Quotulatiousness

March 20, 2023

“It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of The Line have strong opinions on the federal government’s decision to batter Google, Facebook, and other online “giants” over their opposition to the proposed internet legislation in bills C-11 and C-18:

As a result of C-18, both Google and Meta have considered dropping news distribution from their platforms, or have outright promised to do so. To which we have responded: “Well, no shit, Sherlocks.” We have, in fact, warned all of the parties involved with this misguided bill that that’s exactly what was going to happen.

Nonetheless, the dim-witted government officials and corporate media barons who have pinned their hopes of survival to the apparent money spigot of Big Tech didn’t believe us. So when Meta came right out and said it would drop news last week, the ashen-faced Minister of Heritage accused them of using “intimidation and subversion” tactics. And, thus, these demands for private correspondence appear to have been drafted.

It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies — and, by extension, the many independent media creators like ourselves.

Well. Okey Dokey then.

*cracks knuckles*

Let’s start with two very obvious points: firstly, we at The Line don’t object to forcing these tech companies to disclose funding to third parties for the purpose of opposing C-18 et al. That is perfectly reasonable, in our minds. Further, if these companies are being accused of anything illegal, by all means, investigate away — after you get a warrant.

The rest of these demands are nothing short of banana crackers; it’s an extraordinary interpretation of the committee’s mandate. It’s the kind of overbroad dragnet that will necessarily create privacy breaches for the unknown numbers of ordinary citizens, dissidents and journalists who have corresponded with these companies about these bills.

We will remind the government that private citizens and private companies do not owe the government a full accounting of their private business or communications. The government is subject to this kind of transparency and disclosure because the government works for us. Not the other way around.

We will also point out the irony. The government is demanding years worth of correspondence from private entities within a very short time frame: this is a level of transparency that no government department would subject itself to. Don’t believe us? Just try to draft a similar ATIP request to any ministry; it would take years to get such a request fulfilled, and half if it would come back redacted.

March 19, 2023

Disagree with the Canadian government’s attempt to take over significant parts of the internet? Get ready for administrative punishment, citizens!

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist, who often seems like the only person paying close attention to the Canadian government’s growing authoritarian attitudes to Canadians’ internet usage, shows the utter hypocrisy of the feds demanding access to a vast array of private and corporate information on a two-week deadline, when it can take literally years for them to respond to a request for access to government information:

Senator Joe McCarthy would be in awe of the Canadian government’s audacious power grab.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The government plans to introduce a motion next week requiring Google and Facebook to turn over years of private third-party communication involving any Canadian regulation. The move represents more than just a remarkable escalation of its battle against the two tech companies for opposing Bill C-18 and considering blocking news sharing or linking in light of demands for hundreds of millions in payments. The motion – to be introduced by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (yes, that guy) – calls for a series of hearings on what it describes as “current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to avoid regulation in Canada”. In the context of Bill C-18, those tactics amount to little more than making the business choice that Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez made clear was a function of his bill: if you link to content, you fall within the scope of the law and must pay. If you don’t link, you are out of scope.

While the same committee initially blocked Facebook from even appearing on Bill C-18 (Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he was ready for clause-by-clause review after just four hearings and no Facebook invitation), bringing the companies to committee to investigate the implications of their plans is a reasonable approach. But the motion isn’t just about calling executives before committee to answer questions from what will no doubt be a hostile group of MPs. The same motion sweeps in the private communications of thousands of Canadians, which is a stunning disregard for privacy and which could have a dangerous chilling effect on public participation. Indeed, the intent seems fairly clear: guilt by association for anyone who dares to communicate with these companies with an attempt to undermine critics by casting doubt on their motivations. Note that this approach is only aimed at those that criticize government legislation. There has been a painfully obvious lobbying campaign in support of the bill within some Canadian media outlets, but there are no efforts to uncover potential bias or funding for those that speak out in favour of Bill C-18, Bill C-11, or other digital policy initiatives.

