<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/20/meredith-walker-signal-boss-government-encryption-laws>
"Police have used the “very legitimate grievance” the public has with large
tech companies like Meta about data collection and surveillance as a pretext to
undermine user privacy, the president of encrypted messaging app Signal has
said.
Meredith Whittaker told
Guardian Australia that it had become “an easy win
with few political consequences” for politicians to beat up on Facebook in the
past decade, and while there was legitimate public backlash against the “mass
surveillance tech business model” the policy response had a “very unfortunate
shape”.
“Instead of aiming for the root of these harms, the concentrated power at the
heart of the platform monopoly, the mass surveillance that is the engine of
this business model, collecting huge amounts of data on people, using that to
target ads, to train AI models, to manipulate and influence people into
spending more and more time on the platform and service of clicking ads … we
see efforts almost to extend this surveillance and this monitoring and give
governments a piece of it,” she said.
“It’s almost as if a very legitimate grievance has been turned into a pretext
for doing what law enforcement has wanted all along while ignoring the core of
the problem and, in some ways, even exacerbating it.”"
Via Dave Farber.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
