Google has announced a step to kill the third-party cookie, a source of enormous and pernicious privacy violations. This would be great news, except for the fact that Google is replacing it with #FLoC, a way for Google (and Google alone) to track you around the web.

1/
Predictably, privacy advocates are pissed off about this and crying foul, because Google's FLoC, while billed as a privacy-preserving technology, is just another way to violate your privacy.

2/
Likewise predictably, the ad-tech industry is in a fury about this, claiming (correctly) that it is wildly anti-competitive.

Taken together, these two criticisms can make it seem like you can't be both pro-competition and pro-privacy, but that's not true.

3/
The digital rights activists who talk about "competition" aren't interested in competition for its own sake - rather, we're concerned with competition only to the extent that it gives technology users more control over their lives, more technological self-determination.

4/
We don't want competition to see which company can trick or coerce you into surrendering your fundamental human rights, in the most grotesque and humiliating ways at the least benefit to you.

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

5/
Because there are easy ways for Google to have blocked third-party cookies WITHOUT spying on us - they could have copied what Apple did with Safari, shutting out surveillance without adding in new surveillance.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

6/
There's a good reason to worry about Google's competition in ad-tech, just not the reason the ad-tech bottom-feeders who are up in arms about FLoC give (which is that they want to spy on us, too).

7/
The reason to care about whether Google faces competition in ad-tech is that it runs these incredibly dirty, wildly profitable ad marketplaces, which it uses to gouge publishers and advertisers, and spreads the loot around to block privacy laws.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

8/
As is always the case with these seeming contradictions, they arise from looking at the situation from the COMPANIES' perspective, rather than from the PUBLIC'S perspective.

9/
How can you cheer Apple for doing good on privacy while condemning Apple for gouging its app vendors like @heyhey? Easy - just think about the problem from the perspective of a person, not a giant corporation:

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

10/
No one should ever make the mistake of thinking that a corporation is "good" - even the corporation that does consistent good today is liable to changes in ownership and management in the future that can drastically alter its conduct.

11/
By all means, cheer the things that companies do, when they benefit the public - and condemn the things that do harm.

Always fight for the user, never for the system.

eof/
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled 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:

pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/iho…

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More from @doctorow

24 Apr
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Guess who's doing a usury in Iowa; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/04/24/pel…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Next Tuesday, I'm helping @bruces launch "Robot Artists & Black Swans," a book of sf short stories in the Italian "fantascienza" mode, at Austin's @BookPeople!

bookpeople.com/event/virtual-…

2/ Image
Guess who's doing a usury in Iowa: When your exercise bike is actually a predatory lender.



3/ Image
Read 19 tweets
24 Apr
#Iowa's HSB 272 ("An Act relating to tax collection and penalties, tax permits and loans made by state-chartered banks") is the kind of bureaucratic maneuver Woody Guthrie's meant with, "Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen."

legis.iowa.gov/legislation/Bi…

1/ An early 20th Century map o...
On its face, the bill is a completely ordinary piece of tax-code cleanup, purging some superannuated rules and consolidating others. But as Iowa law prof @ChrisOdinet writes for @CreditSlips, there's a clever gotcha hidden in that bloodless language.

creditslips.org/creditslips/20…

2/
Here's where the knife slips in: "The general assembly of Iowa hereby declares… it does not want any of the provisions of any of the amendments contained in Public Law No. 96-221 (94 stat. 132), sections 521, 522 and 523 to apply with respect to loans made in this state…"

3/
Read 13 tweets
23 Apr
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud; Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle; John Deere's dismal infosec; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/rep…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
Laundering torturers' reputations with copyfraud: Eliminalia, where "we erase your past and help you build your future."



2/ Image
Foxconn's Wisconsin death-rattle: Imagine losing your family home for a GOP media op.



3/ Image
Read 16 tweets
23 Apr
As far back as 2015, the agribusiness monopolist @JohnDeere was taking steps to ban farmers from fixing their own tractors, arguing that copyright law made trafficking in tools to effect these repairs a felony.

web.archive.org/web/2015042817…

1/ A vintage John Deere tracto...
The company took this to the US Copyright Office, saying that farmers couldn't fix their tractors because they don't OWN them, despite paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for them - software in tractors means they can only be licensed, not owned.

wired.com/2015/04/dmca-o…

2/
Deere bolstered this argument with a paternalistic warning that farmers are just not qualified to service tractors, prompting electronics specialist Willie Cade - grandson of a legendary Deere engineer - to speak out against the company.

securityledger.com/2019/03/opinio…

3/
Read 20 tweets
23 Apr
No one epitomizes the hollowness of the pose of the "hard-nosed businessman" than @ScottWalker, the union-busting thug who, as governor of Wisconsin, signed up to give away $3b to the Taiwanese electronics giant @foxconnoficial, who promised a massive new factory.

1/ A handwritten 2017 memo com...
This was an obviously bad deal right from the start. For literally decades, Foxconn had been tricking rubes like Walker into handing over vast public subsidies for electronics plants that were then drastically scaled down, or canceled altogether.

nakedcapitalism.com/2017/08/foxcon…

2/
But Walker - presently joined by Trump - didn't care. All he cared about was being able to maintain the pretence that "business-friendly" policies (smashing unions, eliminating worker protections) would attract "investment" that would make everyone better off.

3/
Read 20 tweets

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