pluralistic ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

1/

juliewebgirl ,
@juliewebgirl@mstdn.social avatar

@pluralistic
And then there are those who voluntarily connect to their insurance app while driving to get a better rate.

Pay to stay anonymous is gross.

grey_beard ,
@grey_beard@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic
In the US and probably also Canada “EDR” data is provided to insurers via a little black box and has been in some vehicles since the early/mid 1990’s. There is a database somewhere showing where it is in each model of car. Will try to track it down.
See the following article:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/03/20/174827589/yes-your-new-car-has-a-black-box-wheres-the-off-switch

DamonWakes ,
@DamonWakes@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@pluralistic It seems as though it should be possible to disconnect an antenna or something to avoid this. I mean, the car has to function even if it's going through a tunnel or something and has no signal. Who's to say I'm not driving through a tunnel ALL the time?

GhostOnTheHalfShell ,
@GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai avatar

@pluralistic Wait you’re saying the Matrix was a metaphor?

RenkeSiems ,
@RenkeSiems@openbiblio.social avatar

@pluralistic car insurance laid the foundation for contemporary surveillance. Insurancers were the first customers for Hank Ashers nightmare machine. And remember that data broker sell your location data also to law enforcement and military.

https://www.mckenziefunk.com/thehankshow

gooba42 ,
@gooba42@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic "You wouldn't download a..."

Hold up, are there STLs available because I absolutely will.

SpaceLifeForm ,

@pluralistic

My cars can not leak. They are too old.

TonyJWells ,
@TonyJWells@mastodon.social avatar

@SpaceLifeForm @pluralistic

All my car can manage is throwing some sort of strange code when an ODB-II device is plugged into it, that likely can only be interpreted by a Toyota monk looking it up in some ancient tome whilst chanting surrounded by candles.

Quantillion ,
@Quantillion@mstdn.io avatar

@TonyJWells @SpaceLifeForm @pluralistic
My car is entirely manual. Unconnected to anything except the road.
I will not be "upgrading". 😉

herrman_sk ,
@herrman_sk@infosec.exchange avatar

@Quantillion @TonyJWells @SpaceLifeForm @pluralistic

Good for you, and now please don't take it as trolling, but for how long is this sustainable way to go?
I mean, my previous car was also good old offline model, but well after 12 years it was really good time to say goodbye and now I've got the online computer with 4 wheels and as far as I can see, there is no other option anymore (at least in Europe) if you are buying new car. So in a decade from now it would be close to impossible to drive a decent car (read not 20yo wrack) while it's not an online computer with wheels.

SpaceLifeForm ,

@herrman_sk @Quantillion @TonyJWells @pluralistic

In the US market at least, older used cars are like gold. It is cheaper to fix one than to buy new.

Plus, they do call ET.

david_preston ,
@david_preston@mastodon.social avatar

@SpaceLifeForm @herrman_sk @Quantillion @TonyJWells @pluralistic Older vehicles are indeed lovely and tracking now seems ubiquitous and the data can be reused indefinitely and any rights contained within them can then be wiped upon the termination of the business that obtained them or they can re/de- psyeudonimised. With RaaS being a thing and the connections being there how long before a brand or model of car is held to ransom. The right to repair would enable older vehicles to be kept.

david_preston ,
@david_preston@mastodon.social avatar

@SpaceLifeForm @herrman_sk @Quantillion @TonyJWells @pluralistic I like how the VW Santana was kept as a sought after car, 3 million where made in China, with some improvements but the same car. Means they will have parts to repair them for a long time, shame they never had them in Europe, I think they are quite beautiful. Hopefully the future will be a mix of retro custom cars and spaceships.

