Mark Zuckerberg understands how harmful the NSA revelations are for a global business. Not spying on Americans won't help Facebook clients who come from all over the world. Refreshing view.
Zuckerberg said after the news broke about Prism, the government surveillance program that targets major internet companies: "The government response was, 'Oh don't worry we are not spying on any Americans.' Oh wonderful that's really helpful to companies that are trying to serve people around the world and that's really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies."
"I thought that was really bad," he said and he was right. It's a pity we rarely hear the tech industry and especially the global companies like Google and Microsoft defending their overseas customers.
If cloud and social media companies want to keep our business, they should show responsibility for our data irrespective of the nationality of their clients. Patriotism is misplaced in a global company.
Did you contemplate moving to f.i. European companies because of the "open hunt" on the data of non-Americans? #Politics #SocMed
PRISM started under the Bush administration. Otherwise a good article, but now they try to put Obama's face on it.
Or maybe some of these big companies should relocate out of the USA.
The NSA isn't going to stop doing what it's doing, the govt over there has already proved, frequently, how willing it is to lie to try and hide it.
I mentioned on someone's post the other day that these big tech co's that are mostly software could live anywhere in the world.
For example, they have enough money to buy 'Tech Island', set up there and string their own fibre to it then move their employees (who wanted to) there and pay them tax free, too.
A big undertaking but then they could write their own tax rules, monitor their own end of their traffic and know it to be free from snooping at that end, at least.
In fact this is long enough to warrant a post of its own now, LOL!
I have thought about it, but hard to do.
I did not (contemplate) considering at this stage of the 'game', there's nobody out there offering the services/features Google currently has. Thing is, it's known to the 'tech informed crowd' who's following the whole "Gov't agency X has been exposed doing Y (again)", knows that i.e. Google's fighting "behind closed doors" those 'spy agencies' in the appropriate courts, and that'll take it's time. Unfortunately law prohibits those companies to step forward and actually talk in public what's and how's happening. It doesn't really matter WHERE a company is"legally headquartered at", they'd be still be hammered by those agencies.
love the placard copy made me remember "all base belong to us" meme
Says zuckerberg?! Let me laugh….
I too think it is time for US corporations to consider moving, preferably to Europe, but if not then places like Singapore, Japan etc.
+Otto Normalverbraucher if the companies are outside the jurisdiction of the US they certainly could do more. However I can't see them moving outside of the US.
There seems to be a difference between the companies +Otto Normalverbraucher Not everything is secret so we know Yahoo has gone to court challenging FISA orders.
+Daniela Huguet Taylor Only the creating a sovreign state and fibre laying is the tricky part. the former, mostly as the USA would probably 'refuse to recognise it' a bit like China is with Taiwan but the other way round. Then of course the USA will call them a 'radical' state (because they didn't do as they were told, maybe 'terrorist' if they feel awkward) and then give them some Freedom From Above, pronto.
Of course that would destroy the US economy as nobody in the world would buy from the USA ever again… so they might actually stop at that lunacy. Might.
+Otto Normalverbraucher surely most companies and even public organisations per se try to maintain integrity, but over time there will be more individuals within these organisations who are corruptible and various private players and government agencies will target them. Private companies are not immune to infiltration even if they started their own island microstates.
+Guy Eastwood I was answering the OP, sorry, your comment appeared for me after I posted. 🙂
+Max Huijgen yes, so has google (which was made public by a redaction fuck-up by the U.S. department of justice), and probably others too. I can't see them moving outside the U.S. either, considering that the legal landscape in the U.S. allows a "broader freedom", from a corporate enterprising point of view, than Europe can offer. +Sakari Maaranen that may be true, but by that statement no entity is 'safe', on the other hand, that's not how those agencies operate any longer, thanks to the September 11th 2001 incident, laws in regards of privacy have drastically changed just about in every nation if technological, economical or political significance in the name of "war against terror(ism)", either publicly, like the U.S. or even in Europe (there have been plenty of fuckups revealed where law enforcement has done things they shouldn't have, or laws been changed for "legalizing easier surveillance). Thanks to that, those agencies are hitting them companies with the (now changed) laws, under the guise to fight crime, and/or siphon off data streams directly at the back-bone main distro hubs of the internet, which is a lot easier, than running after a few, troubled for money/ideologies/emotional issues. (Edit for punctuation)
Moving to europe would include the respect of privacy… They are still better off in the states
I have an International Following. So I just Shared this…
Good Government does not rule OVER people. Good Government merely coordinates the large scale stuff that the Public wants and needs.
In a Direct Democracy the Government writes Bills, and then submits them to the Public for a Vote. Yeah, that is a big government, considering that the entire adult population is a branch of it…
The difference is that Google fought for the right to reveal the number of so called Fisa requests after the Snowden revelations.
Yahoo however challenged the FISA's very right to user data stating they were unconstitutional and they did so already in 2008. That's a huge difference in overall stance, but for the general view of my post it doesn't make any difference.
+Otto Normalverbraucher
What are the 'european' equivalent of FB, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter exactly? Moreover, once you're in Europe, you're simply 'officially' spyable by the US?
The access might be harder for the American spies, but the (American) protections are also non-existent, and everything goes… The issue is with the US still believing it's legitimate to even want to dominate the world, that it is not an aggression already.
It should be "are" belong to us. ; )
I know +Mike Elgan These Germans don't know their memes…
+Denis Wallez at the moment the difference is moot as Google is the subject of NSA spying (which claims to have obtained access to the internal network).
As a matter of principle though it would be nice if your mail or cloud provider would stand up for the right of customers wherever they happen to live.
+Max Huijgen What I fear most about all of this is the erosion of free speech. I personally avoid these discussions because I don't want to share my thoughts and beliefs with the any government. I make no judgement on the good or bad of what they are doing. We probably have never had as much freedom of speech as we think and exercising that freedom often has negative consequences whether they be political or social.
+Max Huijgen They have a lot to learn about getting it wrong! ; )
Zuckerberg only pretends to care because most of his digital sharecroppers live outside of the US. Without them, Facebook is even more worthless than it already is.
isn't it "ARE belong to us"?
The way you go about doing something, determines what you are going to end up with….
I've noticed over the course of my life, that the average Human is a bit more Progressive, and a lot more compassionate, than the average government. That means that if we selected the people in our governments by a LOTTERY, then we would get something better, than what we've got.
I'm thinking of that Bell Curve of Statistical Probability
I do think we can do better than that in the selection process, but consider this : IF Random Selection would get us ALL, better Government, than we've got, then we have a serious problem…. points at Psychopaths, running "Intelligence Agencies"
um… Am I in trouble yet?
+Noel Opitz you know what you doing!
Hypocrisy!
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg would have found the spying OK if it were simply renamed a "Privacy Policy change", like the ones Facebook often imposes on its users!
In the today's news, Facebook stands accused of failing to uphold an agreement to get consent for exposing user's private information to new audiences:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/technology/personaltech/ftc-looking-into-facebook-privacy-policy.html?_r=0
Facebook complaining about privacy… the irony is strong with this one…
Maybe his real concern is that the news story got people thinking about privacy, and soon they will demand more of it from Facebook.
Although I can't prove it (which might be why I'm still alive), I've always considered FaceBook to be an SPY Agency project
As far as I can figure, the American SPY Agencies (and for that matter Spy Organizations around the world), have NEVER been loyal to their Governments, or to the people in their countries, any kind of laws, moral behavior, etc…
The various Spy Agencies around the world, have never shown any inclination to be Loyal to anything, besides what furthers themselves. They have never reported anything to their respective governments, which said anything which indicated their activities as a culprit, was doing to undermine, or totally ruin, the normal processes of government
No! No! "All your data are belong to us."
This just makes me wonder if we'll get to the point where we admit that companies run government. Google and FB are new money, new players. Up against the war and oil industries, they won't gain the necessary pull with government until the people can force the governments to put an end to the wars.
lol Zuckerberg whining about privacy issues? Just made my day.
