Facebook and Google’s pervasive surveillance poses danger to human rights
amnesty.org
amnesty.org
(Of course it's better being a hypocrite than being completely indifferent but there's no excuse for not fixing their own site.)
I guess you're only allowed to complain about surveillance on your personal blog where no one will read it, because any modern media site uses invasive tracking. For some reason, HN posters pretend not to understand that the IT staff who install those trackers are different people from the writers who complain about it.
Yup, that was in the back of my mind when I wrote that.
I think it's great that they're complaining on the Amnesty blog. Let's be clear: The issue is not the complaining; it's the tracking. It's not that they shouldn't post this important post on their site; it's that they should consider not using Google Analytics.
As I wrote before as well, being a hypocrite is a step up from not caring. It's good to see Amnesty taking a public stance on this.
But I think you touch on an interesting general phenomena there: That someone, who professes a view, risks being attacked as a hypocrite, which could make it easier to stay silent instead.
Even an organisation as focused on human rights as Amnesty finds it has few tractable options but to use the very tools its criticising.
That tends to undercut the "but you have a choice" / "there is a choice" counterarguments. Those choices come with high costs.
It also highlights the fact that an alleged defence of monopolistic practices -- low costs to "consumers" -- is in fact a principle mechanism of monopoly persistence. By being the lowest-cost provider, the simplest or most convenient choice, what everyone knows, all of which are characteristics conveyed by monopoly rather than intrinsic to the technology or product itself, the monopoly position is highly stable and difficult to disrupt. Just as a river will flow through the lowest, widest channel, without regard to what damage might result from its path, a monopoly position is the path of least resistance. This does not mean it's the path of no or least damage. Let alone greatest benefit.
I like that way of looking at it. To be fair, the people within Amnesty who wrote this warning probably aren't the same who added Google Analytics to their site.
"The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing."
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by IBM. Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book IBM and the Holocaust:
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com
Whether or not it's possible to transact genocide at similar scale without computerised data records, it's quite clearly far easier to do so with them. Worse, with comprehensive records and rapid identification of any particular meddlesome priest, activist artist, or woman who was warned but nevertheless persisted, it's possible for such regimes, state or non-state, to dip in and retaliate with pinpoint effectiveness. Even the mere suggestion that this is possible can be extraordinarily chilling.