It is hard to overstate the broad scope of the disclosure demands. Canadian digital creators concerned with Bill C-11 who wrote to Youtube would find their correspondence disclosed to the committee. So would researchers who sought access to data from Google or Facebook on issues such as police access to social media records or anti-hate groups who contacted Facebook regarding the government’s online harms proposal for automated reports to law enforcement. Privacy advocates focused on how Google administers the right to be forgotten in Canada would ironically find their correspondence disclosed as would independent media sites that wrote to Facebook about the implications of Bill C-18.

December 5, 2022

QotD: Open concept house designs

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, “rooms did not have specialized functions”, explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. “Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown.”

A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for “furniture” still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to “mobile” in meubles and mobilia.)

These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.

As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves,” notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had “multiple seats, for ease of conversation” — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.

Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.

November 8, 2022

QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marx was right. Not for the right reasons, and not in the way he intended, but right for all that. Think of one of those medieval plague doctors in the bird masks. They think the plague was caused by a conjunction of the planets, and they want to give you a poultice made from sheep rectum to cure it … so, you know, they’re wrong about big important stuff. But they’re right about the critical, live-or-die thing: You’ve got the plague, and they know it better — and, crucially, faster — than anybody.

Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).

If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.

Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …

See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”

Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

May 25, 2022

“What is a reasonable general concern?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:

What is a reasonable general concern?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.

And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.

Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.

Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.

It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.

A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.

But a general concern? A general preoccupation?

That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.

It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.

How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.

Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.

The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.

That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.

March 21, 2022

For some reason, Canadians’ interest in alternative currencies has risen substantially since February

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m far from alone in taking the Canadian government’s absurd over-reaction to the Freedom Convoy 2022 political protest in February as a reason to be concerned about the Canadian banking system. Until then I’d paid very little attention to alternative currency options like Bitcoin and the like, but I now understand that they may be a key element in future financial planning. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay explains that he realized at the same time he needed to know much more about crypto:

“Bitcoin – from WSJ” by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On February 15th, following weeks of anti-vaccine-mandate protests in downtown Ottawa, Justin Trudeau lurched from complete inaction to absurd overreaction by declaring a national emergency. One effect of this was that banks were suddenly authorized to freeze the personal assets of citizens linked with the protests, civil liberties be damned. Around the same time, moreover, hackers acquired and published identifying information associated with thousands of people who’d donated money to the protest movement. Rather than denounce this apparent criminal data breach, many public figures — including Gerald Butts, who’d been Trudeau’s right-hand man before resigning amid scandal in 2019 — actually celebrated this doxxing. Some media outlets even tried to mine the dox information for clickbait before being stung by a public backlash. While I hadn’t donated to the Freedom Convoy movement, I was sufficiently appalled by these developments that I started educating myself about how one might donate to a similar cause without government officials and social-media hyenas exploiting these transactions as a pretext to attack my assets and reputation.

The easiest way to get into the crypto market, I learned, is simply to open an account at an exchange platform such as Coinbase or Wealthsimple. But while they’re easy to use, exchange platforms also generally require clients to supply government-issued ID when they secure their accounts, and transactions are traceable by authorities. To assure myself of real anonymity and theft-protection, my tutor instructed me, a better (if more complex) option is “cold storage”. This is a real physical device — in my case, something called a Ledger — that acts as a personal crypto wallet.

My Ledger (which looks like a large USB key drive) contains the data required to generate the “private keys” (which look like long passwords, though that isn’t quite what they are) that allow me to send my crypto to other people. And that spending can be done only in those moments when the device is connected to the Internet, after which it can be relegated to a drawer or safe (thus the metaphorical concept of “cold storage”). On the other hand, I can receive money even if the Ledger is offline, so long as the sender has my public key, which (unlike a private key) is generally safe to give to others (such as, say, a prospective donor to any charitable cause that I might establish).

Bitcoin’s basic mechanics were set out in 2009 by the much-mythologized pseudonymous author (or collective) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a legendary white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Satoshi describes the newly conceived electronic coin as consisting of a chain of digital signatures (a blockchain) that build one upon the next through a mathematical mechanism known as a cryptographic hash function — a one-way function whose output doesn’t expose the original private key to reverse-engineering. So once a bitcoin transaction is recorded and added in verified form to the blockchain by everyone — this being the “public distributed ledger” that bitcoin users are part of — the transaction can’t be erased or reversed (with one important theoretical exception, described later on).

