someone might argue, it's not up to me to judge. Thankfully I live in a country that treats everyone with respect.

In the end it comes down to the fact that Western countries have the app stores. Enthusiasts for various middle-brow airport Big Ideas books can probably advance about a million different theories (many even plausible) that explain why these companies wind up being from California and not Saudi Arabia or Uganda.

As far as I'm concerned, if you're busy promulgating the morals of Saudi Arabia, while ensconced comfortably in California, you've got it coming when your friends and neighbours start pissing on your shoes. Tech companies make decisions all the time about apps that go well beyond the strict letter of the law in countries in which they operate (Exhibit A: adult content).

It would be double standard to allow a muslim app to control real human beings but block porn.

My stance here is that everyone has to make these subjective moral decisions all the time and that the hope that we can pull a neutral principle out of our ass and Resolve Everything is itself a moral decision and not exempt from moral criticism. It's just yet another value judgement: specifically in the Cloudflare case, it's that "the abstract neutral principle of free speech and the idea that companies shouldn't interfere with who they host" is more important than "maybe we shouldn't let those assholes from the Daily Stormer go about their business with impunity". I'm OK with you believing that if you want to, but it's just as much of a subjective moral decision to prioritize a quest for neutral principle over making your own ad hoc moral decisions (which you will wind up doing anyhow).

In short, it's subjectivity all the way down, so you may as well 'fight your corner'.

I urge you to rethink your comment.

Why?

That's a moral judgement like any other ("we should exercise fairness and take seriously any system of values that operates within a recognized national boundary circa 2019"). It would suggest you are committed to that principle above other ones, like "the right of women to self-determination". If that's a decision you want to make, knock yourself out, but it leads to rather strange situations.

Note that I made it sound extra absurd by limiting in time and to national boundaries; but conversely I could take off that limit and have you giving Aztec human sacrifice fair consideration ("strokes beard... well, actually, given population pressures... ummmn... ").

You're still flailing around looking for neutral principles: considering "intentions and outcomes" doesn't get you out of trouble as who is to say what intentions and outcomes are good?

A homophobe in Uganda or Russia might claim that their intentions are "save our young people from the gays" and their desired outcomes are "now all the gays are dead or hiding" as a Good Thing; they would not recognize your principles ("don't harm innocent people for no reason") as valid.

In the end it just comes down to 'fighting your corner'. There is no magical conjuration trick that will make our values objectively better in some way that stands outside our values. Who cares?

But nor do I believe that Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook were aware of this app previously or had any personal responsibility for it.

Nor do I think they should be vilified for shaking hands with MBS prior to the murder of Khashoggi, and especially not prior to the Yemeni war.

A more effective and simple solution is mandatory eVerify. What is the cost of illegal immigration? For example there's no study on the cost of deportations. There's about ~180k people deported annually? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/crossing-attempts-at-us-sout...

The expense of schools has to do with the ever ballooning amount of administers, not teachers. Spending on admin increased and decreased for teachers. As of 2016 more than half of those involved in education are not teachers. Furthermore few countries outspend the US per pupil. In several states education is paid for via bonds and not out of the general fund. The country doesn't have a tax collection problem, it's got a spending problem. As long as people can vote to spend other peoples money, they will.

Yes, money buys influence. But that only goes so far in the face of widespread hostility. The "they took money from XXX" negative argument does really work if everyone hates XXX.

You are drinking up propaganda if you believe this to be true in the slightest. The US extremely rarely has a balanced budget and there is always room for politicians to take on more debt for their projects.

The entire position of AOC at this point is to give up the facade of government brining in revenue to pay for any proposals. All questions about payment are answered with whataboutism pointing at a different unfunded liability.

Neither party cares about balanced budgets. The wall, tax cuts, the green new deal, whatever do not take away funding from other programs because the federal government no longer fundamentally operates that way.

Funding is only cut for political gamesmanship at this point.

Smartphones aren't really about phone calls or sms.

What? Why?

Smartphones are convenient, but essential? Phone calls and SMS/MMS still work without a smartphone.

But we're still a democracy. Not a perfect one, but if enough people want something, they have the tools to make it happen.

How far do you go through the rabbit-hole of so called "provocation" before it's deemed "too much" ?

And comparing this to FOSTA/SESTA doesn't make any sense. Those laws didn't ban something that is unambiguously evil - they banned a whole bunch of random stuff under the guise of targeting sex trafficking. The equivalent here would be if I was demanding that Google and Apple ban all tracking apps in general, on the basis that they're used by "guardians".

> The app doesn’t track women, the government facilities do so (e.g. security checks at airports), they send SMS messages to the guardian when his minor son/daughter or his wife/mother/adult daughter leaves the country through a government check point.

This is not a 'what about chocolate or seafood' but a general frustration I have with people today. They (and this is not directed at you) are grossly misinformed on the state of the world, even though the information is more readily available than ever before. They protest completely inane stuff like it's the end of the world, while completely ignoring the tremendous human rights abuses throughout the world that continue to this very day. If people shined a light on these 24/7 it's possible that something could happen. Even back to Saudi Arabia, not only is there their treatment of women but they still literally crucify people, still literally execute people for "witchcraft and sorcery", and much more. These stories do receive one off coverage, but nothing compared to e.g. a scientist who wore a shirt with some scantily clad girls. Makes all of 'social media justice' look like little more than a bunch of useful idiots. [2]

[1] - https://www.apnews.com/571f1acc466f4f89866d31ae094f1601

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

This is a country that simply should not exist.

So, we might as well demand that they step on the things we wish them to step on.

For fear they should succumb and go astray;

So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,

You will find it better policy to say: –

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,

No matter how trifling the cost;

For the end of that game is oppression and shame,

And the nation that plays it is lost!"

So, Saudi Arabia?

A Saudi startup that basically is the 'Google Nest of oppression' becomes a unicorn company by plugging into the GPS from the chip which enables new forms of tracking. They'll get live video feeds, sentiment analysis and child rearing effectiveness scores all rolled into one app. Multiple wives? No problem - you can compare and contrast all of them in the app.

So glad everyone got Google to remove the original app, instead of thinking of ways to combat the root cause of the problem. At least there's another unicorn startup because of it. /s

How is this not a far worse case of hateful bullying?

FAANG have more money than entire nations' GDP or outstanding debt. Apple with its 250B cash reserve could buy over half of Greece's outstanding debt.

If it wasn't you, that was my mistake and I'm sorry. The main point, though, is please don't do any more flamewar, trolling, or flamebait on HN.