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Comment by AinderS | Hacker News Reader

> Google provides useful products, and in exchange we might be targeted with annoying ads. Big whoop. Until now.

Enter a cage willingly, with barely any complaint, for minor convenience, then cry when you're taken to the slaughterhouse. It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.

And despite this, they remain willfully blind to other threats, that are smart enough to stay below the threshold: https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/censorship-by-algori...

> Four ways to build civil rights into Google products

A laughable chapter of the article, void of any actually effective suggestions, such as compelling Google properties to stop blocking the Tor network (duckduckgo and yandex allow Tor), or using free software that is actually under the user's control.

The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others. That's why they want to build "civil rights" into products, and not "user freedom". That's why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.

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> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic

Which warnings? I ask the question earnestly. As a developer with a clear sense of how the internet is structured, what browsers are and are not capable of doing etc I know the warnings myself. But for the population at large? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything that’s explained the consequences of pervasive advertising infrastructure to non tech inclined folks, much less something placed somewhere that people will actually see it.

Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on them to the extent that you’d be able to detect a visit to an abortion clinic. Or that period tracking apps are sending data in a way that can be later bought on a free market and tied to personal identification.

This is a failure of regulation, education and a media beholden to tech giants. I think we in the tech industry have some reflection to do as well. We understand the implications better than most yet many of us dutifully completed our work tickets to add tracking pixels to every page of the company site. We can’t do that then turn around and say “what, you mean you didn’t know that a Facebook Like button tracks every web page you look at even if you don’t click on it?!” and expect to be taken seriously.

Placing the blame at the feet of individuals that aren’t equipped to understand is a mistake, IMO.

>Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on them to the extent that you’d be able to detect a visit to an abortion clinic. Or that period tracking apps are sending data in a way that can be later bought on a free market and tied to personal identification.

They were aware. It just wasn't until these moments that it affected them personally, and they started to care.

"People" were utterly certain that their phones and computers were listening to every conversation they had, then big tech was advertising the products that they thought about back at them.

But the location tracking software they have enabled to find their phone/keys/bag/friend couldnt possibly be used to see where their phone/keys/bag/friend is ...

For those thinking "no way..." - I have known people who believed this exact thing.

Also, I've known people who won't get a drivers license because "the government wants your face", but spend all their time on Facebook.

I cannot express how unsurprised I am at this - it's simply too stereotypically American. Americans, as a general rule, seem to distrust their government - instead placing their trust in large corporations. This is true from an individual level, all the way up to societal - though I'll admit it becomes more hit-or-miss the closer we get to the individual level.

This is borne out in everything from private prisons, to the medical industry, to ID cards, to your acquaintances that trust Facebook more than their elected officials.

This all comes from somewhere. It's not like we woke up one day and decided to distrust government. The entire movement to infiltrate government and make it ineffective so people will support dismantling and privatizing it is just the tip of the iceberg. Culture doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can trust your government--your post makes it sound like you're not in the US; if you are, you need to pay more attention--because it's not fully captured by private interests that make it work against the public.

I recently watched the 1998 Will Smith movie "Enemy of the State" (lawyer targeted by the NSA finds himself entangled in a terrifying web of surveillance). The point of the movie was clearly to emphasize the importance of privacy and the dangers of mass data collection and surveillance.

What is most wild about the movie is that much of the tech (and government policies) seemed a bit far-fetched (Hollywood-style exaggeration) for 1998. However, now, after 20+ years of the Patriot Act and the advancement of global connectivity (read smartphones) it actually came across as pretty tame and unsurprising. The ramifications of society's decent down the rabbit hole have been clear for awhile to anyone willing to pay attention...

In Enemy of the state they could hide from the every present satelites by

1) Not looking up or going in side

2) Throwing away any phones you have

Good luck with that. You might not even have a phone, that person taking a photo you just walked past does, and the facial recognition works just fine. Even if they don't know your name, they can track you. It was sort-of covered in the film - the CCTV in the garage etc, it's just far less manpower intensive now

I spent 20 years talking to friends and familly around me, and they don't care. They won't even try Firefox if they are used to chrome. Not even that small effort.