Image contained in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, demonstrating the use of public and private keys to verify and sign bitcoin transactions.

Of course, you don’t need to understand how this cryptography works to use cryptocurrency. But it is worth getting your head around an important concept that fundamentally separates crypto from conventional assets such as, say, money that sits in a bank account. Your bank account number doesn’t have any value in and of itself: It’s just an institutional convenience that tells you and your bank where your actual money’s been filed (which is why that account number sits in plain sight on every physical check you sign, assuming you still use checks). But in the case of bitcoin, a private key basically is money — in the sense that anyone with access to such a key can spend the associated funds. And so if you lose your private-key information, or it gets stolen by a thief, there’s no 1-800 helpdesk number. It’s gone forever.

February 11, 2022

QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Of politicians in power it might be said, “By their proposals, shall ye know them.” What they say they want to do is almost as significant as what they actually succeed in doing, for it offers an insight into their fundamental philosophy or state of mind. This is especially important, of course, when they seek to cling on to power by re-election or by some other means such as behind-the-scenes-influence.

That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant — and sinister — in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.

The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)

The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.

Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”

A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.

I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.

But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights — inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.

May 5, 2021

Michael Geist’s overview of the federal government’s steady retreat from their 2015 election promises on protecting Canadians’ online privacy and free speech rights

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Reposting his most recent Maclean’s article on his website, Michael Geist explains why the federal government’s blatant hypocrisy over Canadians’ rights online has finally gotten many people paying closer attention:

The government had maintained that it had no interest in regulating user generated content, but the policy reversal meant that millions of video, podcasts, and the other audiovisual content on those popular services would be treated as “programs” under Canadian law and subject to some of the same rules as those previously reserved for programming on conventional broadcast services.

The backlash undoubtedly caught the government by surprise, particularly since the policy change garnered little discussion at committee. As the public concern mounted, Guilbeault retreated to his standard talking points about how the opposition parties were unwilling to stand up to the web giants. The arguments fell flat, however, since the new rules were directly targeting users’ content, not the Internet companies. Further, the public reaction pointed to a government increasingly out-of-step with the public, which may support increased Internet regulation, but not at any cost.

The fact that the Liberal government was open to regulating millions of TikTok and Youtube videos was a reminder of how unrecognizable its digital policy approach has become in recent years. The party was elected in 2015 on a platform that promised to entrench net neutrality, prioritize innovation, focus on privacy rather than surveillance, and support freedom of expression. Most of those positions now seemingly reflect a by-gone era.

It is still anxious to demonstrate its tech bona fides, but now progressive policies appear to mean confronting the “web giants” with threats of regulation, penalties, and taxes. Cultural sovereignty has replaced innovation as the guiding principle, which has meant the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has been replaced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage as the digital policy lead.

And so for the past 18 months, Guilbeault has been handed Canada’s digital policy keys. In Guilbeault’s eyes, seemingly everything is under threat – Canadian film and television production, a safe space for speech, the future of news – and the big technology companies are invariably to blame.

Few would dispute that an updated tech regulatory model is needed, but evidence-based policies are in short supply in the current approach. For example, the use or misuse of data lies at the heart of the power of big tech, yet privacy reforms have been curiously absent as a government priority. Indeed, Bill C-11 was promoted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last November as legislation to give Canadians greater control over their personal information, but under newly named ISI Minister François-Philippe Champagne, it has scarcely been heard from again.

The government has similarly done little to address concerns about abuse of competition, the risks associated with algorithmic decision-making, or the development of a modernized framework for artificial intelligence. Years of emphasis on the benefits of multi-lateral policy development and consensus-building were unceremoniously discarded the recent budget in order to commit to a digital services tax in 2022 that could spark billions in tariff retaliation. In fact, the US-Canada-Mexico Trade Agreement that the government trumpeted as a major success story restricts Canada’s ability to even establish a new liability regime for technology companies.

January 23, 2021

Scott Alexander returns

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Having been driven from his original blog due to a doxxing threat from a New York Times reporter, Scott Alexander has resumed his public blogging, this time on Substack:

Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.

I’m happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.

Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It’s related to English “rationality” and “arithmetic”, but also “art” and “harmony”. And “right”, both in the senses of “natural rights” and “the right answer”. And “order”. And “arete” and “aristos” and all those other Greek words about morality. And “artificial”, as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively “reign” and related words about rulership, and “rich” and related words about money.

(also “arthropod”, but insects creep me out so I’ll be skipping this one)

The dictionary defines ṛta as “order”, “truth”, or “rule”, but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?

In practice, articles (another ṛta relative!) here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics. The political posts sometimes stray into choppy waters, and I have immense sympathy for people who are sick of that and prefer to pass.

As with most Substack blogs, it’s a subscriber-supported effort with limited public posts available to non-paying subscribers (like me).

November 18, 2020

The Consumer Privacy Protection Act

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Geist looks at Bill C-11, which was introduced by Navdeep Bains on Tuesday:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

Canada’s privacy sector privacy law was born in the late 1990s at a time when e-commerce was largely a curiosity and companies such as Facebook did not exist. For years, the privacy community has argued that Canada’s law was no longer fit for purpose and that a major overhaul was needed. The pace of reform has been frustrating slow, but today Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Navdeep Bains introduced the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (technically Bill C-11, the Digital Charter Implementation Act), which represents a dramatic change in how Canada will enforce privacy law. The bill repeals the privacy provisions of the current Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and will require considerable study to fully understand the implications of the new rules.

This post covers six of the biggest issues in the bill: the new privacy law structure, stronger enforcement, new privacy rights on data portability, de-identification, and algorithmic transparency, standards of consent, bringing back PIPEDA privacy requirements, and codes of practice. These represent significant reforms that attempt to modernize Canadian law, though some issues addressed elsewhere such as the right to be forgotten are left for another day. Given the changes – particularly on new enforcement and rights – there will undoubtedly be considerable lobbying on the bill with efforts to water down some of the provisions. Moreover, some of the new rules require accompanying regulations, which, if the battle over anti-spam laws are a model, could take years to finalize after lengthy consultations and (more) lobbying.

September 2, 2020

Trust – the limiting factor on Chinese tech firms’ growth

Filed under: Business, China, Government, India, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Henrik Tiemroth on the “glass ceiling” that Chinese technology companies are struggling with:

The rise of Chinese technology firms has been one of the major developments of the last decade. As some of those companies expand their operations overseas, some observers see China laying the groundwork for a broader imperial project, using their growing digital might to project power and influence. By 2030, will we all be sending messages on WeChat, searching on Baidu, and shopping on Alibaba?

Probably not. As China’s major tech firms attempt to expand to global markets, they are running into a glass ceiling of their government’s own making: people don’t trust them. The recent ban on ByteDance’s popular social media app TikTok in the United States demonstrates the extent – and the limits – of China’s digital ambitions.

TikTok was the first Chinese internet product to have a mass following in the United States. As of 2020, the app has 100 million active users in the US – about a third of the population. But the popular and seemingly innocuous app for making, viewing and sharing quippy homemade music videos has been declared a national security threat.

In August, President Trump signed an executive order effectively banning the app, along with WeChat, unless their US operations are taken over by a domestic company. Given the close links between Chinese companies like ByteDance and the government, they argue, the data collected on American users of the app could be used by the Chinese state for espionage or other nefarious purposes.

The Trump administration is not the first government to take this step. In July, India banned TikTok, along with 59 other Chinese apps, amid rising tensions with China. The government cited similar concerns about the potential for mining and misuse of private data. Indonesia temporarily banned the platform in 2018, and Japan is reportedly considering following the US’s lead.

Across the world, people are becoming warier of who uses their data and how. Lawmakers are perking up, as the implications of data for national security are becoming more clear. In 2018, the European Union implemented landmark data privacy laws. In the US, tech CEOs are regularly dragged before congressional committees and a bipartisan movement for regulation is building.

Chinese internet companies face those same concerns and then some. It’s one thing to have your personal data used to promote conspicuous consumption. It’s another entirely to have it weaponized by a sophisticated digital surveillance state at the cutting edge of data-driven totalitarianism.

