Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks women

Re:Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks... by geofft on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @12:19AM (#19141249)

Neutrality is a moral viewpoint in itself. It's the viewpoint that nobody is actually wrong, that simply by being a country you have a right to have your moral views respected. In the specific case of app stores, it's the viewpoint that everyone deserves to have the things they're doing made more efficient, and that helping anyone speed up their work is virtuous.

(Neutrality, by the way, is IBM's present defense of Dehomag's actions in World War II: there was a market opportunity in Germany, market opportunities are not inherently immoral, and by the time Germany's morality was beyond the pale, it was too late to say no. See https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss .)

And this isn't really neutrality, anyway. It's neutrality between the views of the powerful. The morality of Saudi Arabia is in scope; the morality of the Unabomber isn't. The morality of the LDS Church is in scope; the morality of Jews who object on religious grounds to the actions of the state of Israel isn't. The morality of China is in scope; the morality of non-authoritarian Communists isn't, because they lost all the Communist countries to authoritarians.

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Re:Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks... by slg on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @12:49AM (#19141369)

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

~Desmond Tutu

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Re:Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks... by BigFish12 on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @08:17PM (#19149484)

In situations of injustice, choosing the side of the oppressor is not always a bad thing, It's sometimes beneficial to let oppressor get it's way. You need to look and evaluate the whole picture before making a decision because constant local optimization is not always the best global strategy. Your goal is to win the war, not the battle.

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Re:Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks... by innocentoldguy on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @01:00AM (#19141408)

I love this quote. Neutrality has enabled some of the greatest evils in history. I think it is impossible to be neutral and also be a force for good.

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Re:Apple, Google criticised for Saudi Absher app that tracks... by schoen on Tuesday February 12, 2019 @02:01AM (#19141611)

This seems like a significant distortion to me. Neutrality can mean that people who provide infrastructure and services may provide them to everyone without being considered to endorse particular uses or users. That doesn't mean that either the infrastructure or service providers or the advocates of neutrality literally believe or assert that "nobody is actually wrong".

From another angle, neutrality can mean that no one, or no entity of a certain type, should have or should exercise certain powers of judgement or discrimination. This also does not mean that nobody is wrong.

This is true across all sorts of situation in which many different entities refrain or are urged to refrain from making particular kinds of judgements or interventions, and there are lots of potentially powerful reasons for such restraint—quite a lot of them having to do with Schelling points that different people can (eagerly or grudgingly) agree on to stop conflicts or disagreements from escalating or infecting everything.

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