At this stage tech companies should be pushing for very strong legislation that makes the US a bastion of data privacy to restore trust. But they are still pushing in the other direction.
No amount of legislation can stop subpoenas, wiretapping and other extrajudicial means the US has used for data surveillance since the inception of the Patriot Act. With data privacy increasingly becoming a critical matter of national security, strengthening data sovereignty laws and holding corporations accountable was always the way forward.
This is untrue. Subpoenas, wiretapping, and other extrajudicial means can be stopped by legislation that bans them. You can't say in one breath that legislation that enables it (Patriot Act) cannot be undone by more legislation. There are many hurdles required to produce the required legislation, which may not even be broadly supported by the public, but it isn't correct to say "no amount of legislation can stop existing legislation".
If they could be stopped by legislation that bans them, they would have been stopped by the legislation that banned them prior to the legislation that authorised them, but we know this is not the case. They were being done on a wide scale long before they were legal.
That would require to repeal the FISA and the Patriot acts. That won't happen.
More fundamentally, however, the US constitution only protects Americans and American companies. Europeans would be foolish to trust the US with their data given this lack of basic protection and oversight.
Extrajudicial means something not legally authorized. The surveillance apparatus in the US for decades has operated outside the confines of legality. By definition, they cannot be stopped by legislation that bans them.
None of them want that. Meta actively hates you. Google doesn’t want data privacy. Neither does Apple, even if they aren’t overtly abusing it for advertising. Why would any of them push for more privacy? Their users largely don’t care (or they wouldn’t use those services in the first place).
The people in this regime and their supporters really seem surprised to discover that actually other countries do have agency and national pride. Serious empathy gap in these people.
The US owned the world’s tech stack and countries let it because it was convenient and despite its problems people mostly trusted the US was on their side. In one year we’ve utterly destroyed that and made ourselves enemies of the democratic world. That Silicon Valley did not see this would threaten its global business says something.
This is something even defense analysts have been hammering about tirelessly. The American pivot to counter China should not come at the cost of the Atlantic relationship. Using Cold war scare tactics against China will not work, because China is not in the sphere of European countries that were under the shadow of Russia. China’s language and culture are so far removed from the rest of the world that the risk of direct conflict would not be a matter outside of Taiwan, and cultural hegemony will not take place in the same way Russia tried and at times succeeded.
It feels doubly stupid that not only did American Business sell out their nations’ economic base to Chinese competitors decades back, they fumbled again and sold out to the guy who (yet again) damaged relations of countries funding the service, finance and defense sectors of the US. So now you lost the manufacturing base and you lost the other money-makers. No wonder they are going all-in on fossil fuels to Europe.
No other company is as clear an example of this double whammy as Tesla. Move manufacturing to China to lose the technological edge, and alienate end-users, to lose the customer base.
The adult engineers and adult managers responsible for such things should get the same treatment as any adult having such conversations directly. You can’t just say “wasn’t me, it’s the AI layer I built to do the abuse for me”. You’re actively choosing to abuse and groom children. Sick stuff.
Depending on your situation, if non emergency and you were able to ask the cash price beforehand you might be surprised that you can get the same CT scan for less than what insurance ultimately paid. At least that’s my experience ($450 vs $1200). You may have to ask at a diagnostic imaging place, not the hospital since the hospitals can never tell you what anything costs they aren’t set up for it. (Of course I went through insurance since I didn’t want to pay out of pocket, but it was an interesting lesson in one of the reasons why healthcare is unnecessarily expensive in the US.)
We used to have Google search and Google maps which solved this problem of finding information about symptoms and finding medical centers near you. LLM doesn’t make anything better it just confidently asserts things about medicine that may be wrong and always need to be verified with the real sources anyway.
The US isn’t pouring money into Ukraine. Under the PURL agreement this year it has switched to selling weapons at a mark up that is being paid for by NATO allies. So this plan is not only screwing our own defense industry in the short term, it is doing so in the long term by showing any agreement with the US can’t be trusted and if you agree to buy weapons from the US you may find your supply cut off randomly as you need them.
Can’t you just limit scope for section 230 by revenue or users?
E.g. it only applies to companies with revenue <$10m. Or services with <10,000 active users. This allows blogs and small forums to continue as is, but once you’re making meaningful money or have a meaningful user base you become responsible for what you’re publishing.
Yet residual or enlarged thymus is seen as a potential cause for autoimmune conditions like Myasthenia Gravis. And it’s often removed in these cases. So is it really good to have a thymus after 30 or not?
It is so hard to believe there was a time where bundling a browser with an operating system was a huge scandal requiring a huge government antitrust case to correct.
Maybe it’s just that I’m old and crotchety but we need regulation to debundle everything, including phones. Yes iCloud, so forth no longer is bundled with a phone you have to choose the providers you want and those providers have to compete and no the Apple company isn’t allowed to make its phone work better for its own products. Just like Microsoft once upon a time wasn’t allowed to make its OS work better for its own browser (how quaint).
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