August 4, 2020

Ontario’s COVID Alert app

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist explains why he has installed the Canadian government’s COVID App on his phone, despite the privacy concerns such government tracking apps present:

The Canadian COVID Alert app is ultimately as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. The voluntary app does not collect personal information nor provide the government (or anyone else) with location information. The app merely runs in the background on an Apple or Android phone using bluetooth technology to identify other devices that come within 2 metres for a period of 15 minutes or more. Obviously, the distance and timing are viewed as the minimum for a potential transmission risk. If this occurs, a unique, random identifier is stored on each person’s device for a period of 14 days. After the 14 day period, the identifier is deleted from the device.

The identifier does not identify a specific person or location information, and is not sent to any centralized database. If a person tests positive for the virus, they are given a key code to input into the app. Once the key code is inputted, anyone that was identified as being potentially exposed over the prior 14 days receives a notification that this has occurred and they should consider testing and/or self-isolating.

From a privacy perspective, this is very low risk. Indeed, the government’s position – confirmed in the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s analysis – is that there is no collection of any personal information and therefore the Privacy Act does not apply. The Privacy Commissioner rightly points out this raises some concerns about the state of the law (arguing it should be sufficiently robust to allow for reviews of this kind), however, the use of random identifiers ensures that identification of individual is very unlikely. Moreover, the Privacy Commissioner’s review concludes that “there are very strong safeguards in place” with security of the data, commitments limiting use, independent oversight, and a pledge to de-commission the app (including deletion of all data) within 30 days of the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada declaring the pandemic over.

The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner was also engaged in the review process. Her recommendation letter points to commitments for potential ongoing issues, including ensuring that the app is effective, that there is monitoring of third party components such as the Google-Apple Exposure Notification System, and public transparency associated with the app and its use.

While the app passes legal muster, its introduction reinforces the problems with social inequities that COVID-19 has laid clear. Much like the connection between socio-economic status and infection risk, the app itself is only accessible to those who can afford newer Apple and Android devices. That obviously means that those with older phones or no wireless access at all are unable to use it. While I don’t think that is reason to abandon the initiative, the government should be exploring alternatives to allow all citizens to implement these safeguards.

May 9, 2020

Sidewalk Labs pulls out of their Panopticon-on-the-harbour project in Toronto

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley clearly hoped the Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs would turn out to be a benign addition to the Waterfront:

Sidewalk Labs Toronto demo, 17 April 2019.
Photo by Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Scalable Grid Engine via Wikimedia Commons.

It would be a mixed-income and family-friendly community: 20 per cent low-income and 20 per cent middle-income, with 40 per cent of units two-bedrooms or larger. It would be fantastically energy-efficient. It would discourage waste production using “pay-as-you-throw chutes” leading to pneumatic tubes that would rocket your trash, recycling and organic waste to the proper facilities.

Some of the details seemed a bit far-fetched, and some of the ideas came to naught at the design stage. But the Google family of companies is not known for wretched failure. To many Torontonians, it was a compelling vision.

Unfortunately, a lot of the very people it was designed to impress hated the hell out of it.

[…]

So there is blame to go around — and to be clear, no one is officially blaming the city bureaucracy or the project’s opponents for scuppering the deal. But the fact is, Sidewalk simply wandered into the wrong saloon. Toronto is an intensely conservative city in the strictest sense of the word. Its establishment doesn’t even believe things that work in other cities would work here. It’s why we pilot-project food carts to death, instead of just allowing food carts. It’s why we’re closing parks and crowding people on sidewalks during the pandemic, instead of following other the lead of other cities and dedicating roads to safely spaced pedestrians and cyclists. When Ontario loosened alcohol regulations, many Torontonians predicted tailgate parties and picnics-with-wine would lead to mayhem — and they really, really meant it.

Sidewalk wanted to do something no other city had ever done. You can imagine the terror and confusion it sowed. And that was over 12 acres — six football fields. Toronto has a great many things going for it. I have argued in the past that its conservatism, broadly speaking, has served it very well. But Sidewalk reminded us what we trade for that. If we can’t take a bit of a chance on 12 acres, it doesn’t bode at all well for the many hundreds of other acres in this city that have been begging for redevelopment my entire lifetime — not if we want them to be at all innovative or memorable, anyway.

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