[liberationtech] Techno-utopia -> techno-pessimism: Are we *too* glum now? Need your thoughts.

[Kate Krauss]

Sorry about all the I--

Tl;dr: I do think that Tiktok is dangerous, but it's American company
Facebook that has the solid track record in screwing up American elections.
Also, according to human rights researchers, Facebook is responsible for
ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia and Burma. So my point is that the more I look
at Tiktok, the more I realize that other companies are also a threat and
are not off the hook. And we need a federal privacy law.

-Kate

On Tue, May 7, 2024 at 8:37 AM Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes <
alps6085 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for distilling this TikTok craze to a single Privacy Bill, although
> maybe a wee bit TMI to my taste.
>
> Certainly we need THAT in the U.S., instead of China fear mongering and
> YAWSA (Yet Another White Supremacy Avatar) this time as  “Yellow Man”
> paranoia.
>
> Regards / Saludos / Grato
>
> Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
> Pronouns: He/Him/They/Them (equal preference)
>
> On May 6, 2024, at 10:08 PM, Kate Krauss <katiephr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
> Hi,
>
> Tiktok collects reams of user data, but it also runs proprietary
> algorithms, which are likely extremely privacy-invasive. These algorithms
> are a danger to US users--and everybody else--and should not be secret.
> Tiktok's user surveillance makes its video scroll compelling: They know
> what we like.
>
> American teens are on Tiktok an average of 1.5 hours per day, and many get
> their news on Tiktok. American teens (like other Americans) often lack a
> basic understanding of how the US government, the news media, and social
> media companies work. And of course TikTok videos are not fact checked, and
> can easily be made to deceive (or you can just adjust the mix of videos
> that people see). Even if the company is driven only by engagement, this is
> scary.
>
> The Chinese government can compel access to Tiktok's proprietary
> information if they choose. They've done way worse (mass, forced DNA
> collection, to name one thing). Regardless of how dumb or ill-conceived the
> Tiktok ban is, I'm worried about Tiktok. It's a powerful tool in anyone's
> hands to shape Americans' thinking at scale. So is Facebook.
>
> I remember once when the reporter Kara Swisher visited Facebook
> headquarters. To make a point about something unrelated, Facebook engineers
> changed an algorithm in front of her, quickly and easily, and the platform
> changed instantly. Facebook is where much of the January 6 insurrection was
> organized and earlier it's where Trump bought targeted advertising,
> counseled by Facebook staff, that helped him to win the presidency. Tiktok
> could do what Facebook did, except at the behest of the Chinese government
> and not because they wanted to impress a reporter.
>
> But you know what else? American teens spend an average of 2 hours a day
> on YouTube. Luckily, nothing bad has ever happened there. 🙃
>
> To me, these algorithms, coupled with floods of unchecked disinformation,
> are a huge risk to the upcoming US presidential election and to US
> democracy. Yes, Americans have a legal right to read propaganda, but to
> quote Yishan Wong, Quantity has a quality all its own. So yes, I'm worried
> about Tiktok. And I'm worried about Facebook. And YouTube. The closer you
> look at Tiktok, the scarier all these companies become. *None of them are
> off the hook.*
>
> We finally have a promising comprehensive privacy bill
> <https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2024/4/committee-chairs-cantwell-mcmorris-rodgers-unveil-historic-draft-comprehensive-data-privacy-legislation#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20following%20her%20Committee,control%20over%20their%20personal%20data.>
> being considered in US Congress that would regulate these companies. To me,
> the thing we (we, fans of privacy and human rights) should probably do is
> get behind it and push to make it stronger. Here is a great analysis
> <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/americans-deserve-more-current-american-privacy-rights-act#:~:text=The%20APRA%20also%20allows%20entities,prompt%20notice%20to%20the%20consumer.> of
> it by EFF. In the US, that means calling your member of Congress and
> Senators at (202) 224-3121 and saying that you're a constituent who
> supports APRA, the comprehensive privacy act. You can state ways you'd like
> to make it stronger, or you can leave it at that. Even if a Member of
> Congress already supports it, it helps them to be able to say
> their constituents favor it. Do the same for Maria Cantwell and Cathy
> McMorris Rodgers, who are sponsoring the bill. After that, there are
> probably more imaginative things you could do to demonstrate your support
> for comprehensive US privacy legislation, and I encourage you to do them.
