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Cory Doctorow

One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people *like* commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn't like spying, they wouldn't opt into being spied on.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/wat

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A photo of a 1950s-era teen girl lying on a pink bed, holding a Princess phone to her head. Her face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The phone's handset, coil and body have been recolored with stripes in Google's four logo colors. Three Android mascot/robots peek out around her body. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
8 October at 16:43 | Open on mamot.fr
8 comments
Cory Doctorow

This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would *ever* permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

theguardian.com/culture/2017/m

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This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would *ever* permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

8 October at 16:43 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face."

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8 October at 16:44 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to *economic* ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations.

Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that *can't* be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially *power*.

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8 October at 16:44 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they *chose* to do so - to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved.

Conservatives hate this idea.

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8 October at 16:44 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of *choice*. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power.

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8 October at 16:44 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband.

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8 October at 16:45 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/far

Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button.

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8 October at 16:45 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow

In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in *three* places and was *still* being tracked:

pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you

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8 October at 16:45 | Open on mamot.fr
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