From what I've read so far (about half), it definitely feels like a hit piece, but it might come out more effective than transparent.
From the beginning, there were signs and a general feeling that there was an agenda that was forthcoming, and only slightly alluded to. It comes in full force only later, when well into the article, so I wonder how many people that weren't primed to look for it or didn't sense something amiss early where successfully primed from the first portion to accept the insinuated problems later.
I’m not sure about this. This seems likely in industries where the user-facing product/service is necessarily tied to the business model (e.g. manufacturing cars, nuclear power plants, dentistry, etc.).
But that’s not the case with the Internet giants. Surveillance capitalism is the business model that Facebook and Google have chosen, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a social network or a search engine sustained though a different one.
It’s the business model, not the service (or the technology), which violates peoples’ privacy.
And it’s one that, upon reflection after reading the article, the EFF seem to be a supporter of.
Which is why it's a policy disagreement. A lot of the people who want Facebook dead and gone still think it should be done via competition and technology rather than government regulation. Others may disagree. But neither position is any proof of being a shill for Facebook.
> Surveillance capitalism is the business model that Facebook and Google have chosen, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t have a social network or a search engine sustained though a different one.
Right, that's kind of the point. If we can build one on a different model and get people to use it then Facebook will wane without any requirement for government intervention, and a lot of people are actively working on that right now.
But if you pass new laws, they typically have unintended consequences. Normal non-surveillance businesses will still have their customers' IP addresses, names, email addresses, etc. for normal business reasons having nothing to do with data mining. If regulations require anyone with that kind of information to be a large established company in order to afford the compliance costs, you won't get new competitors anymore.
But they are, they're just fighting it on a different front. A lot of bad laws can't be countered with technology because the problem to begin with is that the law prohibits the technology, e.g. you have to fight against key escrow laws in Washington, you can't fix it with technology after the fact (and not expect to be prosecuted).
Companies can be handled in the market, which is what they've been doing. The EFF started the Tor project, which protects privacy and promotes decentralization through onion services. They're also behind a lot of the TLS-promoting stuff like Let's Encrypt and HTTPS Everywhere. The more TLS there is, the less ISPs and other MITMs can spy on plaintext. It also improves privacy against web services because browsers treat HTTPS connections more carefully, e.g. not providing cross-domain referrers.
That's their strategy. You fight the government in Washington and private entities by writing code. That's hardly hypocrisy.
However, the article gave me pause to reflect on the EFF's legislative agenda for what it calls privacy, and made me realize that the EFF's definition is quite different to mine.
Government surveillance is a problem for privacy and freedom. But increasingly, corporate surveillance is too. I had naively considered the EFF my one-stop-shop privacy lobbying organization, but I'm realizing that they're going to fight only half of my battle.
I'm struggling to recall a time when they've backed legislation which ran meaningfully counter to surveillance capitalism as a business model. I'm aware of (and extremely thankful for) Privacy Badger, Panopticlick etc., but these are really toys for nerds, not a credible threat to widespread corporate surveillance.
I'm bothered to find no mention of the California Consumer Privacy Act anywhere on their site (an extremely significant piece of legislation I'd at least expect them to comment on, which was strongly opposed by Google). To be clear, I'm not saying that underneath a rubber mask Cindy Cohn is actually Eric Schmidt, but that the EFF's eagerness not to oppose surveillance capitalism is something I naively hadn't considered before.
You make a familiar argument about the perils of regulation -- I understand this view, but don't personally share it. I'm not trying to convince you (or get you to convince me) on this issue, but my view is that regulating government activities has unintended consequences too, and waiting for the market to implement ethical choices is an call-to-inaction that could have been made (and I'm sure was) against ending slavery, banning child labor, introducing seat-belts, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
These are from just the past couple of weeks:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/new-rules-protect-data...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-libe...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/07/eff-illinois-supreme-c...
> I'm aware of (and extremely thankful for) Privacy Badger, Panopticlick etc., but these are really toys for nerds, not a credible threat to widespread corporate surveillance.
I feel like you're underselling this as a strategy. Let's Encrypt is almost singlehandedly responsible for the massive increase in TLS usage across the internet, and prior to that ISPs and others had been snooping on the plaintext for surveillance capitalism. And despite all the rhetoric (primarily from ISPs and Hollywood) about tech companies, the ISPs are really the bigger surveillance problem here. It's a lot more realistic for a normal person to use Signal instead of Facebook than to use whatever kind of artesian wireless mesh network is necessary to avoid using one of the major ISPs.
And Tor is (sadly) not used by the majority of people, but it's still there for the people who most need it, and it is actually effective.
> I'm bothered to find no mention of the California Consumer Privacy Act anywhere on their site (an extremely significant piece of legislation I'd at least expect them to comment on, which was strongly opposed by Google).
Here it is though:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/how-silicon-valleys-di...
You couldn't find it by the name because the name changed since last year, not because they weren't involved.
> You make a familiar argument about the perils of regulation -- I understand this view, but don't personally share it. I'm not trying to convince you (or get you to convince me) on this issue, but my view is that regulating government activities has unintended consequences too, and waiting for the market to implement ethical choices is an call-to-inaction that could have been made (and I'm sure was) against ending slavery, banning child labor, introducing seat-belts, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
The argument is familiar because it's effective, because it's rooted in truth. There are times when the regulations outweigh their costs, but the costs are always there. Which means they should be reserved for situations where there really is no better alternative, like slavery and child labor.
By contrast, there appears to be an obvious market solution to Facebook -- stop using it.
On the CCPA, thanks for the link (a very good post, which I hadn’t seen, and you’re right, the name change thew me off). I’m still a bit surprised that I didn’t hear about the CCPA passing from the EFF, but the national business press, local radio etc. If they have objections, I want to hear them! I’m sure this will shake-out in time.
On commercial surveillance: This is still comforting murmurs/asking-nicely (which they’ve always done) as opposed formally endorsing/mobilizing-for specific, enforceable legislation, as they commonly do on government surveillance, copyright, NN, etc.
But, the posts you link do seem to indicate that this is now a stated legal priority for them, I’m glad to see CC and DB’s names on peice, as well as a focus on opt-in consent.
Consider me somewhat-reassured and optimistic, and thanks for digging these up.
On the regulation vs. animal-spirits question, I get the impression we’d agree in-person (all of the EFF’s recommendations in your links sound like good ones to me), but I’ll decline another round :)
https://www.eff.org/issues/calea
Or it talks about their support for ISPs, but at the time these were the hundreds of small dial up ISPs that were each highly competitive small businesses with half dozen employees tying a modem bank to a T1 line, not the likes of Comcast and Verizon as we know them today. The EFF was consistently in favor of rules like local loop unbundling that would have prevented their monopolization of that market when it converted from dialup to broadband.
It just goes on like that, pointing to half truths and claiming them as evidence that the EFF is some kind of nefarious front.
The main claim seems to be that they should be lobbying against Google and Facebook on privacy, but that's just a policy disagreement. Privacy regulations -- most regulations -- cement incumbents. If you don't want Facebook forever then what you want is a decentralized social network, not federal utility regulation of Facebook.