Who has your back?
Summary: What do Apple, AT&T, Myspace, Verizon and Yahoo! have in common? Little regard for protecting their customers from governmental abuse of power.
With great storage comes great responsibility
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) published its third annual report (pdf) on online privacy and transparency on government access to your data. The EFF looked at 18 online companies and their policies across six criteria:
Require a warrant for content of communications
Tell users about government data requests
Publish transparency reports
Publish law enforcement guidelines
Fight for users' privacy rights in courts
Fight for users' privacy in Congress.
Not everyone has to defend a user before a judge, but the EFF wanted to acknowledge those that do. Requiring a warrant is a new category, but warrants aren't a legal requirement in much of America.
Let's go to the EFF's summary graphic:
The Storage Bits take
Human beings are imperfect, especially when it comes to wielding power over others. That's why constitutional protections are important.
Major online service providers can afford to, if they wish, go toe-to-toe with the government to protect their users from abuse of governmental power. Individuals — as the case of Aaron Swartz reminds us — don't have the resources of corporate "persons" to defend against governmental overreach.
Let's hear it for companies like Twitter, which actively work to protect us. And let's encourage other tech powerhouses, like Amazon and Apple, to support their customers. It's good for their business and good for America.
Comments welcome, of course.
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Talkback
In the end...
Simple one-liners are good for Dr Phil, not for reality
Oh, where were the people supervising the building in Bangladesh that collapsed and killed hundreds?
How many examples that quickly trash your cozy cant will you need to read before you realize how ineffective that philosophy is?
Especially as its creator, Ayn Rand, became a hypocrite and partook in social security and medicare - hiding behind her husband's surname - when real life got in her way...
And Occupy Wall Street is one example of customers forming a group looking out for their interests (with some exceptions, but given the raw size, it was inevitable some miscreants would be there...)
P.S. the market forces controlling the market,
Two ZDnet articles on same report
given that these companies lobby government out of their own
Government is bought and paid for and companies would rather rip off customers at every turn...
That's not a total truism, since there are exceptions