Hm.. Is it really the relevations that are harmful?
Isn't it that the act of spying is harmful?
The 'funny' thing is, that many people already knew that foreign citizens did not have any protection of their data in the use. Apparently no one cares. Not even governments!… Now they act as if they are surprised!
Is spying harmful, or is having something for spies to discover and reveal harmful? 🙂
+Grizwald Grim that depends, would you be willing to let complete strangers rifle through all of your computer activity? If so, send through your credentials and I'll get right on it.
+Nick Coad They're basically doing it whether I'm willing or not. Just let the people use #PRISM on the powers-that-be and everything will come out in the wash 🙂
+Grizwald Grim that wasn't what I asked, I asked whether you are okay with it. And if you are okay with it, you can prove it by posting your credentials for your Google/Facebook account here in this thread.
If you don't, then surely you can understand my point that people have an expectation that their private information won't be scrutinised by people other than those they willingly provide it to. That's not an unreasonable thing to want.
Reading about STASI, Nazis, political and ethnic cleansing and other such abuse might be useful to some.
There really is no 'safe' place to have a data center when your users are sat in watched countries and packets travel through those countries. What really worries me is how much encryption has already been unlocked. Snowden said to use it, but which are compromised?
+Matthew Graybosch +Evan Brody Zuckerberg is certainly no saint and of course it's in his best interest as Facebook is a global company, but that's exactly the way it should be.
Sound economic interest is the best protection against over invasive government intrusions on our privacy. Voting with our feet by moving to companies who don't stand up for the rights of non-Americans is the only way we have to influence policies.
Of course traditionally people used to think that in democracies everyone has one vote. At some point some of us started thinking that everyone should have a different number of votes from zero to to a few billion.
I agree with the comment by +Sakari Maaranen . Aren't citizen participation and strong laws the best protection against bad government? Isn't a democracy supposed to represent the will of the people? If not, the solution may be election reform, campaign finance reform, open-government "sunshine laws", etc.
Or has everyone become so cynical that they assume it is not possible, so they give up?
How to stop an overreaching government +Sakari Maaranen +Evan Brody It's like the military-economic complex of the eighties. The security apparatus is out of the box and no vote will get it back I'm afraid.
I read the situation slightly differently, +Max Huijgen… I see that it's corruption that is having far more worrying overreach and is spreading the industry of fear. It is the industry of fear that is driving this madness rather than government per se. It's using government that is one of its victims. My solution would be to take back the democratic government and use it to tame the corrupt industry.
We can simplify it like this: Decisions are made by two main methods:
1 – Democracy, discussion, votes, transparency, open, public, equality before the law
2 – Power, money or otherwise, legitimate or corrupt, private, closed, proprietary, the law of the jungle
A functioning democratic government belongs mainly to category 1, but too much corruption pulls it to category 2.
If we weaken the government too much or remove it, the only thing we have left will be 2. Power games. That will turn nasty when it's without 1. We need both categories. They balance each other and 1 is supposed to monitor 2 and help keep corruption at check.
Basing social order on private power alone would be like turning the clock back several hundreds of years.
+Nick Coad I'm not particularly sure what the point you were intending to make was in response to. Privacy is great. The necessity of governments to keep secrets is what I dispute.
+Grizwald Grim Some people would argue that the only difference between "privacy" and "secrecy" is that the former is good because it is for them (or their organization) while the latter is bad because it is for other people (or organizations).
"ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!" (OBAMA, Barack)
If someone were courageous enough to apply the european laws about personal data protection, those american companies simply couldn't operate in Europe.
I, as any website owner in Europe, have a lot of obligations and restrictions to gave my services in Spain and Google, Facebook, etc. have none.
Are the US a "data paradise"?
Certainly +Mauricio Luque The US is a data paradise and the reason so many European startups move there.
As for complying with the laws: facebook at least has a different set of privacy rules for the European operations. Google doesn't want to give in so is under scrutiny.