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Ed Webb

Interoperability And Privacy: Squaring The Circle | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-privacy-squaring-circle.shtml

opinion Facebook internet privacy monopoly competition EFF

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • if there's one thing we've learned from more than a decade of Facebook scandals, it's that there's little reason to believe that Facebook possesses the requisite will and capabilities. Indeed, it may be that there is no automated system or system of human judgments that could serve as a moderator and arbiter of the daily lives of billions of people. Given Facebook's ambition to put more and more of our daily lives behind its walled garden, it's hard to see why we would ever trust Facebook to be the one to fix all that's wrong with Facebook.
  • Facebook users are eager for alternatives to the service, but are held back by the fact that the people they want to talk with are all locked within the company's walled garden
  • rather than using standards to describe how a good voting machine should work, the industry pushed a standard that described how their existing, flawed machines did work with some small changes in configurations. Had they succeeded, they could have simply slapped a "complies with IEEE standard" label on everything they were already selling and declared themselves to have fixed the problem... without making the serious changes needed to fix their systems, including requiring a voter-verified paper ballot.
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  • the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge
  • Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook's users to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook's investors made their conduct illegal.
  • Today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.
  • Such a tool would allow someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook vegans get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters.
  • In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers
  • the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to.
  • anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some surprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.
  • If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.
  • Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet). Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We're rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.
  • As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web.
  • Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.
  • For users who have privacy needs -- and other needs -- beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.
  • helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we'd be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet
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