Slashdot Mirror
Mistrust of Google and Facebook is a 'Contagion' That Could Spread To Every Tech Company, Says Box CEO Aaron Levie (recode.net)
Aaron Levie isn't worried about his company, Box, being regulated -- but he is worried about what happens if the government has to do something about Facebook. From a report: "It's a contagion because it's going to reduce trust in these types of platforms," Levie said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. "The worst-case scenario for us is that Silicon Valley gets so far behind on these issues that we just can't be trusted as an industry," he said. "We rely on the Fortune 500 trusting Silicon Valley's technology, to some extent, for our success. When you see that these tools can be manipulated or they're being used in more harmful ways, or regulators are stamping them down, then that impacts anybody, whether you're consumer or enterprise."
Earlier the mistrust was for IBM and Microsoft. Then Oracle was added. And now Facebook and Google.
Also realize that the list just grows, the only way to get off the list is a liquidation.
What's worse is that the mistrust against the top companies is just the tip of an iceberg - you have a large number of companies that aren't visible the same way like doubleclick, cxense, ioffer etc that probably are even worse since they don't provide any benefit at all.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I see no reason why any company holding any personal data should be trusted. They are the ones that resist any regulation of personal data. They are the ones that profit off of it.
You have to earn trust. Since when has any company done that?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
There are two obvious ways to improve trust:
1. Open source all proprietary software, and commit to only using unmodified open source software in production. This way we know what these companies are doing with their software, because we can inspect the code for ourselves.
2. Write all new software, and gradually rewrite all existing software, using the Rust programming language. This way we know that the software is safe and secure, but still efficient, because it has been checked by the Rust compiler.
Doing those two things would help restore the trust that has been lost.
If your business model includes collecting user data, you cannot be trusted.
Even if you are a saint, one day as part of your exit strategy is selling out to another entity and they will pimp out the data one way or another.
And then there's your own security or lack thereof. You will be broken into and the data stolen and abused.
And in this day and age, matching user profiles with others and other data is nothing.
Box?!?! A clud content and filing sharing service?!?
Ahahahahaha, you're gonna get it up the ass one day! It's gonna happen.
The worst-case scenario for us is that Silicon Valley gets so far behind on these issues that we just can't be trusted as an industry
Google and Facebook have crossed that line long, long ago. Perhaps that mistrust is justified.
Apathy is already a contagion that has spread. No one care how much data google and facebook have on them. And they shrug shoulders when it falls into hands of unknown shadowy theives. And they even feel to unmotivated to quit google or facebook when that happens.
Were all waiting for the shoe to drop and it never does. But we do see signs of things like voter manipulation or lots of hard to quantify privacy intrusions. Nothing you can really put a finger on. To hard to investigate.
Hey that sounds like the perfect rationale for regulation of an industry by a central watchdog.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You left out NSA from your list
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
They all need to be brought to task, their behavior should never have been codified as acceptable business practice in the first place. They began making this bed long, long ago - were so many of them really so arrogant as to presume no one would ever notice or care? There aren't a whole lotta people in modern tech to look up to, that's for sure.
Mistrust of the companies is not contagious. Abuse of user privacy by big companies IS contagious, apparently. If they don't want us to distrust them, they should start acting like trustworthy companies. You can't blame users when the root problem is shitty corporate policy.
"..., then that impacts anybody, whether you're a victim or enterprise."
There, fixed that for you. It surprises me that companies are whining when they have tried so hard to be unworthy of any trust at all.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Well, after decades of sharing your own data with all those companies and boasting "I have nothing to hide" attitude, what do you expect? If you gift everyone something of value and they start selling it, why blame everyone? Wake up!
Allowing a few nations security services deep in networks while selling domestic "security" and "privacy" is why so many US brands are so far behind.
Giving crypto to governments, it contractors and random staff to use as they want.
Allowing governments deep into your crypto and code.
Not having the staff skills to find governments and mil wondering around deep in your networks.
