Governments vs. tech companies — it’s complicated
Numerous tussles fit the template:
- A government wants access to data contained in one or more devices (mobile/personal or server as the case may be).
- The computer’s manufacturer or operator doesn’t want to provide it, for reasons including:
- That’s what customers prefer.
- That’s what other governments require.
- Being pro-liberty is the right and moral choice. (Yes, right and wrong do sometimes actually come into play. 🙂 )
As a general rule, what’s best for any kind of company is — pricing and so on aside — whatever is best or most pleasing for their customers or users. This would suggest that it is in tech companies’ best interest to favor privacy, but there are two important quasi-exceptions:
- Recommendation/personalization. E-commerce and related businesses rely heavily on customer analysis and tracking.
- When the customer is the surveiller. Governments pay well for technology that is used to watch over their citizens.
I used the “quasi-” prefix because screwing the public is risky, especially in the long term.
Something that is not even a quasi-exception to the tech industry’s actual or potential pro-privacy bias is governmental mandates to let their users be watched. In many cases, governments compel privacy violations, by threat of severe commercial or criminal penalties. Tech companies should and often do resist these mandates as vigorously as they can, in the courts and/or via lobbying as the case may be. Yes, companies have to comply with the law. However, it’s against their interests for the law to compel privacy violations, because those make their products and services less appealing.
The most visible example of all this right now is the FBI/Apple kerfuffle. To borrow a phrase — it’s complicated. Among other aspects:
- Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino terrorist murderers, had 3 cell phones. He carefully destroyed his 2 personal phones before his attack, but didn’t bother with his iPhone from work.
- Notwithstanding this clue that the surviving phone contained nothing of interest, the FBI wanted to unlock it. It needed technical help to do so.
- The FBI got a court order commanding Apple’s help. Apple refused and appealed the order.
- The FBI eventually hired a third party to unlock Farook’s phone, for a price that was undisclosed but >$1.3 million.
- Nothing of interest was found on the phone.
- Stories popped up of the FBI asking for Apple’s help unlocking numerous other iPhones. The courts backed Apple or not depending on how they interpreted the All Writs Act. The All Writs Act was passed in the first-ever session of the US Congress, in 1789, and can reasonably be assumed to reflect all the knowledge that the Founders possessed about mobile telephony.
- It’s widely assumed that the NSA could have unlocked the phones for the FBI — but it didn’t.
Russell Brandom of The Verge collected links explaining most of the points above.
With that as illustration, let’s go to some vendor examples:
- Apple — which sells devices much more than advertising — has clearly decided that being (seen as) pro-privacy is its preferred course.
- Microsoft — all rumors about Skype backdoors and the like notwithstanding — has made a similar choice. Notably, it is struggling to keep data hosted on its European servers out of US subpoena reach.
- Amazon and Google, by way of contrast, whose core consumer businesses depend on recommendation/personalization, have not been so visible about protecting the privacy of their cloud services’ data.
- Blackberry, meanwhile, seems to split the difference, being pro-privacy in its enterprise server business but acquiescing to surveillance in its consumer operations.
All of these cases seem consistent with my comments about vendors’ privacy interests above.
Bottom line: The technology industry is correct to resist government anti-privacy mandates by all means possible.
Comments
2 Responses to “Governments vs. tech companies — it’s complicated”
Leave a Reply
[…] Apple/FBI conflict(s) about locked […]
[…] no obvious technology industry ox being gored. What I wrote in another post about Apple, Microsoft et al. upholding their customers’ rights doesn’t have a close analogue […]