I hold this truth to be self-evident: That corporations which institute systems for their express benefit are and should be held directly accountable for the negative consequences of those systems
You might have heard that 500 Chrome extensions secretly uploaded private data from millions of users. Which highlights a point I've been making for years: that browser extensions (and related services such as Android and iPhone app stores) are cesspits and disasters in the making.
With numerous associations to cesspits and their consequences quite deliberately made.
An apologist for Google (after the obligatory denial of being an apologist for Google) writes:
I don’t think it’s right to hold them to account for things uploaded to their server. It is the end-user’s responsibilty to make good decisions and avoid bad ones.
Woah, buddy!
We fucking know this model doesn't work, and we've known it doesn't fucking work for decades. This link is from The New York Times in 2004, on adware, malware, and spyware infesting Google Chrome Microsoft Windows PCs.
The "consumer responsibility" is the same bullshit "crying Indian" crap industries ducking their responsibility for negative environmental consequences have been trying to push for the past fifty years. (PDF). The Indian was actually Italian, and the tear a glycerin drop -- the entire message was a lie to its roots.
(OK, actually much longer. But this is an example within human memory.)
This is a general pattern with any organisation holding some wealth/power advantage. Bernhard J. Stern wrote of this in the 1930s, with his "Reistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" detailing cases in which incumbants in multiple areas opposed new innovations which might threaten their position. Taking accountability for externalities such as pollution, fraud, or malware, operates similarly.
At a broader scale, this is an issue of public health and epidemiology. Which you might have heard something about recently.
China (and the world) aren't going to stop 2019-nCoV exclusively by saying \"take personal responsibility for your health\".
Microsoft didn't, and Google won't, solve the problem of market-incentivised malware, adware, and spyware by telling users to inspect their motherfucking binaries.
You're lucky if 5% of your user population can use \"find-and-replace\" in a word-processing app. It's not an insult to the general public, it's simply that computer skills on average are minimal or entirely nonexistant and mainstream platforms, operating systems, and applications are forced to accept this.
(Trust me, there are all manner of implications of this I personally hate. But it's a reality, and I can no more deny it than the laws of thermodynamics or gravity. Wishes aren't horses.)
Google have created a wet-market of malware and spyware distribution. It's on fucking Google to fucking fix this shit and mothefucking fast.
Yes, I'm slightly steamed on this point. Bite me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/19/business/yourmoney/barbarians-at-the-digital-gate.html
#google #chrome #malware #adware #corporateResponsibility