We had the US mass spying revealed in the press, with the PRISM program exposed. The public mostly carried on as usual.

Snowden got persecuted, giving the issue a lot of publicity. He wrote a very good book explaning why surveillance is dangerous. Again, most people didn't flinch.

A lot of people on HN reported trying to talk to people and get blank stares. "I have nothing to hide". "I don't care if people are collecting my data".

This is not just a failure in regulation: people don't give priority to problem that are not a pain right now. It's too abstract. Not to mention they have other problems that are a pain right now, and are armed with limited time, resources and knowledge.

Same problem with climate change. Their life is fine now. They can't care about the impact of their consumption in x year when they have to think about a loan, their health, the kids getting in trouble at school, their boss being pushy lately and the lattest form they have to fill.

There is also the cost of trying to avoid tracking product at the individual level.

I won't use Apple since it's locked down. So I use android. But I can't sign in into a google account or it will track everything. So I can't use the app store and many app won't work.

I can't use the best app provider like gmap and waze, have to sandbox youtube which mean it's mostly suggesting terrible content as it assumes I'm the average human.

I have a collections of extensions on web browser and several Firefox containers to isolate everything. Something I spent a lot of time to learn, master and configure.

I use Linux because Windows is tracking you, and MacOS is a golden cage. So I can't buy the best laptop CPU out there, which is the M2, and have terrible battery life.

My friends harassed me to have a FB account. Then an insta account. Then a whatsapp account. So I have to accept to miss out on things, and their nagging about it for every communication.

Now I am willing to accept all that because I think there are things more important in life than being part of a group chat or having the latest trendy thing.

But it's a hard sell for a many, espacially since, once again, "their life is fine right now".

You really can't force people to want something they don't want.

> Until recently people simply were not aware that personally identifiable location data was gathered on

Is this right? For a long time now, every time I visit a restaurant I get a notification from Google suggesting that I should write a review. That should be sufficient to raise the alarm bells for even non-tech folks no?

This can be called manufactured ignorance. Those who have been informed sometimes practice willful ignorance. I have also come to accept that perhaps a majority of people want to be watched and controlled just as they want to be ruled by powerful people. It is hard for some of us who are not that way to understand and accept.

The fact that Google collects information that can be subpoenaed is NOT the top risk here. Not even close.

It is the fact that if you search for anything abortion related, the top search results are dominated by fake abortion clinics. Who far outnumber real ones. A woman won't know that it is fake until after she has provided them with all of the information that she shouldn't have. And since they AREN'T licensed medical facilities, they have no requirement to keep her data private. For example in Texas they can immediately turn her information over to law enforcement to collect the reward for turning in someone who is trying to get an abortion.

If Google can figure out which clinics are fake and get them off their site (including not letting them advertise), that would do a LOT to help.

> For example in Texas they can immediately turn her information over to law enforcement to collect the reward for turning in someone who is trying to get an abortion.

It is frankly insane to me that the ones claiming the highest moral ground created a vigilante system driven by ruining people's lives when they are at their most vulnerable.

Imagine for a second if you replaced "Texas" with "North Korea" what the very people who support this would say.

The craziest to me is that this is legal.

From the EU perspective, the USA seems to be going into a madness spiral.

This sounds a little like the incremental addiction to fossil fuels the world has developed. It's "the market" and "blame consumers" when we know damn well that consumers don't choose fuel sources and consumers didn't grease the palms of legislators and regulators for more than a century.

You make a good point. I can see how my post could be interpreted as blaming regular consumers for the mess we're in. And while consumer apathy and ignorance disgust me, you are correct, journalists and media that are supposed to be guiding us should shoulder the majority of the blame.

I would blame Google, but that's like blaming the fox for killing the hens, instead of whoever left a hole in the hen house.

Edit: See my other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32126390) about this analogy "excusing" Google/the fox.

Journalism bears some responsibility (insofar as it’s become addicted to cheap social media traffic and digital ad revenue), but I think the context doesn’t justify disproportionate blame.