> I'm a huge fan of privacy tools but here I think we also need laws.
>
> If you don't live in the US and think, damn, the US is pathetic on
> privacy, that is very sad, I almost want to help them, I would say writing
> about the issue online can help (use the bill's proper name, the American
> Privacy Rights Act). If you talk to reporters, talk to reporters. Discuss
> it on whichever social media platform you may favor, if you can get
> traction there these days.  It is almost a secret bill. There is not a
> giant uprising of support for it. But there could be.
>
> On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 4:01 PM kaiser kuo <kaiser.kuo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Great point on TikTok, Richard, and one that I've brought up before in
>> arguments: Why risk the destruction of the one Chinese social media app to
>> gain traction outside of China when the valuable data is either out in the
>> open — the TikTok content itself — or easily purchasable from brokers. But
>> the even better point is this dynamic that Byron Tau wrote about and I
>> hadn't thought about: how warrant-free access to data incentivizes maximum
>> intrusiveness. The book goes on my list!
>>
>> I'd also recommend *Surveillance State *by Josh Chin and Liza Lin. I
>> interviewed the authors for the Sinica Podcast. Check it out here:
>> https://thechinaproject.com/2022/09/15/the-age-of-state-surveillance/
>>
>> - Kaiser
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 30, 2024 at 12:26 PM Richard Brooks <rrb at g.clemson.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I enjoyed reading Byron Tau's "Means of Control." In it a WSJ
>>> journalist discusses tech, data, and surveillance. He had
>>> a lot of things I was not totally aware of. I would say his
>>> big point is that the US government realized that you do
>>> not need a warrant to buy data from data brokers, which
>>> lead to lots of companies competing to be as invasive as
>>> possible.
>>>
>>> Hard to be optimistic, when the Western  vendors seem to
>>> be intent on being more Orwellian than the authoritarians.
>>> I also got the impression that the market will sell to anyone.
>>>
>>> The idea of China using TikTok to spy on Americans always
>>> seemed kind of irrelevant. Why would they invest money
>>> in an app, when they can buy the data already?
>>>
>>> On 4/28/24 22:33, Kate Krauss wrote:
>>>
>>> Are we too techno-pessimistic?
>>>
>>> I pulled out this message from the introductions thread because it
>>> didn't get a lot of attention when first posted, but it's fascinating
>>> --thanks, Kaiser!
>>>
>>> I feel ill-equipped to discuss this but I'll get the ball rolling.
>>> *Folks on this list? I'd love to hear what you think about Kaiser's post
>>> (which is pasted below mine).  *
>>> By 2013 and the Snowden revelations, tech activists were realizing how
>>> much both the US government, and as we already knew, platforms like
>>> Facebook were surveilling our lives. (Snowden also revealed how hard the
>>> NSA and GCHQ were going after Tor.  And they didn't get it, ha.)
>>>
>>> I had also seen, previously, pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance in
>>> China of my activist friends. (They've stopped monitoring your phone calls
>>> and they're sitting in your kitchen--not good). So for me it was all of a
>>> piece, and I didn't have to imagine what could go wrong if governments
>>> conducted unchecked surveillance. And it motivated me to work on these
>>> issues.
>>>
>>> Meanwhile, in the wider US, in late 2015 Trump launched his presidential
>>> campaign by demonizing immigrants, then loudly criticized and sanctioned
>>> China's trade practices, and later he blamed COVID on China. And by the
>>> middle of the pandemic, Asian people in Philly were afraid to walk down the
>>> street. So a lot of racist Americans who didn't know much about technology,
>>> IP, or China, were mad at China. And there are always China hawks that
>>> sincerely or exploitatively go after China in DC. But those are different
>>> groups, obviously, than are on this list.
>>>
>>> The people I know who care about online privacy and digital rights
>>> believe (and feel free to speak for yourselves) that if you want privacy
>>> and human rights, you have to defend them, whether by building online
>>> privacy tools, censorship circumvention tools, or decentralized
>>> communications platforms, or educating people in avoiding surveillance, or
>>> blurring out your house on Google maps. You have to take action.
>>>
>>> I myself also think it's important to change laws and regulations, but
>>> you still need the technology. I remember that Griffin Boyce and others
>>> developed tools
>>> <http://I%20remember%20reading%20an%20essay%20by%20an%20internet%20pioneer%20that%20talked%20about%20the%20implications%20of%20online%20surveillance;%20that%20was%20the%20first%20time%20I%20saw%20that%20things%20could%20go%20bad%20on%20the%20internet.>