Dont sell crypto thats junk as a security product and expect the world to then trust any US brand.
Hire staff on merit with skills who can understand and consider gov/mil spyware kits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Gov and mil contractors deep in your best products is not good as the same spyware methods get sold to anyone with cash.
The world has no trust in any brands skills when gov/mil/contractor/random people with cash get crypto keys in real time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Technology before wisdom, what could possibly go wrong.
Americans are a fearful people. We're literally taught to be fearful from childhood. Who in America hasn't had these sentiments slammed into their faces at some point in life?
All politicians want to be tyrants.
All neighbors are potential molesters.
All automobile drivers are blind and malicious.
Anyone will step on you to get ahead.
We're constantly at risk of invasion, attack, or harm otherwise.
Everybody wants what we want and they're willing to take it by force.
Of COURSE Americans distrust massive rich corporations that have a plausible desire to exploit them. We've been told to expect it. And in some scenarios (oddly enough like the Facebook and Microsoft ones), we shouldn't actually trust the companies. Given that it is one of our most important principals to be secure in our person and papers (aka - personal information) and these companies are in prime place to access that personal information, we have to continually ensure that the tentative trust of customer/vendor is sufficiently earned.
But never be surprised when Americans distrust a powerful person or organization. It's literally in our upbringing.
Honestly, what makes anyone think that trusting a huge faceless corporation is good idea to start with?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Mistrust of Google and Facebook is a 'Contagion' That Could Spread To Every Tech Company"
Greed is a contagion that has spread to every capitalist company, but you sure as shit don't hear any shareholder bitching about profits, now do you?
Funny how everyone is all up in arms about the moral and ethical values tech companies hold, right up until it affects revenue and stock price.
Nothing will change, because Greed.
indeed, these excessively rich "executives" are not your friends or neighbors, they're a gang of self-serving thugs and have so corrupted the marketplace and society that honest people can't make a reasonable living and in many cases can barely survive financially. Evidently excessive greed and arrogance is going to be our tower of babel.
Is there anybody out there that actually trusts Facebook (except the people who work for Facebook)? At this point, aren't people in the position where they don't trust (or even like, or enjoy) Facebook, but quitting it altogether isn't an appealing option either due to how integral that platform is to communications and their daily lives?
Google and Apple are slightly different: I'm sure there are large numbers of people that do entirely trust (rightly or wrongly) Google and Apple.
That's going to be a real challenge.
These are companies. They have to make money somehow in order to operate. Plus some amount of eventual profit if they are publicly traded. And none of the options are great. Three choices: they can charge individuals for their services (and lose users), they can sell ads (and annoy everyone), they can "monetize" the consumer by selling data (and damage trust). Or some combination of the three.
Some sub-group of users are going to be angry no matter which option they choose.
The "problem" is that the mistrust of the companies named in TFS is absolutely, totally, well-deserved.
When you see that these tools can be manipulated or they're being used in more harmful ways, or regulators are stamping them down
When you see that these tools can be manipulated or they're being used in more harmful ways, regulators will stamp them down eventually. The industry solution has classically been to self-regulate in order to avoid the government involvement. When a center of innovation becomes a bank of the world, there is certain tension in the air.
Google and more so FaceBook are not to be trusted as they have repeatedly put profits before privacy and so need to be regulated.
Corporations need to be regulated, like the banks which have repeatedly taken advantage with every loophole and lobbied against every attempt to regulate them and are now in a bubble and bailout cycle all of the time the executives received their bonuses.
This story sounds like it's about a decade or so out of date. I think most people made the decision that they couldn't trust these platforms a long time ago. That doesn't mean people don't use these websites, but there's an automatic jadedness to it.
That someone in 2018 is worried about government regulation, isn't so much a sign of people beginning to mistrust these websites, as it is that people are finally getting to the "we have to Do Something about this adversarial force, with whom our relationship just keeps not getting better." And in America, Doing Something tends to involve passing laws rather than altering ones own behavior, because we're more into authoritarianism than freedom, compared to the rest of the world.