In particular: social media companies understood, very early on, that they could use their position to squeeze traditional media by cutting into its advertising. It was a classic industrial takeover, including the incumbent’s mockery of the newcomer until it was too late.

They probably deserve some blame for not seeing how the wind was blowing, and reacting accordingly. But I would place more blame on digital ad markets and all of the perverse incentives associated with them, all of which originate somewhere in the grimy junction between VCs and traditional advertising.

But the journalists too are just following the incentives that are provided to them. Don’t they deserve some of that “but that’s like blaming the fox for killing the hens, instead of whoever left a hole in the hen house” blanket pardon you’re handing out, here?

> blanket pardon

Oh that wasn't a pardon. Maybe the fox analogy was poorly chosen, since foxes are cute and have their place in the ecosystem. I should have said Google is like cancer, and media are the negligent doctor that takes too long to send you to therapy.

instead of whoever left a hole in the hen house

The entire world is full of holes, and always has been. We shouldn't be lauding the foxes that use every hole they find. Unethical activities should be called out, not downplayed and dismissed.

In your analogy, whatever happens to the lazy farmhand, the fox also still gets shot.

I wouldn't be so quick to paint the big ad networks as natural phenomenon like foxes, that just need to eat.

After all, foxes don't need to eat 23% more hens year after year for decades. Their stomachs are only so big.

It's partly the atmosphere of hyper-growth--"growthism" it is sometimes called--that has given rise to this situation. And it is partly because big tech has been gaslighting us about how all this tracking and ad personalization is good for consumers--which it isn't. It benefits advertisers and ad networks, not consumers.

If you have enough chickens, the number of foxes, too, can grow exponentially with time.

I am getting confused in this whole analogy, TBH, but if chickens were clicks or ad impressions, it seems like foxes have developed an appetite for pigeons, larks, hawks, eagles, rabbits, squirrels, shrews, groundhogs, muskrats, cats, small dogs, mice, rats, and other foxes. They seem to have a bottomless pit for a stomach and are telling us that it's always been that case that foxes were the dominant life form and that we should be grateful for the services they are providing.

> we know damn well that consumers don't choose fuel sources

That's not entirely true. Where I live people have a choice of energy provider which includes much more costly "100% renewable" options. Guess how popular that choice is.

> people have a choice of energy provider

I don't know where you live, so it's impossible to say what you actually mean. But if you are referring to the choices for electric power, these are almost certainly new developments that have been forced by legislation mandating giving consumers a choice, which is only a small walkback of the past century of promotion and even subsidizing energy producers that use fossil fuels. Energy production is a deeply non-free market. Even in recent times with the rise of solar, it's often the case where it's illegal (or sometimes merely inconvenient or uneconomical) to sell power back to the grid.

You don’t say where you live, but in the United States, in addition to ‘titzer correctly says, these “100% renewable” providers that are piggybacking on the established providers’ grids are mostly a flavor of adjustable-rate scam.

We’d all be a hell of a lot better off if your camp didn’t casually and routinely believe that failure to contact FSF or advocate for Tor is evidence of a conspiracy against computing. I swear free software people have a really great idea and philosophy and absolute garbage ideas of how to promote the idea and convince disagreeing viewpoints. We badly need to start coming around to the seemingly-crazy understanding that there’s a huge middle ground between where you are and would prefer us to be, and unfettered, apocalyptic corporate exploitation dooming us all. It’s tiring to live this Sith existence that free software people push: “with us or conspiring against.” And we all know it’s RMS who sets that tone and has inspired all of you to religious battle. The problem is you’re showing up to battle with civilians most of the time, including here, in this thread, right now.

You mention nearby that you didn’t mean for this post to come off as blaming the consumer. That’s weird, because typically when I’m blaming someone for something, I use adjectives like “myopic”, “apathetic”, and “willful” to describe their behavior that I find disagreeable. Your entire post is blaming the very people you’re trying to convince; when called on it, you quickly rush in with oh no, not blaming the consumer, and not even blaming Google (!?).

> That’s why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.

How do you think this conversation goes? Is it something like this?