>>> that made the Stop Online Privacy Act impossible to enforce. Another lesson
>>> from SOPA: Collective action can get the goods. (Thank you, Aaron Swartz.)
>>>
>>> So maybe we are techno-optimists and techno-realists at the same time?
>>>
>>> Mainstream Americans are still inured to a lack of privacy, and that is
>>> very dangerous. However, they are now suspicious of Facebook--and maybe
>>> that's a good thing.
>>>
>>> This doesn't mean that Chinese companies are always  A+ and never
>>> steal IP. I went to a lecture in 2018 or 2019 where a Chinese scholar
>>> presented her research studying Chinese companies--and some of them lacked
>>> research departments because they were "borrowing" IP. Several things can
>>> be true at once.
>>>
>>> Other people on the list: What do you think?
>>>
>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>> From: kaiser kuo <kaiser.kuo at gmail.com>
>>> LT <lt at lists.liberationtech.org>
>>>
>>> Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:20:43 -0400
>>> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] Liberation Tech would like a word.
>>> Thanks, Kate, for stepping up to revive this effort — and for the
>>> low-key shout-out!
>>>
>>> I've written and spoken quite a bit on the seemingly sudden swing from
>>> the politically techno-utopian idea still present in this listserv's name
>>> to the techno-pessimism that seems so pervasive in discourse on the
>>> relationship between technology and authoritarian politics. We've gone, as
>>> I've often said, from believing that the spread of digital technology
>>> sounded the death knell for authoritarian governments to believing instead
>>> that tech is the loyal handmaiden of authoritarians, who've become adept at
>>> using them to suppress dissent and other nefarious ends. To an extent, I
>>> get why this has happened — the failure of the later color revolutions and
>>> the Arab Spring, when we too-eagerly appended the names of various American
>>> social media products to these revolutions (the "Twitter Revolution," the
>>> "YouTube Revolution," the "Facebook Revolution"); the Snowden revelations
>>> about Prism; Russian meddling and Macedonian troll farms; Cambridge
>>> Analytica, etc). I suppose some humility about it was needed, but have we
>>> (i.e. the national or "Western" conversation) overcorrected? I'd be curious
>>> to hear from list members with experience in different geographies to get
>>> their sense of how things have played out in the last decade. I put the
>>> inflection point at roughly 2016: that's when I started sensing the
>>> dramatic narrative shift.
>>>
>>> And I'm curious whether people think that's related to, or completely
>>> independent from, another narrative shift that seems to have been
>>> simultaneous when it comes, specifically, to China: At about that same
>>> moment, the narrative went from this disparagement of China's ability to
>>> innovate (blaming, in most cases, the lack of free information flows and
>>> academic freedom, and positing a relationship between innovation and
>>> political freedom) to a pervasive sense that China was out-innovating the
>>> U.S. and was an unstoppable juggernaut ready to eat our lunch. Obviously
>>> this latter narrative continues and has been made worse in recent years.
>>>
>>> Thanks! Once again, Kate, thanks for your efforts!!
>>>
>>> - Kaiser
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> R. R. Brooks
>>> Professor
>>> (He/Him/His)
>>> College of Engineering Computing and Applied Sciencehttps://www.clemson.edu/cecas
>>> Clemson University
>>>
>>> 313-C Riggs Hall
>>> PO Box 340915
>>> Clemson, SC 29634-0915
>>> USA
>>> office:    864-656-0920
>>> fax:       864-656-5910
>>> voicemail: 864-986-0813rrb at acm.orgwww.clemson.eduhttps://www.clemson.edu
>>>
>>> PGP 1: 955B 3813 41C0 9101 3E6B CF05 02FB 29D6 8E1E 6137
>>> PGP 2: FC15 BAF0 4296 B47E 932A 9DB3 D41B 81AF C6EA 90F6
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable. List rules:
>>> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to
>>> digest mode, or change password by emailing
>>> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>>>
>> --
>> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable. List rules:
>> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to
>> digest mode, or change password by emailing
>> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>>
> --
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable. List rules:
> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to
> digest mode, or change password by emailing
> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>
> --
> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable. List rules:
> https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to
> digest mode, or change password by emailing
> lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/lt/attachments/20240507/7d3a1ab6/attachment.htm>