Internet

This has been a banner week for people concerned about oppression via tech companies. The New York Times put out an article about “the human cost” of Apple products, wherein the litany of safety atrocities that take place in China are detailed. Google released its new Terms of Service, where you don’t get to opt out and they share everything you do across everything they do. Finally, Twitter announced that they are now able to block individual tweets and users.

I thought I’d break this down a bit, as I’ve been somewhat mixed in my own opinions.

…the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, The New York Times - January 25, 2012

There’s nothing fun about reading something like this on your MacBook. I really have no idea what I’m supposed to do as a consumer when something like this happens. Do I boycott all Apple products until they do something radical to change it? Well, supposedly they are. Apple CEO Tim Cook responded with this:

We are focused on educating workers about their rights, so they are empowered to speak up when they see unsafe conditions or unfair treatment. As you know, more than a million people have been trained by our program.

We will continue to dig deeper, and we will undoubtedly find more issues. What we will not do — and never have done — is stand still or turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain. On this you have my word. You can follow our progress at apple.com/supplierresponsibility.

What am I supposed to think? Apple can’t just snap its fingers and make working conditions better in China. Are they really working on it? Is this just an easy out? I have no idea.

In a nutshell: As Cook implies earlier in the above e-mail, most Apple employees don’t know what really is/isn’t going on unless they’re actually there. So how can I?

While I’m lumping these three companies together, it needs to be noted that they are in very different circumstances with disparate corporate philosophies. Google is, in some ways, the one people hold at the highest standard, as along with being massively influential they make the strong statement of “Don’t Be Evil“.

Google recently announced that they have changed their Terms of Service (TOS). Every Google product you use can interact with any other for the purposes of having better information to advertise to you better. The only way to opt-out is to get the hell off of Google.

I’ve had a lot of problems with Google as of late. Google+ is a huge waste of time that causes me to get into stupid debates that I don’t want to get involved in. They’ve used their muscle to try to get G+ further spread by complicating their searches with “personal results”. I also haven’t been enamored with their corporate folks that I’ve seen at conferences.

Google seeks to give information. People with love messing with Siri, but what if Siri really could answer which job you should take? That’s exactly what Google wants to be for you (or at least what Eric Schmidt sees it as). And maybe you want that. But forcing you to opt into that experience is not something that everyone wants.

If this is that big of a deal, where is the government to come in and restrict, or at least force you to have the option to not be a part of that? Like SOPA/PIPA, I think the only way this will really change is if there’s a massive enough outcry. But if there is a change, I think that it’ll be on the Google end. Google is already trying to reframe what this Terms of Use change actually means. Will they change the change? They would, if people stay loudly upset.

In a nutshell: Google is trying to anticipate what users want before they want it or know they can have it. If enough people tell them they really don’t want it, they’ll have no choice but to change policy.

The one that bothers me the most of these three is the Twitter situation, because it’s a position that Twitter hasn’t intentionally put themselves into. Apple is in China to save money; Google is trying to customize their experience to stay ahead of the game. Twitter is just doing what they do, which runs them into trouble in other countries.

Twitter recently announced that they have set up a new system to block specific tweets and users in specific countries. They’ve yet to use it, but they feel it’s a scalpel as opposed to a sledgehammer (with the alternative being globally blocking something). Free speech groups have had a varied reaction. Some feel that Twitter’s commitment to report what they’re censoring (which they’ve said they’ll do on Chilling Effects) is valuable, whereas others feel that the policy is too loose and will make it so future Arab Springs will not be able to take place.

5 years ago, Thailand blocked YouTube for having videos that mocked the Thai king (which is against Thai law). The ban was lifted by YouTube making a deal to make sure videos of this nature would not be seen in Thailand. In other parts of the world (cough China cough), sites like Facebook and Twitter get blocked and unblocked with regularity. Part of the reason is because, whether the West agrees with it or not, speech is legally limited in some places. There are lots of problems with oversimplifying the difficult spot that Twitter is in:

1. We expect companies to be law-abiding. Laws change country to country and this is not easy to deal with.
2. If they don’t comply, they’ll get blocked (See: Google in China). If they do comply, even in a limited, transparent capacity, they get called censors.
3. “Free speech” may be a universally declared human right, but it means different things around the world. Look at the above example with Thailand. Twitter also cites how France and Germany have very specific laws against pro-Nazi propaganda. What about hate speech? It’s hard for me to believe that everyone really believes in free speech as much as they claim.

People in countries where Twitter is blocked/limited have found ways around the restrictions that their countries have placed on them. I hope and believe that this will not impede the users in restricted countries any more than they were before.

In a nutshell: If this becomes a problem, I will speak out, but as of now, I think this is the smartest path for Twitter to take.

I got the logos via a Google Image Search. They all have their own interesting stories.

The Apple logo is from a ZDNet article, Why I Shall Never Buy Another Apple iProduct by Zach Whittaker.

The Google ‘Evil’ logo is from The Stuttering Brain, from a piece from 2008 about how Google is not banning ads that claim to have a cure for stuttering, which is against the ad laws of the UK.

The Twitter logo is from the Reporters Without Borders open letter to Twitter, re: censorship.

Agree? Disagree? I left out Facebook Timeline. If people want me to talk about that a bit, I will. Otherwise, I’m moving on to whatever controversies lie ahead…