“The people are dangerously close to understanding true freedom. We cannot have that and we must convince them that Google policing is in their best interest. If we call FSF that’s what they’re going to tell us, so we absolutely can’t do that. Let’s call the safe option at Harvard.”

Because (former investigative journalist here) it isn’t. The conversation you’re annoyed about actually goes like this:

“The last five hundred times we tried the FSF we got lectured about why our computing choices suck and we make bad decisions about using computers. Let’s go to a person we’ve worked with before who is able to break this down in a way that I, and my readers, will understand. Bonus: I don’t have to Google why forgetting ‘GNU/‘ in the last article destroyed my comment section.”

It’s so weird and depressing because everybody in free software is brilliant, for the most part, but just can’t see how alienating and frustrating this kind of thing is for the majority of people who aren’t them.

You kind of have a baby/bathwater situation, eh? You'd throw the baby out just because the bathwater has a lot of evangelists you personally find unpleasant to communicate with. Doesn't seem to matter that they're fighting for _your rights_ just that you don't like them. I guess your post directly leads to OP's post in that sense, because my first thought after reading yours was, "you reap what you sow" which is more or less what OP wrote. So maybe we'd be a hell of a lot better off without your attitude?

What OP is saying is that the brilliant people churning ideas and insights within FSF, are terrible at advocating for it.

I agree.

As an example: FSF points about free (as in liberty) hardware was years ahead of its time; yet it wasn’t taken very seriously until MS push for UEFI.

The work of getting the message out on the important points is better left to others.

Yes, thank you for elaborating, but I did understand their point. The issue is that OP hasn't thought far enough ahead (or doesn't care) and as a result, as GP and myself have now said, a situation where you reap what you sow occurs.

Let me elaborate now: The people who are willing to get the message out about FSF ideals are currently the people who are doing it. So unless OP or yourself can provide the means to do that better than what is being done now, what you get is what there is right now. So then, if at that point, you hear about a good idea (like what the FSF fights for) but turn away from it (throwing out the baby) because you don't like the source of that idea, then, as was already said, you reap what you sow.

Except they aren’t doing it. What we have to show for decades of FSF activism is enough of a rejection of GPL that other licenses filled the gap, and that gap basically created cloud computing by letting the very companies RMS detests offshore their engineering to the detesters without any risk. So in one interpretation, the ideal software model but maybe not the ideal license envisioned by FSF is a major component of the transfer/takeback of computing as a concept from individual to corporation (and then bigger corporation) and the creation of pan-surveillance culture. Which is incredibly ironic given the ideals of the FLOSS community. That’s what we’re reaping, in my estimation.

Vexing yourself with the legal provenance of the BIOS in your laptop ignores all that, and this state of computing been slowly growing in that technofetish blind spot for about thirty years. And now the community with said, massive blind spot is saying “see what you reaped by not listening to us?” Come on. We did. It’s a safe bet I’ve been thinking about this longer than you’ve been in the job market, and I’m not saying that to tout my experience, but it’s equally frustrating to level some criticism at the FLOSS world and get accused of shortsighted/myopia/blah blah which was exactly my bone to pick with OP. That’s the only argument path. FLOSS is perfect, and if you disagree, you just don’t see it. That’s not a society. That’s a belief.

I’m not saying that’s the fairest take. (Please give me a better one that isn’t “people just don’t listen,” and I may be convinced.) Maybe if everything Posix were GPL we wouldn’t be offshoring our computing responsibilities to companies who built platforms with these tools, I don’t know. This has been the background noise of my entire adult life, though, and yeah, I’ve had enough reaping of the current state of affairs.

I assure you wholeheartedly that I care. I just disagree with you. Stop confusing the two.

They ARE doing it, you just don't think it's effective. If you can do better, do it! If you can't, or don't want to, well, ... we reap what we sow. There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

My experience is that journalists do the first using the vocabulary of the second:

They phrase objections to viewpoints and ideas that are forbidden in the language of decorum, so they can claim to be upholding propriety and good society rather than censorship.