CelloMomOnCars ,
@CelloMomOnCars@mastodon.social avatar

@herrman_sk @Quantillion @TonyJWells @SpaceLifeForm @pluralistic

I was thinking about what I would do.
At least if you live in Europe you have the option of ditching the car altogether and opting for a combination of biking and public transit. (I have an inordinate LOVE of the Dutch public transit card). But if you live in car centric places, like the US, you're stuck. You hafta buy that spyware on wheels.

dascandy42 ,
@dascandy42@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic "recongifuring"

I don't think that's a word?

trabex ,
@trabex@newsie.social avatar

@pluralistic

I already hated cars before I read this, and now I see even less reason.

stevel ,
@stevel@hachyderm.io avatar

@pluralistic that’s US privacy for you.
Mine emails me (and the other registered driver) to let me know 2 explicitly authorised users have looked at my stats that day
-Trionity for EV app integration and home assistant. That I pay for and trust
-Octopus energy for their EV charger scheduling. Whenever the car charges it some sends a message to let them know where I am; if I’m at home it decides when is best to charge the toy (i.e. when renewals are at max output). This I have more doubts about

fredcy ,
@fredcy@indieweb.social avatar

@pluralistic I really appreciate your writing, but these "long threads" on mastodon are poor way to take it in.

pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar
fredcy ,
@fredcy@indieweb.social avatar

@pluralistic I do follow your site via RSS, so I get your postings that way and it works fine. I also follow you on mastodon and have to skip over the "long thread" stuff.

pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar
radundtat ,
@radundtat@berlin.social avatar

@pluralistic Not sure that's entirely fair. Those who are gouged are the bad drivers (however the telemetry defines that) whereas the good ones should be getting discounts. I personally can't wait until anyone who speeds regularly gets priced off the road.

pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

2/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot - a surveillance-based discount - they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

3/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

4/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple - and its army of cultists - insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

5/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

6/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product - provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple - and other companies - from treating you as the product.

7/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors - when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms - they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival.

8/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

9/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

10/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at - and stick to - a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

11/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Apple - and Google, and Facebook, and your car company - can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

12/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

13/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

14/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?"

15/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels - it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

16

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app - or any other IP-encumbered technology - is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA - modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products.

17/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere.

18/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

19

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Apple owes its existence to interoperability - its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s - and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

20/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

21/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity.

22/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

23/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission.

24/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

25/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

26/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms - and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers - are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

27/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product.

28/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification - access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams.

29/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

30/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Big Car figured out that VIN locking - DRM for engine components and subassemblies - can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

31/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The fact you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans - over $1t worth! - absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off.

32

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars.

33/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them - they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

34/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

35/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

36/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

37/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

38/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

39/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

40/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

41/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

42/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

At @eff, we call it "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting the vulnerable with conspiracy theories, or teens targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

43

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law.

44/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

45/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

At long last, the San Francisco stop of the book tour for my new novel "The Bezzle" has been finalized: I'll be at the San Francisco Public Library Main Branch TOMORROW (Wednesday, March 13th), in conversation with Robin Sloan!

https://sfpl.org/events/2024/03/13/author-cory-doctrow-bezzle

--

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support @eff with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle:

https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books

46/

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

eof/

18+ obucate ,
@obucate@bildung.social avatar

@pluralistic

Hey Cory, do you have an alternative to long-threading my timeline? I really value your insight and your thoughts, but my timeline is flooded by 46 toots now, which means that I have got lots of scrolling to do.

I'm not quite sure whether there's an option to view them differently, but atm, long threads equal clogging the timeline.

18+ pluralistic OP ,
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar
18+ jmcrookston ,
@jmcrookston@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic

Yeah the layoffs really were performative for companies making that much.

tomjennings ,
@tomjennings@tldr.nettime.org avatar

@pluralistic

And don't forget, the 1988 VPPA was only pushed through because Bob Bork was the victim of a video store leaking a VHS rental ...

Video Privacy Protection Act (“VPPA”), 18 U.S.C. § 2710, a statute enacted in 1988 in response to the Washington City Paper's publication of a list of films that then-Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork had rented from a video store.

18+ bergmayer ,
@bergmayer@mastodon.social avatar

@pluralistic yeah this one bugs me. in part because the line from Facebook is not “Apple should stop doing what we can’t do anymore” but “We should be allowed to snoop because Apple does” https://publicknowledge.org/apples-privacy-promises-are-undermined-by-its-app-store-rules/

18+ technotion ,
@technotion@urbanists.social avatar

@pluralistic anytime I hear an Apple fanboy talk to me about privacy, I laugh

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines