The EFF does good work. Here they have Cory Doctorow writing for them.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, August 3:
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Platforms Want To Be Utilities, Self-Govern Like Empires
Believe the Hype
After decades of hype, it’s only natural for your eyes to skate over corporate mission-statements without stopping to take note of them, but when it comes to ending your relationship with them, tech giants’ stated goals take on a sinister cast.
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of tech giants reveal a desire to become indispensable to our digital lives.
They’ve succeeded. We’ve entrusted these companies with our sensitive data, from family photos to finances to correspondence. We’ve let them take over our communities, from medical and bereavement support groups to little league and service organization forums. We’ve bought trillions of dollars’ worth of media from them, locked in proprietary formats that can’t be played back without their ongoing cooperation.
These services often work great...but they fail very, very badly. Tech giants can run servers to support hundreds of millions or billions of users - but they either can’t or won’t create equally user-centric procedures for suspending or terminating those users.
But as bad as tech giants’ content removal and account termination policies are, they’re paragons of sense and transparency when compared to their appeals processes. Many who try to appeal a tech company’s judgment quickly find themselves mired in a Kafkaesque maze of automated emails (to which you often can’t reply), requests for documents that either don’t exist or have already been furnished on multiple occasions, and high-handed, terse “final judgments” with no explanations or appeal.
The tech giants argue that they are entitled to run their businesses largely as they see fit: if you don’t like the house rules, just take your business elsewhere. These house rules are pretty arbitrary: platforms’ public-facing moderation policies are vaguely worded and subject to arbitrary interpretation, and their account termination policies are even more opaque.
Kafka Was An Optimist
All of that would be bad enough, but when it is combined with the tech companies’ desire to dominate your digital life and become indispensable to your daily existence, it gets much worse....
....MUCH MORE