That attitude (and your post) are why trust in media has collapsed — you’re no longer doing the hard work of bringing us the fire of truth, you’re just having a pleasant chat with your friends.

While I agree with some of what you said about the free software community, I think you're ignoring GP's larger point, and somewhat derailing the conversation by focusing too much on one sentence of a long comment.

Perhaps you could post a substantive rebuttal to the heart of GP's comment:

> they remain willfully blind to other threats ...

In other words, what about broader issues with censorship, surveillance, and corporate control of the Internet outside the context of abortion?

I didn’t rebut either of your quotes because they’re both ascribing intent to the actions of others with very limited information. I’d be rebutting their interpretation of events, not the events (and I’d also be doing it with the same limited information).

I also think the broader point is more important.

Fair enough, those claims could use some evidence. The author of this article once wrote:

> As more of the Internet permeated our lives, so has the expectation that tech companies share a responsibility for content that’s akin to food companies’ responsibility for public health.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/24/online-...

It seems fair to characterize that as believing that "Google and other corporations [should] keep acting as internet police".

It could also mean that they share responsibility because of their lobbying efforts.

Laws could have been enacted a long time ago and surveillance expectations could have remained strongly on individual privacy instead of fighting like:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

Or https://thehill.com/policy/technology/407528-fight-looms-ove...

> Let’s go to a person we’ve worked with before who is able to break this down in a way that I, and my readers, will understand.

That will have an anemic opinion that is close to your own, and works for an institution that is as establishment as they come [1]. How can you "speak truth to power" when you get your commentary and opinions from one of the seats of that power?

[1] Eight of the nine members of the current [supreme] court went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. - https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/supreme-court-cov...

I’d love to respond substantively on this topic, but every followup I’ve written so far in this thread has been immediately flagged, so I’m not inclined to risk the time. (I’m sorry for that. That’s not your fault.)

I could fly off on a tangent about how that’s a conspiracy to suppress my view, but I think it’s more productive to look at that as a misunderstanding of the role of the “flag” button. Maybe that’s my substantive response I’d leave you with: when presented with opportunity to presume the worst in people, find the middle if you can?

> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic

99% of people I interact with have absolutely NO idea of the ramifications of the apps and services they use. Their understanding of technology ends at "click app icon and scroll". I think that (probably because you're in tech) you seriously overestimate the degree to which the vast majority of people can be said to have given "informed consent".

Hell, even among my friends with PhDs and whatnot a majority does not understand.

> But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others.

This brings to mind a useful test: Consider a hypothetical, in which instead of a majority-Republican-appointed Supreme Court allowing states to ban abortions, a majority-Democrat-appointed Supreme Court allowed states to ban guns. If you'd want Google to continue collecting data on people visiting gun stores and machine shops in that case, then don't pretend privacy is why you want them to stop doing the same thing in this case.

> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.

I took years before I realized Google was spying on me and following me around on different sites. I did get no warnings, until I realized what they were doing and visited sites that warned about it.

It is just in the recent years "big tech" spying is a thing in the mainstream after like a decade of free reign. An ordinary person received warnings like 15 years after they made their Gmail or Facebook account.

> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.

This is what governments and NGOs are for.

Individual initiative is not enough to address systemic issues like pollution, or food/car/airline/workplace safety for example. You can't just blame the average person for not running their own mailserver, growing their on food etc.

Surveillance capitalism is now a political problem like monopolies/oligopolies creating pollution and so on

> Individual initiative is not enough to address systemic issues

I couldn't agree more. But before we can have the software equivalent of a food safety agency, people have to stop shrugging off food poisoning with "they probably deserved it".

> Enter a cage willingly, with barely any complaint, for minor convenience, then cry when you're taken to the slaughterhouse

I don't think it's fair to characterise Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube and plenty other Google "products" (Pay, Music, Android, Android TV, Android Auto, Calendar, Podcasts, etc.) as "minor convenience". Some of them were literal game changers, and some still are (YouTube, Google Maps, even if they're finally starting to get decent competition).

