From: Doc Searls <[email protected]> (via ProjectVRM list <[email protected]>)
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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