Facebook, Google Fund Nonprofits Shaping Privacy Debate
news.bloomberglaw.com
news.bloomberglaw.com
> Organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology, which received at least $960,000 from [Google and Facebook] in 2018, are often quoted in the media as unbiased third parties and influence how policy is developed in Washington as such, despite receiving the tech company funding.
> The group supports allowing tech giants to sell user data to third parties with limited restrictions, a position that is in line with technology companies that profit handsomely from such sales, but not so popular with consumers.
I guess "Privacy Advocacy Groups" does not equal "Pro-Privacy Advocacy Groups".
Could you share which government is doing this? It is very troubling.
Edit: thank you all for good responses, I wasn't aware of the risks of de-anonymization but I will do more research into this.
Hell yes. The only time it's acceptable is if they get my informed consent.
I'm not yet convinced it can be done in a way that can't trivially be reversed by anyone combining it with other datasets.
And if it can't be anonymised, then it probably shouldn't be saleable.
See https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.02201 for the main paper from the Census.
If you had access to anonymised health data from my nation, for example, picking me personally out of the records would be extremely trivial, using just two data points:
+ I have an illness that only 1% of people have.
+ I lost my spleen whilst I was in primary school.
Both of those things are actually a matter of public record, thanks to being mentioned in various local newspapers, so it's reasonable to assume someone somewhere has that data.
I believe the general consensus on health data is that you have the age a person was at an incident, and the nature of an incident, you only need to have two or three incidents in your database to de-anonymise their records.
The only way to combat it is to not provide the detail required for the analysis that is exactly what the above organisations wish to do. No profiles, no fine-grained demographics.
And yet, people with rarer illnesses or events than mine will still stand out, so you also need to eliminate them from the dataset, even though they may well be the ones who could benefit most from this sort of widescale analysis.
For example, if they're tracking all instances of various ailments seen by some doctor in some time period. Suppose you are the only person of a given age and gender with that ailment, so that bucket would one entry for anonymous you. Fine. But then suppose the aggregating party begins to buy and correlate against credit card and location records that place you at the doctor's office in that time frame, bingo, they have a match to tie all three data.
It also reminds me of a recent post-Cambridge Analytica story about FB trying to get patient records, for which they said they "wouldn't get the names of the patients".
Okay, but the only reason Facebook would even get that data is to match it with its users' real names through some of their algorithmic reverse engineering of the data. That data is only useful to FB if it can associate various illnesses with real users on its platforms so that then advertisers can market to those people directly.
Don't fall for the "anonymized data" bullcrap. Google was caught doing something similarly recently, too.
"Spain’s National Statistical Institute (INE) plans to track the movements of millions of Spanish citizen’s cellphones to conduct a ‘sociological study’, El Pais and EFE reported. The INE will analyze user’s movements between November 18 to 21, November 24, on December 25 and during July 20 and August 15, using data from the ‘big three’ telecom companies in Spain. Data however will be anonymized before processing, the INE stressed."
What on earth are they going to learn? People go to work, people go shopping?
I can see that as useful - it is targeted and pretty simple to do (although the anti-tracking mechanisms in wifi now makes it harder)
but ... I struggle with the value of such data collected on such a scale. Cell Tower radius is on the order of kilometres - the interesting stuff to do inside cities cannot be discovered on that scale - you need metres or better.
This feels like a mass public holiday migration watch. And you learn that ... people live in different cities to their parents?
As a result cells are naturally much smaller in populated areas where you're most likely to want detailed information. In a city centre the cells may be only a hundred meters across. True, up a mountain the cellular network may have no idea where on the mountain you are, but this isn't a Safety of Life application, it's a survey.
Armed with that knowledge, they can prepare for the eventuality where the one-off exercise gets turned on permanently.
One key one imo is simply ownership. Why do they get to sell it, regardless of who they are. I find the "terms of service" argument to be disingenuous.
I really think we need to completely change the way we do IP, and "data" has effectively become a new type of IP.