Similarly, characterising Google's knowledge about one's habits and interests for the purpose of serving ads (that are also, at least sometimes, more interesting for the user) as "entering a cage" is hyperbolic to say the least.

Yes, having a corporation know you very well for monetisation is bad, but it's not a cage from which you're going to be slaughtered. And even today, many people would prefer, if they even have the choice, to have free access to Maps, Gmail, YouTube and all the rest instead of paying 5-20 $/€/£ each/month, or having to buy into Apple's expensive walled garden and its own massive issues and fleecing.

> "entering a cage" is hyperbolic to say the least.

Until you do something forbidden, such as get an abortion, and hyperbole becomes literal truth as you're sent to prison.

Has anyone in the world ever been sent to prison for getting an abortion based on Google location data? Or is this all still hypothetical? (Seriously curious)

I don't know, but I don't see this as a problem that is specific to Google or abortion. China can serve as a cautionary example of where surveillance leads.

True, fair point.

> Similarly, characterising Google's knowledge about one's habits and interests for the purpose of serving ads (that are also, at least sometimes, more interesting for the user) as "entering a cage" is hyperbolic to say the least.

If you don't think it's a cage, try saying no to the data collection of google and others.

Where I live it cuts you off from most community events and organisations. It cuts you off from second hand markets. It cuts you off from many events. It is starting to cut you off from access to banking services (for now limiting features, but the stranglehold will get tighter once attestation hits PCs). And during covid it got you passed over on the vaccine waiting list without a google/apple only app and then forced you to choose between submitting to google and awkwardly standing out the front of any shop demanding they follow the law and let you sign in manually in order to buy anything while you get lumped in with anti-vaccers.

It has already repeatedly been used to round up protestors and dragnet people for criminal investigations when they had nothing to do with it. Now abortion, and it wil, only get worse.

It's more akin to pollution than slaughter. Most of the people selling their privacy are not significantly harmed by it. It's a group downstream that get it worst.

Purchasing and search history suggest that you had a pregnancy magically disappear in a red state? Buy a book that is critical of Islam in a Middle Eastern country? Search for the long term health risks of giving minors hormone therapy in Canada? Congratulations, the ad services have now flagged you for possible wrong think / criminal investigation. Hope not having to print out Map Quest directions was worth it.

> The problem is that would give users actual power and autonomy. But what the authors really want is for Google and other corporations to keep acting as internet police, but only enforcing rules they agree with, and not any others. That's why they want to build "civil rights" into products, and not "user freedom". That's why they get comments from an establishment Harvard professor, and not the FSF.

There's a strong authoritarian zeitgeist built into the identity politics proposals of papers like the WP. It's been like this for years - stories about "hate online" and "what are corporations going to do about it." Proposals around racial justice always end up with laws to compel something from someone.

The goals might be benign, but they should follow principles that we've already agreed by consensus as a society / culture rather than via compulsion and radical 'rethinks'.

The obsession of the last few years with regulating 'misinformation' and 'hate' online should be a big red flag here.

> It's sad that despite all the warnings, people are so myopic and apathetic that it takes something this big and obvious to make them react.

The problem is, the very same data that anti-abortion fundamentalists or the police in the pointless "war on drugs" use against the population are what makes many services possible or usable in the first place.

A real-time traffic map only works with a large number of devices transmitting location and movement data that are then evaluated to detect a traffic jam. An app to help fertility or contraception only works with people entering very detailed data about their periods. Cell phones only work by having the phone register at each cell during roaming around.

Boycotting Google or deleting your period app is a stopgap solution - the real fix is we all need to get the right to privacy enshrined in our Constitutions, Basic Laws (the German equivalent) and international treaties, in a way that matches the reality that our phones and computers are direct extensions of our minds. We don't allow police to use brain reading (=polygraphs) as evidence in court, so tell me, why the fuck should we allow police to use digital representations of our brains?

Oh, and we all have to literally fight for the separation of church and state that basically all Western nations have in their constitutions to be actual reality. Fuck churches, fuck religion - the immense amount of influence both have on politics is completely unhealthy.