In a more conservative (or at least libertarian) society, these companies would have simply gone out of business a while back, or else at least ended up facing market forces that made it where they had to be less hostile to their users. Fortunately for them (at the time), they were operating in America so they didn't have to worry about consumer backlash, so it worked for a while. But now they're going to get political backlash instead.
Really. Just do it. Critical thinking is a good thing.
The thing is, it's ALWAYS been possible to manipulate these sorts of platforms. Recall the results that Google used to return for "more evil than satan himself" and "miserable failure"? No? Fine... go ahead and Google for "Santorum". You'll still get more than a dozen mixtures of lube and fecal matter before you get to the actual stack of crap that used to be a senator. And this is nothing new to the internet. Howard Stern used to engage in the pastime of having his listeners prank call news stations with "reports" blaming everything from the death of John Kennedy Jr. to the bomb attack in the old WTC's parking garage on his producer: "ba ba booey". And none other than Dan Rather once got fooled by a fake report wrt/ George Bush #2's national guard service.
The fact that media platforms can be manipulated and fooled doesn't make them inherently untrustworthy. It means that they're designed and operated by human beings. And humans are inherently prone to making mistakes; particularly when they're deliberately misled. That doesn't mean anyone should distrust legitimate and reputable media and run off into conspiracy theory and they're-out-to-get-me paranoia land. It means you should just check multiple sources and apply critical thinking skills to what you read and hear.
Imagine all the people...
First there were mainframes that offered lot's of power and high levels of privacy, but were limited in user access.
Then there were Personal Computers that offered limited power, but wide user adoption and maintained privacy.
Then there was the "Cloud" that offered virtually unlimited power AND wide user adoption but disregarded privacy.
The future is going to be to go back to personal computers/servers that control data locally and privately but now can offer virtually unlimited power and connection.
Government is not being trustworthy either. So if you care about these things, SOL. Fortunately? The public doesn't even care enough to hang on to net neutrality so, business as usual. But the internet as something in the public's interest is dead.
Why would anyone 'Trust' a company? The whole purpose for existing is to profit off of you.
Trust is something that is earned and maintained. You don't get it by default, and you have to keep being trustworthy if you want to keep it.
Doubly so if you plan to profit from it.
I'll never trust any business that is ad supported, at some point they will break your trust to ensure their profit. Its much easier to trust a company that I pay, that is beholden to my payment and not a payment from an advertiser. If you want users to trust you then treat them in a way where they can trust you. If you fail when customers leave then you will ensure that those customers are taken well taken care of so that you don't fail - this is true even when your customers are advertisers.
Techies never trusted them. The general public, apparently, never being informed that they are sheep have gone straight to the slaughter.
The distrust should not only spread but be amplified until someone dies something to protect the witless beasts.
Sorry, but multi-billion dollar tech companies, startups, and everything in between is consistently demonstrating their business model is to harvest far more information about people than they realise, and then make money from it.
Yes, we distrust you, because we pretty much know you're doing the shady things you don't want people to know you're doing.
The distrust is real, and it's based on the actual fact that these companies are hoovering up tons of information about people.
Yes, Silicon Valley has a trust issue. But let's not pretend there isn't a damned good reason for it.
Really? An hour long podcast? .mp3 from their website.
If you don't want to install iTunes, or Spotify, use the Pocket Casts link and download the
I listened to the five minutes of seems to be an advertisement for his company and gave up.
Consumers' distrust towards tech companies are a good thing. It will require the companies to earn the trust, e.g. by providing additional transparency in their business or management of data.
It's unfortunate that apparently the silicon valley whiz kids can't seem to form a business plan without a) free-to-use products and b) selling information about the product's usage to others.
One would hope (in vain) that people would see the destructive effects of this model on the foundations of democratic government (think fake news influencing elections) and shun FB, MS and the rest. They have earned and richly deserve our mistrust, if not imprisonment.
