[DSingularity]

Yes! Let’s stay in a present where Israeli hackers-for-hire can help dictatorships capture and murder dissidents.

At a minimum we should demand transparency and accountability from all of these scale-enabling organizations.

[ben_w]

Obviously I am not in favour of that either.

Making takedowns automatic on any user report means the dictators take down the apps of the dissidents.

In the absence of AI that would necessarily have to be good enough to also radically change society and the economy, the only solution I can even think of is a big increase in funding for the policing of apps. Who exactly would fund that? Governments would want to use such powers to pursue their own agendas, while Big Tech taking a proportion of App Store income is already being called “[Apple|Google] tax”.

[funcDropShadow]

Or we could use a different architecture for our applications that isn't so easily taken down. You know like locally installed apps, that can do something without the cloud overlord pushing new code with every pixel or character that is transmitted.

[ben_w]

How would that stop, to go up-thread a bit, "an advertiser … that was using JavaScript … to fingerprint user's devices and if an Android device was detected a fake media player or fake CAPTCHA would trick user's into accepting push notifications for fake virus warnings to install questionable apps from the Play Store"?

[DSingularity]

Why can’t we we reduce cloud provider margins and use that money to fund it!

I mean — why is this not obvious? Force these companies to adhere to certain regulatory standards - the minimum of which is transparency and accountability.

[etherealG]

I’m sad to see you being downvoted. I agree completely. Somehow the richest company in the world paying for this burden on us all is a bad idea :/

[hef19898]

I guess your founder and CEO being victim of something similar helps in these decisions. Or not.

[mrits]

I wish we could just go back to the pre amazon days where we didn't have problems in the middle east

[DSingularity]

This is besides the point. Just because the Middle East has been in turmoil since it was neo-colonized after WW2 doesn’t mean it’s okay for massive corporations to exert this much influence.

Also, while we are on this subject, your language has some pretty orientalist vibes to it. I wonder who you think created these problems and who feeds them today?

[mrits]

You should have closed with "How do you like them apples?"

[DSingularity]

I’m confused. Do you support corporations having this kind of unchecked power or do you support the neo-colonial strategies that have left places like the Middle East in turmoil for the past century?

[jjice]

Given two sides of a spectrum, one will take that one that aids their argument most. We need a healthy middle, like most cases.

[DSingularity]

No dispute there. That’s why you should push for accountability and transparency. When we discover groups like NSO, we (the public) should be able to use FOIA like mechanisms to query these cloud providers and check if they are doing business with these criminals. We should be able to see who exactly approved their application and why they didn’t fail whatever standards we (the public) have decided that cloud providers should uphold. Maybe the standards had gaps or maybe there is corruption. Either way, the public has a method for feedback into key parts of society: cloud providers.

Voting with the dollar doesn’t work anymore.