The default should be open/public domain, at lwats for anonyzable data. There are lots of reasons for it, economic moral and liberal.
Tesla's data enables better driving software. Medical data lost motives medical tech, etc. If more people had access to it, the technology would improve more.
The conventional argument for patents, is/was (1) to encourage/reward innovation and (2) avoid secrecy. Imo, #2 failed, for the most part.
On innovation/etc... Ultimately data needs volume to be useful for ml applications. Opening all the datasets would also combine them, and improve their usefulness.
Yes!
It's simply not anyone's matter to decide but the affected person what their data is used for, if only because that destroys trust. It is critical to the relationship between doctors and patients that the patient doesn't feel any need to hide information because they think that it might be shared and used against them, even when that fear might not actually be justified by the actual facts of the situation.
Also, that big if of anonymization is an important reason why the decision should be for the individual to make, if it is allowed at all: If you distrust the anonymization, then you should be able to refuse, without any requirement on your part to prove that it is unreliable.
It is in Germany and the law isn't active yet, but will be very soon. They basically create a central organization to collect data from all insurers. They receive info and are allowed to spread it to third parties in anonymized form.
> If the data is truly anonymized (and that's a big if), would you still have an issue?
Health data cannot be anonymized , since indicators and diagnoses can quickly identify a person. But no, this is my data and I do only share it when I explicitly consent to it.
You can opt out if you make enough money because that allows you to leave state insurance, which is kind of a real problem in our health system. But that wouldn't phase our current health minister, who seems to be an idiot and needs to be removed from office. His performance is bad enough.
Now that you bring it up, I can see how one could identify a person based on that data. We're able to identify users based on things like browser extensions; I see how the concepts map.
The only reason I have to favor this sort of data sharing is that I have a (perhaps naive) hope that it would aid diagnoses and treatment.
After all, the data is more valuable the more bits there are per patient record, for researchers to find correlations - and the more bits there are, the easier it is to de-anonymise. Especially as you never know how many bits of data are already public about a given individual.
And given that they're releasing the data to make a profit, or to advance research, anyone doing this has an incentive to release more bits - and no incentive to release fewer bits.
If applying complete attribution to our data was the norm, for at least some markets places, entities empowered by our data would be much less likely to just "share" it willy nilly.
Dark markets will always exist, but I think attribution of data would incentives certain corporations (health, banking, etc) to act in their users better interests, at least compared to what we have now.
I see I'm not cynical enough.
Google and most of the other major tech companies don't actually sell user data. They collect it to use internally. The biggest companies who actually do that are the ISPs, but that doesn't really fit the same narrative, and I doubt they donate a lot to privacy groups.
The reason a lot of privacy groups don't try to restrict selling user data is a combination of a potentially legitimate first amendment problem with restricting it and a finite amount of political capital. Sometimes political capital has to be spent making sure that e.g. the FBI director doesn't push through a law against strong encryption. Sometimes it's better to have a bill that improves privacy a little and actually passes than a bill that improves privacy a lot but never makes it into law, or start with one that isn't as easy for Comcast to have struck down by the courts and in so doing create a problematic legal precedent.
Meanwhile you ask why Google and Facebook donate to privacy groups, but their goals are actually aligned on a lot of things, like promoting the use of HTTPS over HTTP and opposition to draconian copyright laws.
This is gotcha journalism, and it's problematic because what are you proposing as a solution? That privacy groups stop accepting money from tech companies? What that would do is cause them to have less money for privacy advocacy. Ask yourself who benefits from that.
Overall, isn't your last point also the source of problems? If the whole idea is to be able to exert regulatory control, to protect users, over companies that seem to have a huge share on decision-making in this space due to their unmatched wealth, how is their parting with a minuscule portion of their wealth so they can potentially influence a decision made on the topic of restricting them, solve any problems in the first place? It seems like a stretch to suggest that privacy advocacy groups need money from tech giants to support themselves.
