This week on my podcast, a spoken-word version of "Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability," a major new white-paper that Bennett Cyphers and I co-authored for @EFF.
It’s a paper that tries to resolve the tension between demanding that tech platforms gather, retain and mine less of our data, and the demand that platforms allow alternatives (nonprofits, co-ops, tinkerers, startups) to connect with their services.
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I read the first half of it this week - about 40 minutes' worth - and I'll finish it next week. If you don't want to wait, you can dive in with the written version straightaway:
Since 2017, @beehivebks has been kickstarting GORGEOUS, slipcased, oversized new hardcover editions of beloved public domain classics, lavishly illustrated by the best artists working today.
The idea of "centaurs" comes from automation theorists: it describes a system where a human and a machine collaborate to do more than either one could do on their own. The world's best chess players are centaurs: grand masters paired with software:
While centaurs hold out enormous promise for extending human capabilities and making our lives better, they have a dark corollary: the reverse centaur. That's a system where the machine uses the human for support, not the other way around.
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Amazon's Mechanical Turk is an example of this: a "cloud" of low-waged, precarious pieceworkers that you can tap on demand to do cognitive work that software can't do, mediated through an automation layer that makes the human dimension of the labor invisible.
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Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.
Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your camera.
That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.
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In late 2020, a coalition of predatory, money-losing, private-equity backed companies ran a $200m disinformation campaign that resulted in the passage of California's #Prop22, legalizing worker misclassification and mass-scale labor law violations.
Almost immediately, the passage of #Prop22 led to the loss of unionized jobs paying a living wage and offering basic worker protections, especially for people of color - only to have them replaced by "gig work" that lacked any of the above.
One of the primary funders - and beneficiaries - of Prop 22 was Uber, which pioneered worker misclassification. Uber is now pushing the EU to "harmonize" its regulations in a game of transatlantic pingpong where each volley makes things worse.