Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face Jail | Hacker News Reader

Crime Shouldn't Pay: Why Big Tech Executives Should Face Jail

mattstoller.substack.com

107 pointspseudolus32 comments

> The complaint reveals that after Facebook bought WhatsApp, which pledged to its users (and the FTC) strict privacy controls, “Facebook signed an exclusive agreement with Google, granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files.” If true, that’s a remarkable set of illegal acts, by both Google and Facebook, as well as a betrayal of their users.

This has already been debunked as bullshit. What the lawsuit is referring to is just WhatsApp adding the option of backing up your chat history to Google Drive on android devices.

"What the lawsuit is referring to is just WhatsApp adding the option of backing up your chat history to Google Drive on android devices."

Can you explain how that's any different from "granting Google access to millions of Americans’ end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files."?

As a disclaimer, I work at Google but have no hidden insights here

I haven't used Whatsapp but I would imagine that exporting your data to Drive is an activity that doesn't happen unless the user initiates it. I find manual backups to be a lot less insidious than the implication that Facebook has built a backdoor for Google that breaks Whatsapp's end to end encryption

True, users have to enable Google Drive backups, but they are tied to the user's phone number and

> WhatsApp backups no longer count against your Google Drive storage quota

So I imagine there is some kind of (paid?) agreement between FB and Google to keep them free.

I don't doubt that the content of the messages stays secret, but there is a lot of metadata that can be inferred by simply tying a phone number and the size of the backup (and deltas) to a user's email.

"I find manual backups to be a lot less insidious than the implication that Facebook has built a backdoor for Google that breaks Whatsapp's end to end encryption"

If the backup process makes it crystal clear to the user that by making the backup Google will be able to read the user's messages, then it's fine.

Otherwise the users might mistakenly think their messages are still private.

Backups are automatic, but opt-in. Unfortunately, you cant opt-out from your contacts saving your shared chat history AFAIK, so even if you dont use backups, there may be an unencrypted copy of your messages anyway.

yep, chances are that most whatsapp groups contain at least one person the uses the google drive backup.

Because it makes a difference if google can read the messages or not.

- if the messages are shared, google has access to private information they were never explicitly granted access to.

- if an encrypted tar ball is shared, google has access to nothing but a blob of unreadable data.

Isn’t this obvious?

Google can read the messages. The backups are not uploaded to Google Drive in encrypted form. The WhatsApp FAQ states clearly:

> Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in Google Drive.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/about-google-drive-ba...

While enabling Drive backups is something that the user has to enable manually, I'm not sure the complete consequences of doing so are really communicated to the user. I wouldn't expect Google having an agreement bypass to access my messages even if Drive backup was enabled, but that's exactly what happens, if I understand it correctly.

It's a nothingburger if all they're doing is just backing up WhatsApp user data. It's not if the terms of the agreement allowed for anything else, which we don't really know because that part of the complaint has been redacted.

it's not nothing if most whatsapp groups contain at least one member that gives an un-ecrypted archive to google. sure it's stated in the fine print, but nontheless most ppl argue that whatsapp is "private because encryption right?"

One issue is that anti-trust has moved from being concerned about harm to consumers (great!) to being focused on harm to other businesses (not so great).

For example, a TON of issues especially in EU around Google de-prioritizing some of the scam "Review" and shopping network sites that were just total trash and clutter. Yes, this hurt those businesses, but as someone who was absolutely sick of them in search results it was WONDERFUL to see them go down in flames.

To be clear, places like nextag were paid "comparison" shopping engines. To have enough margin to win the "comparison" you often had just total trash products advertising impossible claims.

Anti-trust seems focused on the harm shutting these folks did to these businesses, but no one asks if users actually liked these folks (or the auto review sites that someone generated just boilerplate but clearly never actually had product in hand). Again, SO glad they pushed some of these down, lots of complaints.

If you think people want this trash, just start your own search engine that emphasizes this junk.

Hasn’t “harm to other businesses” been traditionally understood to be harm to consumers in that consumer choice is reduced?

No, a monopoly that consistently provides extremely low prices due to economies of scale helps consumers while harming competitors. Unfortunately, while that’s perfectly acceptable it’s very much the exception not the rule.