Americans are a fearful people.
To an extent this is true. It certainly explains the success of the gun lobby. It also explains the desire (by some) for a border wall, much racism, and quite a lot of other features of our society. On the other hand we can be an incredibly brave and adventurous people too if properly motivated. We're complicated...
Of COURSE Americans distrust massive rich corporations that have a plausible desire to exploit them.
Except they do trust them. If they did not trust them then they wouldn't act the way they do. If you do not care enough to actually act on that mistrust then that is indistinguishable from in practice trusting that organization. And there are huge swaths of our voting public that may on occasion distrust corporations but they definitely distrust government - even under circumstances where they probably should fear the corporations more since they are less accountable. There are also huge swaths that feel exactly the opposite. Both are right at times and wrong at times. The truth is that some caution is always warranted and some trust is always necessary.
Given that it is one of our most important principals to be secure in our person and papers (aka - personal information) and these companies are in prime place to access that personal information, we have to continually ensure that the tentative trust of customer/vendor is sufficiently earned.
That's a nice theory about what we should do but it doesn't explain what we actually do. In reality we hand over our personal information quite readily to unknown parties without even
Its funny how so many american get angry when the government tries to tell them what to do. Those same americans take any amount of crap off of some corporation and say "well thats the contract". Americans love to get told what to do by non governmental organizations. We have even given them the right to bribe/lobby for more 'rights' to do it. But at least we aren't giving decent healthcare to the masses.
The best approach is to slowly entangle the resource (human consumers of your platform) until they can't conceive of living without it. i.e. boiling the frog by raising the temperature slowly. Once the general population considers participation in a social media & cloud computing framework a sign of normality and lack of participation a sign of criminal deviance, then success is assured. Once upon a time, there was a great outcry about the mass of data collected by credit agencies on ordinary people; now people actively seek participation in the credit system and quickly forgive even the most catastrophic failures of trust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Waxman: Well where do you think you made a mistake then?
Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations specifically banks and others were such is that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
consumers love what they think is free stuff - gmail, facebook, etc. they ignore the fact that google and facebook have to make money somehow and that's by selling the data they collect. doh.
nothing to see here - move along
While I'd appreciate some kind of "common requirements" regarding privacy - this is simply a matter of owning the problem. If Gov't has to regulate it becomes more difficult to operate as a free business. If Silicon Valley doesn't own the problem - then we won't trust them because it isn't their problem.
I signed up with Disqus and they have this whole "you promise to keep your password secret, only use the platform for appropriate purposes, and allow us to share/do X,Y,Z to you, bend over...blah blah" in the privacy statement. BUT it doesn't say what happens when somebody HACKS THEIR F-ing system and steals my password and runs off with all my private data. So no -- I won't provide you with my real name.
I don't Trust You!!
Signed,
-Bob
Google, Zuckerbook, and others have abused and broken the trust of their users over and over and over again and you bastards are actually surprised and upset that no one trusts you anymore!? Seriously!?
MEMO TO TECH COMPANIES, ALL OVER THE WORLD: You motherfuckers want people to trust you? Then you have to EARN THEIR TRUST by displaying a consistent pattern of TRUSTWORTHYNESS over a long, long period of time -- and I don't mean the typical "Fool the idiots into BELIEVING they can trust us by making some Grand Gesture then going behind everyones' backs and continuing with business as usual", either. Stop violating everyones' privacy. Stop stealing their private data. Stop profiling people. STOP MAKING PEOPLE AND THEIR PRIVATE DATA YOUR 'PRODUCT'. Just fucking STOP.
And the gun grabbers. After all, there wouldn't be any crime if we just rounded them all up, amirite?