I agree that every organization needs the money but the problem at hand is that every organization should not ideally depend on tech company donations because they have amassed the largest sums. Since this is the problem these laws are trying to address in the first place, I am not sure taking donations from tech giants would solve the problem, even if it doesn't exacerbate it (assuming for a moment that the tech giants are actually being a force of good here).
Start with the premise that you're passing a law against people telling other people anything they know about you (especially if they would otherwise be able to without compensation), then add in the "money is speech" thing, which is existing precedent whether you like it or not.
> If the whole idea is to be able to exert regulatory control, to protect users, over companies that seem to have a huge share on decision-making in this space due to their unmatched wealth, how is their parting with a minuscule portion of their wealth so they can potentially influence a decision made on the topic of restricting them, solve any problems in the first place? It seems like a stretch to suggest that privacy advocacy groups need money from tech giants to support themselves.
Privacy advocacy groups don't just have binary existence where either they exist or they don't. Every dollar is more advocacy.
And you can't have it both ways. Either the amount they receive is insignificant and consequently shouldn't affect their overall policy positions or it is significant and losing it would be a meaningful hit.
This sounds extremely vague and contrived - something something, the money is speech thing, 1A issue. We regulate all sorts of sales, data collection practices, etc, all the time. Can you find a concrete example, especially in a non-political, plain business-to-consumer context where such regulation has received 1A scrutiny? Even a description by Google or FB or their surrogates of such a potential problem will do.
Every dollar is more advocacy.
The question is advocacy for what. To square this circle you have to argue that the interests of Google and FB are aligned with the privacy interests of individual users - those are the interests such groups tend to claim to represent. This seems implied in your line of argument as I read it and, to me at least, appears glaringly inaccurate.
This is a classic case of zooming in too far with your politics. You can maybe make this argument if you put blinders on and only consider the next best option in this exact political system, but really this is a paradigmatic example of Google & Facebook attempting both regulatory capture & crowding out organizations who would authentically advocate for users rather than gigantic corporations.
If you wake up every morning and choose the least evil of the options directly in front of you without once thinking of the bigger picture, you go to some truly bad places.
Pointing out that ISPs are worse is really neither here nor there. Just because big tech isn't the worst does absolve them of criticism nor is a compelling argument for why we cannot talk about them lobbying for the law to allow them to continue to do what they're doing or even expand it.
I'm not even going to try and address why we cannot have privacy because of "legitimate first amendment problem[s]" or because it would result in "law[s] against strong encryption." I don't consider those arguments to even pass the basic sniff test, they feel like throwing out every argument under the sun and seeing what sticks. Almost to Gish Gallop levels.
> This is gotcha journalism
That isn't what "gotcha journalism" means. Collecting facts, presenting those facts, and putting a negative spin on it isn't "gotcha journalism" because the journalist didn't trick Google or Facebook into doing these things, they're simply telling the public that they did. In fact the term doesn't really to apply to journalism outside of interviews, see:
What? That's a difference in scale, not in kind.
It's a bit murky whether the amounts to being able to identify you. It's not clear how much advertisers care about identifying people who don't buy or how effective advertising actually is. And this data goes stale pretty quickly anyway.
So it comes down to, "well, it depends." None of this is comforting to people who don't want to be tracked. On the other hand I haven't heard anything credible about people being directly harmed by it? It seems more about the principle of the thing?
----
† Yes, I'm stretching the "proof" beyond its breaking point here.
If I ran a newsletter, "selling data" would be me giving a 3rd party my mailing list. Profiting from the data would be me "selling eyeballs" from my list.
That is effectively what Google and Facebook do. They are in the eyeball selling industry, not email selling.
They create a medium the advertisers want to advertise into.
They "own the eyeballs," as it were. They create the newspaper that people read.
Google does not own the eyeballs, they are an aggregator but they loudly point out that users could switch. Let's acknowledge that users are not likely to switch away from Google websites, Android, etc. but it's as if Google snatched the newspaper and stuck advertising stickers all over it just before you read it in the morning.
Google owns the eyeballs on the places of the internet that have sold that space to google.
