[liberationtech] Amnesty International on Surveillance Giants

[Yosem Companys]

From: Doc Searls <doc at searls.com>

(via ProjectVRM list <projectvrm at eon.law.harvard.edu>)

Amnesty International has published Surveillance Giants: How the Business
Model of Google and Facebook Threatens Human Rights: <
https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL3014042019ENGLISH.PDF> Its
Recommendations for Companies (page 50) starts with this:

Google, Facebook and other technology companies that depend on invasive
data-driven operations amounting to mass corporate surveillance must find
ways to transition to a rights-respecting business model.

Amnesty International has the same dependency. See here
https://twitter.com/dsearls/status/1197618922956046336, where I say this:

Great report, but please acknowledge that @amnesty is in the same business.


Also, like pretty much every effort of this type, the report lays all blame
on big bad companies, and wants those companies and governments to fix the
problem. There is no recognition of actual or potential agency on the part
of individuals. We are just victims.

Toward companies, it says,


As a first step, companies must ensure that their human rights due
diligence policies and processes address the systemic and widespread human
rights impacts of their business models as a whole, in particular the right
to privacy, and be transparent about how they identified and addressed
these impacts as well as any specific human rights risks or abuses.

This is fine, but by itself this will never give any of us agency
(including privacy) across all businesses and models. Worse, by itself it
will only reify the existing default construct, by which we are each
required to each opt out of every company's privacy-threatening (especially
data collection, controlling, processing and dispersing) systems.

We need systems of our own: ones that work at scale across systems,
categories and markets. We have models for that with the Net, the Web,
email and too little else. But at least they're models, and in the case of
the Net and the Web they are ones we can build on.

Recommendations for states start on p. 49 and have little if anything to
encourage VRM / Me2B development.

Still, not bad, and worth sharing.

Doc
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