BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie is sounding the alarm about surveillance

The article does a good job of explaining why YouTube and Facebook don't currently do a good job of currating content, or whether that should even be their responsibility. It's not about machine learning, it's about price incentives.

I think the core problem is that under our current model of free-market capitalism, there really is no way to constrain what companies like Google and Facebook are doing. You can add on some additional privacy protections like Europe does, but it only goes so far, since the core model of these companies is to make products that people want and give them away in exchange for data. Google and the like will continue to get the data they want because people will keep giving it to them voluntarily.

Me personally, I don't want to give up my free gmail, or my free maps app. I was on a trip in Japan and Google Translate works amazingly well. Way better than a few years ago, and also free.

Even if I am uncomfortable with some of Google's practices, I'm not going to stop using their products.

The controversy evolves around opinionated content where group A sees a problem with group B having a certain opinion heard.

We need to think about extreme cases. Take for example a political party for pedophiles. You can rest assured any free market player will be laser focused as soon as such content shows up on their platform. Reputations are at stake. Many will execute their freedom to have such content removed. They don't need to provide a reason.

Now with a regulatory system it becomes a different story. There is no way to define a set of rules that prevents people from advocating pedophilia without sacrificing freedom of speech.

They failed to read the winds of change that saw Bring Your Own Device come to the workplace and thought they were safe with enterprise and government users.

> Sidewalk’s proposal is peppered with phrases like “comprehensive data collection,” “an enormous amount of data,” and “fine-grained data.” The data it desires runs from environmental (localized weather conditions, noise levels, and pollution) to social ( everyday actions that paint a detailed picture of what residents are doing and when ).

It looks like Google's vision for the modern city is to turn it into the Sims where Google can peer into everything. If you want to live in that world be my guest, but he's absolutely right. This is not something which is good in many ways. Where Google is monitoring everyone all the time. I mean even in Star Trek the computer isn't monitoring everyone all the time.... if it were then many plots could be resolved with the surveillance log on everyone's actions.

From everything I read and know about RIM, the enterprise level BlackBerry systems were unbreakable to governments and the keys were generated and controlled entirely by the customers (not by RIM). The pissed-off governments demanded access and threatened to ban RIM--the market leader at the time. I think the first to demand access was India and RIM put up a years-long fight against them before they capitulated.

It's easy to say that they should have taken a principled stand and lost the market. (In a similar vein, RIM had to pay a slimy patent troll $612.5 million dollars [not a typo, more than half a billion!] by a certain deadline otherwise the judge in the case would have banned them from the entire US market until they had a trial. The patents in question were ludicrously obvious and should never have been granted. I'd like to have seen RIM take a stand and fight the troll, but I can forgive them for having chosen not to go bankrupt.)

At the other extreme of corporate misconduct, are you aware that AT&T has been giving the call records (meta data) of every person in the United States to the NSA for decades? If Snowden's info is correct, they even allowed live tapping into phone calls for every phone call that passed through their network.

Furthermore, here's a quote from the article you linked to: "RIM, unlike rivals Nokia and Apple, operates its own network through secure servers located in Canada and other countries such as Britain." I have a high degree of respect for Apple (and somewhat for Nokia), but isn't it odd that RIM was being targeted by the host country but Nokia and Apple weren't? Perhaps they had a way to monitor communications (or at least get meta data) on Nokia and Apple phones, but they couldn't monitor RIM because RIM maintained its servers outside of the country.

In summary, cut some slack on RIM. RIM did use good encryption and did put up a fight. Many other companies have done and are doing much much worse.

From this story: "Facebook had been caught designing algorithms to identify stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious teenagers on its network, presumably to assist advertisers who might want to target them"

From NYTimes story last November https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-...

"But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation……….She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.....“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos………………Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic"

Short of Apple and ( theoriginal) WhatsApp, I don't there was/is another major company that took encryption between devices as serious as RIM did: getting on the podium with bronze is not a bad accomplishment.

We can also thank them for helping move the ball forward with ECC encryption. They were taking crypto seriously before Apple and others even were in the game.

The fact that they didn't manage to get things perfect, or implement what we now call end-to-end encryption, shouldn't diminish the positive things they did.