Nice attempt to misrepresent the argument. The argument is that guns make violent crime MUCH easier which is undeniably true. Nobody thinks eliminating guns would eliminate crime and to pretend otherwise is to present a strawman argument. Confiscation of guns unquestionably would reduce the amount of crime committed with guns. Pretty hard to commit a crime with a gun if you can't get one in the first place. But since that won't (and IMO shouldn't) happen then the proper thing to do is to closely monitor gun ownership. The 2nd amendment does say "a well regulated militia". Which well regulated militia are you a member of again?
Remember kids, when they say "no one is coming for your guns," they really mean "we're totally coming for your guns."
There is a huge gap between sensible regulation of gun ownership and actual confiscation of guns and we are in no danger of crossing that gap and likely never will be in the US. Widespread confiscation of firearms is a political non-starter in the USA. But we have a situation where ownership of dangerous weapons are ludicrously under regulated. I own several guns and I think it's bonkers that I have to jump through more hoops to get a drivers license than to carry a deadly weapon whose sole purpose is to kill and which does so with horrifying efficiency. You can regulate a right to bear arms without abridging that right.
And I don't even use Box. Not like they'd have my trust to begin with - I have never trusted any of these companies other than the (very few) which have *earned* my trust. The fact the CEO of Box is such a f*ing idiot he would assume users just come in to a new platform completely trusting is as laughable as it is horrifying.
This is amazing.
Don't you realize that the only way they ever got the personal information in the first place, is that someone did trust them? People choose to give information to companies like Facebook and Google.
The ones holding the personal information are the ones that PEOPLE VOTED as MOST TRUSTWORTHY. Past perfect tense. It already happened: people decided to trust Facebook and Google.
Again: this is an amazing attitude. How do you reconcile this with the fact that Facebook and Google have so much of people's data? Them having the data suggests that they obviously did do something to get peoples' trust. Otherwise, they simply wouldn't have the data and nobody would be disappointed or feel betrayed that they used it incorrectly. (Are you sure trust needs to be earned? Did Facebook earn it? If you can't think of how Facebook earned trust, then you might be wrong that earning it was necessary.)
I think the best way to take your comments, would be as advice to users, to think about why they trust websites with their personal information before they go ahead and give that information. If people do that (think!!) before they give power to potential adversaries, then I think people might learn how to abstain and then these websites wouldn't ever gain the power in the first place. WE should make others earn our trust as a condition for giving them power over us, instead of treating all strangers as completely trusted by default.
And if Facebook and Google need to be regulated, it's almost as a corrective action, and not even for their own sins but for the sins of their existing users who leapt before they looked. People incorrectly trusted these sites before thinking about why/if they should. And now that the damage is done, that means we've decided that Facebook and Google should be forced to become trustworthy, since it's too late to deal with the usual situation where you don't trust someone (which you usually address by denying them power over you).
But that itself (forcing them to become trustworthy), I think might be unprecedented. In real life, we mostly merely judge whether or not someone is trustworthy. Or we put conditions on trust, like insisting that someone act trustworthy (or somehow demonstate trustworthiness) before we make the decision to treat them as trustworthy. But have we never forced someone to become trustworthy, after the fact?
This idea isn't merely rare on the internet, but it's rare in business in general, rare in personal relationships, and rare in politics. Dealing with trust after-the-fact (and then also: using force to get it) is not the typical way we handle trust issues. You usualyy deal with trust first, before deciding to make yourself vulnerable.
Somehow, I suspect we don't know how to do that. Anyone have examples where we have successfully done it? (Prisons are about the only example I can think of where this approach is used, but I'm not sure people would describe that as successful, or at least not here in USA.) (Thought of another: arranged marriages, maybe?)
Treat your users, customers and workers like people, not like assets or products, treat them like partners instead of cash cows, and you'll notice that they'll actually WANT to do business with you again.
What goes around comes around.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I hope this "mistrust" spreads like malaria. You and your companies are just parasites feasting on the "lower" humans souls.
'I feel stupid,
and contaigous
here we are now
entertain us'
Mr. Cobain was a prophet indeed.