If I have a website and want to monetize it with ads, I'm giving that section of my page to Google. Who now rents the "tower" in my sidebar, and owns the eyeballs of my visitors. The advertisers don't get to own my data. I'm just exposing my audience to their products. If my audience decides that they want the advertised widget, they are then willingly giving their data to the advertiser when they purchase/sign up/whatever.
The only point I agree with you on (if this is what you meant) is how Google ranks search results based on the speed of the content, and who's content loads fastest for Google? AMP... owned by Google.
I think the browser is the equivalent of a newspaper.
It's just you can "open your newspaper" to pages defined by someone on the internet, as opposed to only getting the 30-to-50 pages put out by the newspaper company.
I think the pages within it can be Google, but there's a browser in between. If you use Chrome, then Google totally owns your eyeballs (according to my viewpoint).
But you are spot on with publishers opening up a "tower" on their page, and Google moving in and paying rent. And from that point on, Google is watching you.
Maybe the ISP owns the eyeballs? ISPs are often characterized as either a "content network" (such as Netflix) or an "eyeball network" (such as Comcast). And the networks sometimes fight because Comcast thinks they're the big, bad eyeball network. Netflix, of course, thinks they're the big, bad content network.
Google gives free reading glasses that allows you to read the newspaper. The problem is that they only work for the newspapers they like and the newspapers they like happen to have advertising stickers all over it.
Purportedly unrelated to that they have also told all the newspaper sellers to take a note of when and where you buy your newspaper, but they assure you that is completely unrelated to the advertising side of things.
That sounds like what TV, radio and newspaper ad space sells.
Google on the other hand is selling the data attached to those eye balls. You want Male eye balls, between the age of 18-35? You want eye balls from a certain state? city? county? How about college educated eye balls?
Knowing everything about your eye balls and monetizing that information is Google's real racket...that and fraudulent clicks (that is Google often sells fake eye balls).
On TV, you can target so many demographics indirectly by buying ads on shows they like. Companies like Nielson have been reporting on the demographics watching shows for decades. You can also target geographically at least down to the county-ish level.
TV stations and Google both know who is watching what and selling access to their customers to advertisers. Google might be a bit more sophisticated than TV, but besides "retargeting" (following you around different sites) they use the same basic techniques and offer the same things to Advertisers
If I pay you $5 to show an ad in front of a certain type of person and you come back and tell me that you did it I haven't really learned anything about that person. It seems hard to say that that is the same as selling people's data.
Because sure, Google knows a lot of people and they have a lot of ad space to fill which means they have a good chance at finding and reaching the demographics I asked for but I don’t get any of that information as part of my transaction with them.
If adtech wants to serve us "relevant" ads, that's fine but the intrusive spying has to stop. Plain old contextual ads should be more than enough for that purpose.
With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like. Are the people watching daytime soaps can be 18 or 80, it’s vague topic and time of day based filtering.
Google's guessing of your demographics is amusingly wrong sometimes (you can see the categories it puts you in).
> With TV, it’s all vague guess on their part about what kind of content people like
People with HBO have disposable incomes. People watching Nick or Disney channel are or have children, whose ages and genders can be further refined based on the shows in question. "You have a 8-11 year old daughter" is absolutely trivial to accurately glean from television, and is basically the single most valuable advertising demographic.
As to Disney watchers, my male collage roommate used to love those shows. At the extreme end MLP friendship is magic has a vastly wider following than the original target demographic.
They both correlate with demographic data, TV is swimply wildly inaccurate and not tied to a specific individual.
When the argument is that the privacy groups have a perverse interest in opposing a specific rule because of donations from tech companies, it seems pretty relevant that the tech companies already aren't actually violating that rule.
> Pointing out that ISPs are worse is really neither here nor there. Just because big tech isn't the worst does absolve them of criticism nor is a compelling argument for why we cannot talk about them lobbying for the law to allow them to continue to do what they're doing or even expand it.
