back to article Cloud giants demand overhaul of America's privacy rules on overseas servers

Technology trade organizations have urged the US Congress to replace the country's antique privacy protection laws – after a New York court stopped American prosectors from seizing emails from servers offshore in Ireland. A Second Circuit Court in the so-called "Irish Warrant" case, brought by Microsoft against the US …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    Google doesn't want to support this

    Because it would complicate their own hoovering up of everything about you.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Google closer ties with the state than any other, has yet to back the privacy measure."

    ===================

    Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

    ===================

    http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html

    ===================

    Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. ... Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.

    ===================

    Who are these “various people” and what is this “long-term game”? The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination. - The goal: to change people’s actual behavior at scale This is just one peephole, in one corner, of one industry, and the peepholes are multiplying like cockroaches.... A Goldman Sachs report calls it a “gold rush,” a race to “vast amounts of data.”

    ===================

    "We are the native peoples now"

    The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,” and so on. These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy. - We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior.

    ===================

    Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen. Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing. Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily? It’s like asking for suicide.

    ===================

    Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny. - In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just no.

    Anything that comes out of the Congress sausage-machine is entirely certain to preserve no one's privacy even with industry giants getting out and pushing. Sen. Feinstein. Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump.

    I can't think of any way to resolve this.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Just no.

      I can't think of any way to resolve this.

      Two important steps:

      1 - educate yourself and then others on your rights

      2 - insist on your rights. Nothing more. And by "your rights" I don't just mean your right to privacy and absence of surveillance unless there is a clear, and valid reason for it and surveillance has been formally approved by a judge (so, not like Google who has no rights to it but does t anyway), but also your democratic right to insight and transparency in what the government is up to.

      We need law enforcement, because there ARE bad guys. But with such powers come responsibility and accountability, and every time that is not enforced it erodes your rights. ALL your rights.

    2. quxinot

      Re: Just no.

      I can. There's a lovely way to correct the congressional issues in the US.

      It involves a mixture of those American favorites--ammunition and ordinance.

      1. sabroni Silver badge

        Re: ammunition and ordinance

        That's your answer to everything. It's a shit answer.

      2. fruitoftheloon
        WTF?

        @quxinot: Re: Just no.

        Quxinot,

        Right, and that has achieved exactly what so far???

        Ooi, one lives on one of the smaller islands the other side of the pond (I assume you are an American, btw that is not intended to be a disparaging comment), plus unlike many Brits, I have a fair amount of (legal) experience using small/full bore rifles/pistols plus shotguns etc.

        I suspect that the Federal gubmint and its' many varied militia members is rather better armed and trained than the populace; I doubt that is coincidental...

        Regards,

        Jay

      3. Mike Moyle
        Headmaster

        Re: Just no.

        Just to confirm: are you recommending "ordinance" (legislation or executive decree) or "ordnance" (weaponry and/or munitions)?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Perhaps governments should actually agree to the "terms and conditions" that the rest of us have to?

  5. quxinot

    I was not clear and haven't been in town. To clarify, I was suggesting using the ammunition on the lawmakers.

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