Chicago School vs the EU. We need the EU model, the Chicago School is Gilded Facism.

>> Hasn’t “harm to other businesses” been traditionally understood to be harm to consumers in that consumer choice is reduced?

Yes, unless the battle is just between businesses spending money on lobbying vs businesses not spending money on lobbying.

Consider telco and how they are upset with Facebook/etc.

Traditional telco is being harmed because their raw deal to customers {sign up for 2yr contract where you dont even get the full monthly price upfront and then pay a boatload per SMS etc; oh and they also sell out your privacy} has been replaced with more competitive offerrings {exchange your privacy for free unlimited communication including free international communications, no contract, no 2yr agreements, no mysterious regulatory recovery fee}.

As a consumer, I honestly dont care about the traditional telco deal. It was a completely raw deal. The addition of WhatsApp/Messenger/Jitsi/FaceTime/Duo/Allo/etc has not reduced options. In fact, I'd give up anything not to go back to $0.20/sms.

I think much of the "harm" narrative is driven by lobbying, not actual harm. They both have harm, different types, some more than others. One has better lobbyists.

>One issue is that anti-trust has moved from being concerned about harm to consumers (great!) to being focused on harm to other businesses (not so great).

The first thing listed in the Federal Trade Commission Act from 1914 is empowering the FTC to "prevent unfair methods of competition". This is a business protection to ensure that businesses fairly compete with each other.

To me the problem isn't that Google de-prioritized these sites, it's that they did so while running their own shopping service. It's the same problem I have with Apple's work to ban game streaming services from their site- it would be a lot more convincing that they are acting in the users best interest of they weren't also selling Apple arcade. We really should be concerned about gatekeepers prioritizing their own services over the competition. I'm not saying that these sites should be restored to a place of prominence (they shouldn't) but that the underlying idea that a monopoly like Google search should be restricted in its ability to branch out or self promote its services is valid.

Calls to "lock up the bastards" might give some short-lived emotional satisfaction but rarely translate into anything resembling victory (see the war on drugs). The burden of proof in criminal matters is "beyond a reasonable doubt". I'm somewhat doubtful that prosecutors, faced with an onslaught of defense counsel and sympathetic jurors, will meet that burden in white collar crimes. The answer isn't jail but rather developing the will to overcome regulatory capture and to enforce existing legislation which is more than sufficient to counter monopolies.

And taxation, to make evil geniuses less interested in the activity in the first place, creating room for less evil geniuses.

Bigcorps are veto-driven as no one wants to be the one to kill the cash cow, and VPs will do unethical things as long as they are legal and benefit the company + their immediate team, justifying it as 'good business leadership.' So jailtime and meaningful fines shifts burden from 'a fee smaller than your bonus / company profit' to 'oh shit.'

Truly bug and evil stuff happens, but most normal VP politics has email + file trails due to design docs, legal agreements, etc. Harder part seems like knowing what to subpeona and in time :)

Do you feel the same way about the malfeasance that brought on the financial crisis?

The malfeasance that brought on the financial crisis is illustrative. It ultimately led to one criminal prosecution that involved a small single digit number of branches Chinese-American community bank (Abacus Bank). The prosecution was ultimately unsuccessful. If the government couldn't pull off a successful prosecution of such a small fish then why believe they'll be successful with the likes of FAANG? Best to devote the limited resources the government has to proactively utilizing its powers and enforcing anti-monopoly legislation. If it was readily capable of doing so in the past, why not now?

In passing, the debacle that was the prosecution of Abacus Bank was the subject of a great documentary 'Small Enough to Jail' [0][1]. It's demonstrative of whom the government will ultimately always chose to prosecute. In the case of Abacus Bank, an institution that had a significantly lower default rate than most large banks.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/video/abacus-small-enough-to-jail-suqmxe...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus:_Small_Enough_to_Jail

To me this reads like a generic argument to de-criminalise white collar crime and fraud.

Untill we have prosecution for executives, events like 2008 and boeing will keep coming.