But that isn't what they're talking about. They're talking about laws against selling user data, which the ISPs are doing (so there is a strong lobby against passing a law to prohibit it), but the tech companies generally aren't.
To prohibit what the tech companies are doing you would basically need a law against collecting user data, or something much more invasive and specific about what it could be used for than "don't sell it", and that's a whole different debate. Because then you run into problems like entrenching the incumbents by creating a complex regulatory environment that only huge tech companies can navigate. Which is why opponents try to tar them with "selling user data" instead, which is a lot easier to define and be opposed to, even though they aren't actually doing that.
> I'm not even going to try and address why we cannot have privacy because of "legitimate first amendment problem[s]" or because it would result in "law[s] against strong encryption." I don't consider those arguments to even pass the basic sniff test, they feel like throwing out every argument under the sun and seeing what sticks.
Political realities exist even when they're complicated and inconvenient. Mocking them doesn't make them go away.
> Collecting facts, presenting those facts, and putting a negative spin on it isn't "gotcha journalism" because the journalist didn't trick Google or Facebook into doing these things, they're simply telling the public that they did. In fact the term doesn't really to apply to journalism outside of interviews
The term originally dates from a time when "interviews" were a thing that happened after you actually agreed to be interviewed. Now the debate happens live on the internet and trolls get to ask their loaded questions in front of the public with the implication that you're guilty if you don't respond.
But the question is phrased so as to make an exonerating response impossible. It's the rhetorical equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife" -- have you stopped allowing tech company money to influence your policies? Respond right now, while the question is on the front page, or you're guilty.
You conveniently left out one of the two companies, and I wonder why you omitted that Facebook has actually been convicted of violating the rule.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46618582
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/12/05/facebook-emai...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/mark-zuckerberg-le...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/12/faceb...
(There are more sources.)
> But that isn't what they're talking about. They're talking about laws against selling user data, which the ISPs are doing (so there is a strong lobby against passing a law to prohibit it), but the tech companies generally aren't.
Yes, Facebook totally got caught selling user data.
> To prohibit what the tech companies are doing you would basically need a law against collecting user data, or something much more invasive and specific about what it could be used for than "don't sell it", and that's a whole different debate. Because then you run into problems like entrenching the incumbents by creating a complex regulatory environment that only huge tech companies can navigate. Which is why opponents try to tar them with "selling user data" instead, which is a lot easier to define and be opposed to, even though they aren't actually doing that.
Such as... GDPR?
> Political realities exist even when they're complicated and inconvenient. Mocking them doesn't make them go away.
Totally agree.
> The term originally dates from a time when "interviews" were a thing that happened after you actually agreed to be interviewed. Now the debate happens live on the internet and trolls get to ask their loaded questions in front of the public with the implication that you're guilty if you don't respond.
What's your source?
In either case, the model for having API access was that the end user would get a nice clear permissions dialog telling them what info they were giving to the third party and having them click "I Agree" before any data was transferred.
Even better, in the case of the device partnerships, you had to login with your FB username and password!
Those articles are the equivalent of saying Apple shares data with Google because iMail can open your Gmail account
Why do so many people think that these companies sell your data?
The most common behavior people observe that makes them think companies are selling their data is when they visit some site P that sells widget p and then on completely unrelated site Q they start seeing ads for p. The obvious conclusion to draw is that Q now knows they visited P. In reality, ad broker X knows the user visited P, and is satisfying queries from Q (really, from the user agent visiting Q) by vending ads for p to the user agent that is displaying site Q's content alongside that ad. But the ad and Q's content are generally sandboxed from each other the same way that your bank account login state is sandboxed from Q also (1). In reality, Q has no idea the user has visited P, but the content on the page strongly suggests that Q does.
(1) note: It is possible there are holes in the security model that an unscrupulous Q could use to gather information on a user about their history on P; that's generally considered a violation of the ad vendor's policy and will get Q kicked off the ad network.
throw these companies have lots of money to pay fines, suits, and campaign donations with, and the outcome is decided
When you purchase data, it can be remixed and resold, can be used outside the original terms of service agreed to between FB/Google and their users. This is difficult to enforce agreed upon protections, and is a troubling issue (e.g. Cambridge Analytica had user data they used in a "clearly wrong" manner -- a problem that AFAIK was from 3 years ago and has since been shut down).