But as this current crisis clearly shows, the problem is not privacy invasion by FANGs. The problem is government privacy invasion, everywhere. And there, sorry to say, Google is not the problem. Perhaps some changes to their policies is warranted, but a total turnaround? Why?

Hospitals and doctor's effectively report on women's periods, contraceptives and pregnancies when women visit. This is not optional, this is important for correct diagnosis and care for women, as well as for emergency care for women when necessary (many drugs and life-saving treatments, including emergency ones, MUST NOT be used during pregnancies, not because religion, but because they would harm the baby, or mother, or both). And unlike Google searches, Facebook chats or Amazon orders, medical provided information about periods has actually been used to convict women getting abortions.

Something similar goes for social workers providing women with feminine hygiene products.

The first thing we need is for police to stay away from medical records, and to go back to outlawing doctors, and any medical and social services (esp. mental care of any kind) giving any information to the police.

But that would this information is inaccessible to law enforcement and the next time some teenager disappears for a week we'd need to show backbone ... The next divorce proceedings we need to show backbone, and WHATEVER mental health history any of the partners have needs to stay out of it. We need to make police, justice, some medical procedures and social work harder, and accept the costs that will come with that.

> But as this current crisis clearly shows, the problem is not privacy invasion by FANGs. The problem is government privacy invasion, everywhere. And there, sorry to say, Google is not the problem.

I literally said that boycotting Google and period apps is a stopgap solution and the real fix is to get rights to privacy enshrined in constitutions?

Just to note that separating medical records from government's prying eyes would also include (lack of) vaccination status and would neuter most 'red flag' laws that restrict gun access based on mental health.

Sounds like a positive outcome.

Vaccination status is something between the patient and the doctor, the police have no need for that information.

Red flag laws are both blatantly unconstitutional and have been wildly misused in their short time in existence, the only people I see defending them are mostly those who see it as an inch towards a complete personal gun ownership ban, which is what they really want.

Doctor/Patient confidentiality used to be sacrosanct, and it is no longer, and realistically I know many people who refuse help because of this. The Defund the Police folks are right, America needs more social workers, not more police powers.

> Red flag laws are both blatantly unconstitutional and have been wildly misused in their short time in existence, the only people I see defending them are mostly those who see it as an inch towards a complete personal gun ownership ban, which is what they really want.

The US has a problem with gun violence that puts all other civilized nations to shame, and it is per 100k second in the world when it comes to firearm suicide [1]. The problem is, getting any sort of federal gun control that actually reduces the amount of gun violence passed in Congress is impossible. Even right after yet another completely preventable massacre - firearm death is the most common source of child deaths [2].

So, yes, states need to be able to institute limitations on gun use, and "red flag" laws that use either known records of mental health issues or (domestic) violence citations are a reasonable compromise between privacy and the right of children to go to school without getting shot dead.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...

[2] https://time.com/6170864/cause-of-death-children-guns/

So, to clarify, you are confirming that you are against personal firearms ownership and also support red flag laws as a compromise/inch towards a ban.

I don’t understand why you’re replying like we are going to engage in a debate here.

Gun violence in the US is insane, and of course you could not have gun violence without guns. Yet other places, of comparable economic status (Switzerland, Austria,...) also have high gun ownership, without having the insane rate of gun violence. So there must be more to the insanity than just 'guns'.

> Google is not the problem. Perhaps some changes to their policies is warranted, but a total turnaround? Why?

But it is the problem. Google legally collects the data, but that means the information is only one law away from becoming accessible and directly used against individuals.

There are many checks in place—practical, legal, and cultural—to keep law enforcement from collecting such data.

FAANG’s surveillance tech has created a backdoor to circumvent all but the legal checks.

That’s an awful place to be in, especially in the world of parallel construction.

Google is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register which is the way around privacy law.

> Twelve years [after Katz v. United States] the Supreme Court held that a pen register is not a search because the "petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company." Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 744 (1979). Since the defendant had disclosed the dialed numbers to the telephone company so they could connect his call, he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers he dialed. The court did not distinguish between disclosing the numbers to a human operator or just the automatic equipment used by the telephone company.

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