White collar crimes often include a special requirement that other crimes don’t have; a requirement that the accused were aware of the illegality of their actions. This is an extremely hard bar to clear for prosecutors, which is why they often don’t pursue criminal charges that seem obvious from the outside.

Lots of extraordinary claims in this article and literally no proof. This isn’t helpful. You can’t just say, (paraphrased) “Wow Google and Facebook had an illegal exclusivity deal! It’s so illegal and crazy I can’t offer any evidence”. I hate both companies but this reads like a tabloid. Companies are sued all the time and what the Plaintiff alleges can deviate greatly from reality. Sometimes cases are fishing for evidence to support a theory.

The write-up seems to focus on monopolization and mentions privacy only in passing. I don't care if there is a single company or duo running the advertising market, and to what extent they are controlling prices. I also don't want to "open up the market" so that more companies can participate in it. Privacy should be regarded as a fundamental human right, and the surveillance economy is based on the mass violation of that right. The lawsuits, and this write-up, completely miss that point.

I've love to be pointed to some empirical evidence to the contrary, but it's hard for me to take anything written by Matt Stoller seriously. A lot of it comes off as knee jerk populism.

I do think tech needs much more scrutiny than it currently receives, but this kind of writing doesn't help imho.

> What’s more frightening is the political corruption that Google and Facebook are enabling. Thousands of newspapers have fallen apart over the past ten years, and over the next three, thousands more will collapse. Aside from killing pro-social institutions like newspapers, these platforms have been inducing significant harms society-wide, from enabling ethnic cleansing abroad and divisiveness in Western democracies, to undermining our economy writ large. The end state is frightening.

I honestly laughed at the claim that newspapers are "pro-social." What evidence is there for that? And while certainly social media reduces barriers against certain awful mob behavior, it's hardly reasonable that Facebook or Google are responsible, especially since in the very next paragraph he gripes about YouTube ruling over creators with an iron fist.

I despise both of these companies and want to see the world rid of them in their current forms, but this whole article is fairly silly. Openly celebrating an authoritarian strongman like New Deal trust-buster Thurmond Arnold is not exactly my idea of "rule of law," which Stoller repeatedly appeals to and claims to cherish.

If there really was collusion between FB and Google (which I’m willing to believe) I’m quite disappointed the CA AG wasn’t the one bringing suit.

The Apple (civil) case being brought by Epic feels utterly different to me and I feel the word “monopoly”, as a term of law, does not apply.

At a high level, I think we should put fewer ppl in jail... not more...

Complete and total BS. I am sick of people trying to accuse big tech for all the woes of the world. I see it too much ion the media, and, surprisingly, here on HN.

Big tech is NOT a monopoly. You, the user, are not their customer, and thus you (as a citizen) cannot claim antitrust or wrongdoing. Still don't like Facebook and Google? Then delete your FB profile and use duck duck go. [1]

You know what industries are becoming monopolies? These:

* Financial services [2]

* Media [3]

* Telecom and ISPs [4]

* Airlines [5]

* and others I can't remember at the moment

IMO, the negative consequences of those industries merging together are far more material than FB. You can quit FB, you can't quit your checking account or your ISP. [6]

Corporate media and their proxy boot-lickers (looking at you, Matt Stoller) have you fetishizing about big tech (for the page views, again looking your way, Stoller) so you are too distracted when ATT acquires Time Warner under your nose, and now you get watch crappier programming (how about that last season of Game of Thrones?) on a crappier internet connection (from ATT), all for the same price, while ATT cuts costs with "synergy" (vomit) and the stock price goes up.

Stoller makes a weak attempt at highlighting my point:

> As Steven Perlstein noted in the Washington Post, this effort is more than just an attack on Google and Facebook, but a “legal shot across the bow of dominant firms in other highly concentrated industries — pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, financial services — who are now on notice that their nonstop acquisitions and hardball business practices could invite similar challenge.”

Yeah...too late.

[1] You won't, even though you can.

[2] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/bank-merger-his...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownersh...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...

[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/airline-mergers-and-acquisit...

[6] Likely you only have one ISP to choose from for your location. Hint: that's a monopoly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com