FWIW having worked at Google, I can tell you they take these issues pretty seriously there. This is largely because of a few self inflicted wounds early in the company’s life.
And the "Sign Into Chrome" feature slurps up all your history, cookies, etc. in a form Google can read and which their terms allow them to data-mine, unless you know to dig into the settings and configure a separate encryption key.
I mean..it's a Cell Phone. The "cell" part of it means that you move between different "cells" which correspond to different towers, so that the carrier can best route your call. Even feature phones tracked your location in this way, it's used in criminal cases sometimes.
Ah yes, which explains why my Android phone suddenly stopped working after Google apologized and removed the functionality described in the article.
That the phone has to connect to nearby cell towers is obvious. That this information needs to be sent not to the cell company but to the OS company without an option to turn it off is bad programming or something worse.
And yet most of what he does is just business as usual for Republicans and in common with neoliberal ideas. He is a bit of a wildcard so sometimes he yells something about tarifs, which might come out of nowhere, but looking at the stock markets they are perfectly happy with the current administration.
I don't think it's about ideology as much as interests. In the 80s and 90s, the US was the world's most economically powerful country and was able to use free trade to further its own interests; the ideological arguments for free trade were constructed to justify policies which were deemed to be in the interest of the US and its owners. Now that the US is facing serious competition, protectionism is gradually becoming a more rational policy, and the public ideology of American politicians is adapting.
Methods for choosing to ensure a market that operates how the public wants:
Regulation:
Laws that mandate exactly how something should be done and if the company doesn't do it that way they are shut down - with no regard to whether or not the legally-mandated process achieves the end. Quite literally it's politicians controlling the means to hope that a certain end occurs, regardless of that end being achieved. Prone to regulatory capture, rent seeking, anticompetitive practices. Apt for: when a negative outcome will absolutely devastate the public, there isn't much variability in how to achieve the end, the domains in which the market operates are stable.
Tort Law:
A company is free to change how some process works but is able to be held financially liable for all ramifications of their process. Prone to failure if the assets of a company are less than the damage they can produce. Apt for: a new market which is highly dynamic, the state of the art is constantly changing, ruin is limited to customers who have chosen to engage with the company (no to little externalities).
Neocons: in favor of no regulation and castrated tort remedies
Neoliberals: in favor of bloated regulation (rent seeking) and symbolic tort remedies:
Libertarians: in favor of /extremely/ limited regulation and strong tort remedies.
The problem with tort law is that by the time the government or court reacts, the perpetrators are long gone with the money and only a shell of a limited liability company is left.
For that to work the owners of a company has to be personally responsible for the damages they create.
For tort law to work, you need a very effective universal legal aid system. It can't all be done by no-win-no-fee and class actions, and it takes an extremely long time.
Despite what Redditors like to say, the big banks have done a surprisingly good job at self regulating since the financial crisis. That said, these regulations will probably lax as people get more confident and comfortable with taking risks.
> a surprisingly good job at self regulating since the financial crisis.
The financial crisis was less than ten years ago. That's like calling a drunk driver "responsible" for going a whole week sober since that time they crashed into a minivan and killed an entire family.
Do people who think banks and corporations are good at self-regulating not look at history? The same pattern has repeated for hundreds of years—it’d be embarrassing and horrible if a drunk driver didn’t learn their lesson after a decade, but we haven’t learned our lesson after at least a century.
Hundreds is a bit of a hyperbole here. We've only had modern corporate America for maybe the last 150 years. Pre-industrial companies didn't have as much power or clout as large behemoth enterprises do today.
We’ve only had the Internet for a few decades, but that doesn’t mean we can’t draw parallels between the dot-com bubble and what happened before, or that we shouldn’t have learned from the past.
In this case it's not the same driver though. The majority of people in finance had nothing to do with mortgage backed securities, and a lot of leadership has changed in the past decade.
Remind us which leaders got fired? Wall Street makes the same excuses every time—oh, it wasn’t a majority of us, and those guys are retired anyways.
The same executives that paid fines and damages neither left nor were prosecuted. Perhaps this is because they aren’t guilty, and they just ponied up the money to make people happy. I think most people will agree that it is more plausible that at least some of the people who are still executives were guilty of at least incompetence.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...
People in high positions never get fired. Even Nixon resigned before he was forced to leave office. Do you really think that the board of directors would want to keep someone responsible for causing their stock to drop 99%? I'm sure you can dig up some 10 year old Bloomberg articles to see how leadership changed, but only a few people can make sense of the significance of these changes.
This is all beside my original point anyways. I'm not saying things are perfect right now. My point was that people don't give credit to how common self regulation is because they don't care enough to pay attention to it.
> a lot of leadership has changed in the past decade.
> People in high positions never get fired.
Can you explain how you aren’t contradicting yourself? The first quote is from your original comment.
> I'm sure you can dig up some 10 year old Bloomberg articles to see how leadership changed, but only a few people can make sense of the significance of these changes.
Come on. I gave you an Atlantic article that claims no one suffered any real consequences. In contrast, the sum total of your argument is that “only a few people can make sense of the significance of these changes.” That sounds a lot like mysticism to me— are you operating on faith?
It's not a contradiction. People rarely get fired when they screw up in most white collared jobs. They usually "voluntarily" leave. The Atlantic article focuses on criminal consequences, not leadership changes. My argument is that the board of directors and colleagues would know a lot more than you or me about who to blame and deserved to be asked to leave, and it's in their best interests to make the right decision.
That's a strange statement. What about all the regulation that doesn't come to be? To take your statement to its logical conclusion would allow no company to do anything on its own.
Also, a statement like "no company can be trusted to do the right thing on its own" is obviously untrue, doesn't account for many of us with companies out here, and harms your overall point when you make these kinds of broad generalizations.
Of course they aren't the same. I still don't agree with the statement. And if the pitchforks weren't out, most people would realize that they trust companies to do the right thing quite frequently even when there are no regulations to prevent the wrong thing from being done instead.
I don't think bakeries or flower retail companies doing the right thing are the crux of the argument here, on HN of all places. We're talking about startups that are braving new grounds in terms of what they're able to do, mostly without a legal framework to restrain them. These companies, once they reach a certain size will eventually need to be regulated because they come to wield too much power. See AirBnB, Uber, 23&Me, Amazon, Google, etc., etc.