Trust?
What trust?
You are the Product.
Not the Customer.
They sell data and metadata and ads targeted at you based on that.
What trust?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unfortunately, it would be dangerous and misguided to consider this question solely from the perspective of "Can you trust Facebook?" or "Can you trust Google?"
The reason for this is simply because of the legislative framework under which any company incorporated in the United States [and similar controls apply in other countries - this is by no means a US-centric issue] are legally obliged to operate.
For example, the US Government can issue an "NSL" - National Security Letter to any US Company and that company is legally obliged to cooperate and legally prohibited from even admitting that they have received such an NSL. In the UK the equivalent notification is the "D-Notice", and disclosure of being under the direction of a D-Notice can be considered a breach of the Official Secrets Act, which carries some very strong punishments indeed.
The second reason that it is important to understand context concerns what we already know.
Disclosures from Edward Snowden have taught us that:-
1. Physical modifications have in the past been made to equipment from Cisco systems between that equipment being released by the factory and arriving with the client.
2. Systems have been compromised by specially-made USB cables, which included micro-transmitters that gave access to agents operating using a "remote control device" the size of a briefcase, from a range of up to 8km.
3. etc...
Does this suddenly mean that all (US/UK/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand) companies are suddenly to be considered untrustworthy? No, of course not. It just means that you have to walk into business relationships with all parties [no matter the country of origin] with your eyes open.
Aaron Levine is right to be concerned, but the issue isn't "Google" or "Facebook" alone, it is the fact that any company to whom you give data can be compelled to give up that data to the government under which that company is incorporated. And from the perspective of the government in question, it is far cheaper to get some commercial entity to do all the hard work, then subpoena it for next-to-nothing, than it is to spend a fortune attempting direct connection...
It's good that people wake up and realize the dangers of American tech products and media, social and IT services. In the end, all of them are wholly or in part used to funnel data and money into the U.S. on shaky ground and premises that most people would object to, if they were privy to all the details.
If you use U.S. tech or services, then the companies and U.S. agencies are all up in your shit.
Governments and financial institutes outside of the U.S. simply cannot continue to use U.S. tech, hardware, operating systems, or they are wide open for sabotage and espionage.
If you don't trust the corporate cancer and agree to love, honor, and obey the ToS, then you'll merely force them to take away your email address. Probably remove your birthday, too.
Actually, I was looking for "funny" in this thread. The obvious jokes were something along the lines of "I caught the distrust virus" or "Too late, it got me!". Couldn't find anything along such lines. *sigh* Sadly typical for Slashdot these days.
The corporate cancers are winning. Or maybe that should be past tense and we're just in the grace period until advances in drone technology and self-driving cars eliminate any need to keep the humans around. Thus endeth the Fermi Paradox?
Solutions? We don't need no stinkin' solutions! Certainly not on Slashdot.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
...that sell their users' information need to worry.
Silicon Valley says they need skilled foreign workers, and Congress should bring them in. In reality, the positions are not as skilled as Silicon Valley claims they are, and the USA has plenty of workers to meet their needs. It is an excuse to bring in cheaper workers. Silicon Valley engages in age discrimination. Silicon Valley companies say they are politicially unbiased, but they are not.
The world's most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data
Casteism
if they didn't do all these things to earn our mistrust, then we would still trust them.
but no, instead they all seem to make the same mistakes and do the same horrible things.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The worst-case scenario for us is that Silicon Valley gets so far behind on these issues that we just can't be trusted as an industry
Too late. People woke up to the fact that you are all greedy sociopaths long before the Facebook scandal broke (hell, just look at the cesspool of evil that is Über).
We haven't trusted you for a long time. You are like drug dealers. We know you are scum who are out to cheat us, but what can we do? We've allowed ourselves to become addicted to your junk.
But, many are self-detoxing and beginning to realize that we really don't need any of the crap you are selling. Once this movement gathers steam, it will make the .com bust look like a minor market correction.