The article appears to be saying that there is something fundamentally new happening because Google/Big Tech are now potentially able to facilitate the implementation of law the writer disagrees with.
It's obviously a useful example of the potential for where (say) privacy rights may be superceded by other (eg legal) considerations but framing it as a clear and new moral wrong in the context of a massively contested ethical argument over abortion is simplistic.
What’s the point of this comment? It’s an opinion piece, so we know it reflects the author’s opinions.
You don’t have to agree with them on abortion, or even privacy. But backbiting on privacy solely because it appears in the context of an abortion argument is bizarre.
The article gives the impression that privacy doesn't matter otherwise.
In the author's words, Google's behavior "has suddenly become dangerous", suggesting privacy didn't matter before and would stop mattering again if not for abortions.
The charitable reading is that the author sees a direct link between a lack of privacy here and imprisonment and forced birth for women. That’s a material sense in which Google “has suddenly become dangerous” for the target audience of the Washington Post.
It’s manifest to every reader of this site that adtech has always been dangerous. But it should also be manifest that we’re not the sole audience.
It's also perfectly fair to criticize the author for ignoring the dangers that only affected other people until now.
Framing the issue solely in the context of abortion suggests Google's response should be to stop tracking a few health and pregnancy related data points and otherwise carry on business as usual.
I could be misunderstanding what you mean, but do we actually have evidence that the author has ignored the dangers of adtech until now? All we have is this one topical opinion piece; we don’t know either the contents of their mind or their opinion piece history (unless you bothered to look it up; I didn’t.)
I read this opinion piece as: “here is a topical example of the danger of surveillance capitalism.” The language if imminent danger reflects both the topic and the intended audience, not the more oblique and unlikely claim that privacy violation is okay so long as it doesn’t trample on this one specific issue.
> What’s the point of this comment? It’s an opinion piece, so we know it reflects the author’s opinions.
Well yeah, it's an opinion piece so OP is going to criticise their opinions and how they are framed.
Take the following:
> "This is a moment I’ve long worried would arrive. The way tens of millions of Americans use everyday Google products has suddenly become dangerous. Following the Supreme Court decision to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, anything Google knows about you could be acquired by police in states where abortion is now illegal [...] There is something Google could do about this: Stop collecting — and start deleting — data that could be used to prosecute abortions."
Now what he is effectively saying is - Google should destroy evidence of a particular crime (a crime I suspect most of us believe shouldn't be a crime, but is now a crime nontheless).
He isn't arguing Google should delete evidence of all crimes - just this specific crime.
So presumably we are arguing that Google should be able to decide which crimes are 'good' and 'bad' and then destroy evidence of things that it thinks shouldn't be crimes?
Once more - I personally agree with the author on abortion and don't think abortion should be illegal - but it's a really weird twist to ask Google to effectively intentionally and automatically detect when someone might be breaking a specific law, and then specifically delete just the data that they think could be evidence of law-breaking so that law enforcement can't get the evidence. I can't imagine this passing the sniff-test with prosecutors in terms of tampering/destroying evidence.
I mean if we are arguing for a blanket ban on law enforcement having data from Google then that is fine and a viewpoint I can understand - but only arguing for limitations in the context of abortion is the thing that seems strange.
Should they delete evidence if you crash your car so the police can't see if you have been using your phone when driving? Should they delete the evidence of who was at the congress riots? Should they let investigators trace if a suspect was at a particular location during a murder trial? It becomes a bit of a slippery slope trying to work out where the line is.
> it's a really weird twist to ask Google to effectively intentionally and automatically detect when someone might be breaking a specific law, and then specifically delete just the data that they think could be evidence of law-breaking so that law enforcement can't get the evidence.
To leave with only this interpretation of the article involves ignoring both the headline and the four suggestions that it argues for, which don't concentrate on abortion, but clearly call for rules that would protect women who have abortions to also be applied generally, to 1) all searches and history (possibly qualified with "health-related" exclusions by default in the spirit of HIPAA), 2) all location data, 3) 'incognito mode' in general, and 4) all chat and private messaging.
Abortion is what motivates him (or at least what he decided to hang the article from), but that's clearly one of the few issues that motivates wealthy elites because it has the potential to affect them or someone they love. Any truthful angle that gets anybody riled up against ubiquitous surveillance is good.
It actually argues for the scope of data deletion to be data specifically around sexual reproductive health, for the explicit purpose of deleting evidence of abortions for Roe vs Wade.
I agree that the other points are more broad - but I also think that these issues have to be looked at via more than a single lens. Just using the lens of 'abortion' for these data privacy issues leads to a much more limited scope of discussion than is ideal.
It's a valid debate. Most people in developed countries would clearly disagree with an argument that privacy is beneficial merely inasmuch as it might protect those who e.g. seek abortions late in the 2nd trimester-- which used to be considered part of a pregnant woman's "right to privacy" under Roe (though a lot less clearly so after Planned Parenthood v. Casey which introduced a revised standard) but is very much banned in much of the Western world! The ethical concerns over abortion are extremely real, far more than those involving privacy in a more everyday sense.
There are ethical concerns about abortion - eg whether knowingly giving birth to a sick child is ethical - but the part that’s being discussed isn’t ethically complicated at all. It’s the same situation as with anti-vaxers - on one side there’s a clear consensus, and the other side is a coordinated stupidity, in this case the Church.
To have a proper abortion debate we first need to get rid of political correctness. We need to stop pretending that certain religions are anything more than fairy tales and that they “deserve respect”.
> The article appears to be saying that there is something fundamentally new happening because Google/Big Tech are now potentially able to facilitate the implementation of law the writer disagrees with.
Wrong. People have been warning for 2 decades that corporate surveillance can enable "turn-key" dictatorship.
It's obviously a useful example of the potential for where (say) privacy rights may be superceded by other (eg legal) considerations but framing it as a clear and new moral wrong in the context of a massively contested ethical argument over abortion is simplistic.