Buying access to the users means an advertiser is purchasing the ability to put a message in front of the user. This data is covered by user agreements, and is much harder for third parties to use in a "clearly wrong" manner. This data must be deleted at the request of the user, and can be (relatively) easily deleted by going to the original source (a key distinction -- it's very hard to delete data that has been sold and resold).
It is important to use the correct description of what is happening. On FB, you're not "buying an audience" so much as "defining an audience to reach". You don't get to hold the user data in a csv; you get to put messages in front of groups of people. You don't possess the data -- you have access to use it through a user interface provided by FB/Google.
I respect that you may feel FB/Google holding these user data is unethical. Other people feel the exchange is perfectly fine. Regardless, using precise language is important to not muddy the waters, especially in such a tendentious debate.
Saying or assuming that no tech companies sell user data is disingenuous. Case in point, doesn't Edmunds have an exclusive data contract to share data with Oracle Data Cloud?
Re-reading my comment, I don't think I said anything about companies in general.
The fact that they collect it in the first place is the real problem. And when they inevitably get hacked and lose the data (happened), or leak the data (happened), or their employees inappropriately access the data (happened), or they hand it over to whatever government after putting up a token fight (happened)... it doesn't matter one bit.
If the answer is yes to these questions Google may have a clear competitive reason to lobby for pro data selling/buying legislation to the detriment of users which may signal that these privacy advocacy groups may not actually be privacy advocacy groups as the article alludes to.
It, ALL OF IT, is wrong. There is no nuance that legitimizes ANY of it.
It. Is. Wrong.
There is no nuance that legitimizes any, or even any part of it.
It's not 'here's all the activity data about Anthony Mouse', and user data is collected internally, but it is also baked into targeting products that they sell to brands and agencies.
No, this is not true. It's more like "Oh you want to to serve ads to individuals that shop at Uniqlo? Give us your ad creative and we will show you to the profiles that have checked into a Uniqlo three times in the past 6 weeks"
Additionally, at FB ads, often it's custom audience, and in that case it's "Oh you want to to serve ads to individuals that shop at Uniqlo? Give us your ad creative and list of email addresses of people you want to target and we show them your ads." (though you can actually do "similar audience" and so on.
This is not correct. Google and Facebook may not sell PII directly to third party but most lower/medium size tech companies do sell PII to third party (insurers, credit co, erc) and most of them even say it explicitly on TOS or privacy policy.
Now, because it's written deep down inside some TOS doesn't mean users are fully informed and people certainly are not making truly informed decisions.
Now, the fact is: people do not understand whats going in and tech companies are abusing this.
And the question is: are we OK with that?
They certainly buy data [0]. Whether they are the seller or the buyer, they have vested interest to make sure the trade can continue.
[0] e.g. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
Yes; absolutely!
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
If you accept money from a company, which is actually completely contrary for what you claim to represent you're compromised. Period.
https://www.accessnow.org/financials/
Trusting anything immediately is a bad habit to develop anyway.
For example, in the links you provided, we can see that AccessNow is supported by Google and Facebook, but also by Mozilla, which is generally considered to be a strong privacy advocate. Similarly, CDT is supported by Google and Facebook, but also by DuckDuckGo and Mozilla.
So what can we conclude from this? I'm not really sure. It could be any of:
1. Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, etc. are supporting organizations that are working against the interests of privacy.
