Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month
One of the most brazen lies of Big Tech is that people *like* commercial surveillance, a fact you can verify for yourself by simply observing how many people end up using products that spy on them. If they didn't like spying, they wouldn't opt into being spied on.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted 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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated

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A photo of a 1950s-era teen girl lying on a pink bed, holding a Princess phone to her head. Her face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The phone's handset, coil and body have been recolored with stripes in Google's four logo colors. Three Android mascot/robots peek out around her body. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
A photo of a 1950s-era teen girl lying on a pink bed, holding a Princess phone to her head. Her face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The phone's handset, coil and body have been recolored with stripes in Google's four logo colors. Three Android mascot/robots peek out around her body. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
A photo of a 1950s-era teen girl lying on a pink bed, holding a Princess phone to her head. Her face has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The phone's handset, coil and body have been recolored with stripes in Google's four logo colors. Three Android mascot/robots peek out around her body. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/2

This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would *ever* permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/mar/11/sxsw-facial-recognition-biometrics-surveillance-panel

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/3

The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face."

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/4

This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to *economic* ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations.

Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that *can't* be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially *power*.

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Arianity
Arianity  ·  last month

Long thread/4

@pluralistic You often say that power can't be reliably quantified and can't be mathematically modelled. Why is that? It seems like you could just include terms for it in equations. The issue seems to be that certain economists tend to ignore it/assume it to be negligible, rather than it being impossible.

There are for instance, models that include monopoly/monopsony (and even show why they're bad).

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/5

The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they *chose* to do so - to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved.

Conservatives hate this idea.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/6

They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of *choice*. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/7

Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/8

Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five

Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button.

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send
send  ·  last month

Long thread/8

@pluralistic
Thank you for this insight!
I've only recently started following the neoliberal economists you are referencing on substack, and my first reaction was "am I too stupid to understand this?", but now I see that the model of revealed preference doesn't apply IRL. It tries to compress millions of interconnected dimensions of our life into a smooth 1D model. (1/2)
send
send  ·  last month

Long thread/8

@pluralistic
All while making assumptions that everyone has perfect meta-information, cost and preference signals propagate instantly, nobody ever does anything illegal - or, as you quipped, that power doesn't exist - and then wonder, why poor choose to be poor under this assumption, why indeed, what a curious artifact of the model... what a load of bullshit.
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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/9

In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in *three* places and was *still* being tracked:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/10

Multiple googlers complained about this: they'd gone through dozens of preference screens, hunting for "don't track my location" checkboxes, and *still* they found that they were being tracked. These were people who worked under Chai *on the location services team*. If the head of that team, and her subordinates, couldn't figure out how to opt out of location tracking, what chance did you have?

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/11

Despite all this, I've found myself continuing to use stock Google Pixel phones running stock Google Android. There were three reasons for this:

First and most importantly: security. While I worry about Google tracking me, I am as worried (or more) about foreign governments, random hackers, and dedicated attackers gaining access to my phone. Google's appetite for my personal data knows no bounds, but at least the company is serious about patching defects in the Pixel line.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/12

Second: coercion. There are a *lot* of apps that I need to run - to pay for parking, say, or to access my credit union or control my rooftop solar - that either won't run on jailbroken Android phones or require constant tweaking to keep running.

Finally: time. I already have the equivalent of three full time jobs and struggle every day to complete my essential tasks, including managing complex health issues and being there for my family.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/13

The time I take out of my schedule to actively manage a de-Googled Android would come at the expense of either my professional or personal life.

And despite Google's enshittificatory impulses, the Pixels are reliably high-quality, robust phones that get the hell out of the way and let me do my job. The Pixels are Google's flagship electronic products, and the company acts like it.

Until now.

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Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/14

A new report from Cybernews reveals just how much data the next generation Pixel 9 phones collect and transmit to Google, without any user intervention, and in defiance of the owner's express preferences to the contrary:

https://cybernews.com/security/google-pixel-9-phone-beams-data-and-awaits-commands/

The Pixel 9 phones home *every 15 minutes*, even when it's not in use, sharing "location, email address, phone number, network status, and other telemetry."

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Marcel Waldvogel
Marcel Waldvogel  ·  last month
According to @GrapheneOS people, which are very knowledgeable in this area (as the goal of their free Android OS replacement is to keep Google at bay and maximizing security/privacy), the #Cybernews report on #Pixel9 is incorrect: What Cybernews reports is the behavior you get on any #Android phone, if you answer the setup questions to maximize data leakage.

Switching to other Android ohone manufacturers only increases your problems.
@pluralistic
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113276070397057417

Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow  ·  last month

Long thread/15

Additionally, every 40 minutes, the new Pixels transmit "firmware version, whether connected to WiFi or using mobile data, the SIM card Carrier, and the user’s email address." Even further, even if you've never opened Google Photos, the phone contacts Google Photos’ Face Grouping API at regular intervals.

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