Week of 08.24-30: Web censorship & privacy
Twitter shut down a service that archived politicians deleted tweets. Infuriatingly, they had this statement to add:
"Imagine how nerve-racking â terrifying, even â tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?" Twitter reportedly told the OSF. "No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the userâs voice."
I am genuinely stressed about how they donât see why this is wrong. No, if you tweet as a politician you are responsible for what you say: people should have the right to have access to all that they deemed publicly accessible. Accountability, bitches. Itâs nerve-racking to be a politician as is, they are supposed to shoulder the responsibility to serve peopleâs interests. If they canât even handle Twitter, they really shouldnât be politicians.
Australia and the UK are both dialing up to 11 when it comes to surveillance. You know when itâs really bad when the UN special rapporteur on privacy has this to say:
Joseph Cannataci, has called the UK's oversight of surveillance "a rather bad joke at its citizensâ expense," and said that the situation regarding privacy is "worse" than anything George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984
I like this guy. Cannataci seems ready to have some rules about what companies can and canât do with our data. This is terrific news.
As for Australia... Maybe donât call on anyone there from 13 October on, ever. Sorry.
The electronically logged data of mobile, landline voice (including missed and failed) calls and text messages, all emails, download volumes and location information will be mandatorily retained by Australian telcos and ISPs.
Intelligence and law enforcement agencies will have immediate, warrantless and accumulating access to all telephone and internet metadata required by law, with a $2 million penalty for telcos and ISPs that don't comply.
The US asked Norway to arrest Edward Snowden would he set foot in the country. They suspect a similar letter was sent to most European countries.
And now, for something completely different
AMAZON
Amazon is laying off employees at its hardware development section bythe dozen. Projects shelved, frantic employees. Amazon is widely known to be a terrible employer (see NYT article). Their 401(k) pension plan is way below Silicon Valley average, and is based entirely on Amazon stock. The new Amazon Underground app, which pays developers 12 cents an hour is also cause to boycott Amazon wonder about Amazonâs business practices. (I will get off my moral high ground soon, but I have been boycotting them since 2011, this series. Buy books from Kobo, people.) The New Yorker wrote a piece about how Amazon is also bad for the readers, too.
Their argument is this: Amazon has used its market power both to influence which books get attention (...) and, in some cases, to drive prices lower. These practices, the authors argue, squeeze publishers, which makes them more risk-averse in deciding which books to publish. As a result, they claim, publishers have been âdropping some midlist authors and not publishing certain riskier books, effectively silencing many voices.â And this is bad not only for the non-famous writers who go unpublished, but for their would-be readers, who are denied the ability to hear those voices
The authors have basically requested the Department of Justice to look into Amazonâs business practices.