2. Google and Facebook actually care about privacy.
3. Privacy is a complicated issue and there aren't really well-defined "sides" to take.
We notice one consistent thing: these purpose of organizations/institutions isn't as simple as "serve the best for the native population that they are supposed to save from natural/economic/humanitarian disaster". The need (say, for regional/program directors) to find the next funding to keep the project going trumps EVERY OTHER altruistic purpose. Also, these program directors don't stay for longer than 2-3 years (let alone getting to know the native population they are trying to help) and most of them are always trying to get in on the next action/conflict in another country, and/or to simply move to a better pasture (a more developed country). The management in these non-profit orgs--such as save the children, world vision, UNICEF--are always whitewashed (I do not intend this to come out negatively, but have to keep it real here) and they rarely promote native workers to have a say in things that matter (although native workers are the ones who have to do the day-to-day, on-the-field hard work). On Facebook, there has been a growing resentment by native workers toward these 'foreigners of ruling hierarchy' that work for non-profits (while taking up most of the salary+benefits and wasting donation money). I don't know how far it will go and am interested to see it out.
Never trust a name, as more often than not it just has been hijacked by the most powerful/lucky marketing group.
Here's the pattern: "First, do some harm. Reap gains from it. Then atone, and reap power from the atonement."
Anand Giridharadas has this all down. Best book you can read right now if you're interested in this topic.
This is why it's important to view a wide range of sources, but who has time for that really.
All of the listed think tanks are for sale. EPIC, an actual privacy advocacy group, is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Privacy_Information...
The EFF, popular with many tech workers, also falls into the latter group. They've started to pivot post all the privacy scandals of the past few years, but in general they've taken positions that align with the tech industry. There's a reason why they've been preoccupied with government surveillance but have been silent (until recently) about corporate surveillance.
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...
They're a 501(c)3, they take donations off the front page of their website. Sure, you might be curious who is donating? Or if there are any donations over a certain amount? I don't see any of that for The March of Dimes, either, do we question whether they are "for sale?"
I think it's reasonable to ask some number of questions about the March of Dimes. It's surprising, at least a little bit, that eradicating polio didn't reduce the amount of charitable work a polio charity had to do.
California Drivers Alliance
Washington Consumers for Sound Fuel Policy
Californians for Balanced Energy Solutions
The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition
Friends of Science
Now it makes perfect sense.
It seems that's partly the case here: they want more legislation, but also want to make sure it won't hurt them.
It's not ideal for them, but I believe it benefits their monopoly position. Implementing the technical and compliance measures required by the GDPR is trivial at the scale of Google, but a significant barrier to entry for smaller competitors.
I don't believe they care about people's privacy either, but it's a noble cause to be exploited. I think what they really want is regulatory hurdles that stifle competition, but have no real impact on their business.
I expect they want to shape emerging legislation to include the likes of: appoint a dedicated data protection officer; have a process by which customers can request their data; produce quarterly reports. Things which place a proportionately larger burden on smaller businesses (which perhaps can even be sold to them as services), but don't limit the collection or processing of data.
Implying you usually just base your opinion on headlines? That seems like a risky proposition...
Privacy is important, but the monopolistic/oligarchic control these businesses exert over their peers and the people of our countries is the real issue.
Nothing would make these companies happier than if we argued about privacy for the next 100 years.
I wonder how many of the targets take the bait and "sign up for privacy" just to never sign out again, giving Google official approval for their data collection mechanics...
I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that a wide array of problems (from privacy to creating a sustainable economy) might just be served best by heavily regulating the whole advertising sector (starting from banning individualized ads to enforcing quotas on ad-spending/marketing in all other industries)
FUD / message control / obfuscation is the name of the game.
Non-profits should be automatically named <sponsor>'s <name of group> - that would at least make it a little more obvious whose message you're getting.
If you think about it, it's not even that bad. No one else really cares much about the companies' exploits and the money is at the end at least partially used for praiseworthy goals. And wheel of market keeps spinning...
Impossible. That sentence literally contradicts itself. The real question is why we allow companies to be non profit, yet be shills for the like of Google and Facebook while pretending they are doing a public service. A company cannot be fully focused on privacy and take money from Google, fb, etc. Even Mozilla can't fully pull that off although they come pretty close.
Edit: A closer reading seems to indicate these groups may not be enemies.
Hopefully dang can update the title here as well.