15 Oct 2024
Another easy-ish state law: the No Second-class Citizenship Act
Tired of Big Tech companies giving consumer protections, fraud protections, and privacy protections to their users in other countries but not to people at home in the USA? Here’s another state law we could use, and I bet it could be a two-page PDF.
If a company has more than 10% of our state’s residents as customers or users, and also does business in 50 or more countries, then if they offer a privacy or consumer protection feature in a non-US location they must also offer it in our state within 90 days.
Have it enforced Texas SB 8
style, by individuals, so harder
for Big Tech sockpuppet orgs to challenge.
Reference
Antitrust
challenge to Facebook’s ‘superprofiling’ finally wraps in Germany — with
Meta agreeing to data limits | TechCrunch We’ve asked Meta to
confirm whether changes will be implemented globally — or only inside
the German market where the Bundeskartellamt has jurisdiction.
Bonus links
How
the long-gone Habsburg Empire is still visible in Eastern European
bureaucracies today The formal institutions of the empire ceased
to exist with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire after World War I,
breaking up into separate nation states that have seen several waves of
drastic institutional changes since. We might therefore wonder whether
differences in trust and corruption across areas that belonged to
different empires in the past really still survive to this day.
TikTok
knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show : NPR
(this kind of stuff is why I’ll never love your brand
—if a brand
is fine with advertising on surveillance apps with all we know about how
they work, then I’m enough opposed to them on fundamental issues that
all transactions will be based on lack of trust.)
Cloudflare Destroys Another Patent Troll, Gets Its Patents Released To The Public (time for some game theory)
Conceptual models of space colonization (One that’s missing: Kurt Vonnegut’s concept involving large-scale outward transfer of genetic material. Probably most likely to happen if you add in Von Neumann machines and the systems required to grow live colonists from genetic data—which don’t exist but are not physically or economically impossible…)
Cash incinerator OpenAI secures its $6.6 billion lifeline — ‘in the spirit of a donation’ (fwiw, there are still a bunch of copyright cases out there, too. (AI legal links) Related: The Subprime AI Crisis)
The
cheap chocolate system The giant chocolate companies want cocoa
beans to be a commodity. They don’t want to worry about origin or
yield–they simply want to buy indistinguishable cheap cacao. In fact,
the buyers at these companies feel like they have no choice but to push
for mediocre beans at cut rate prices, regardless of the human cost.
(so it’s like adtech you eat?)
How web bloat impacts users
with slow devices CPU performance for web apps hasn’t scaled
nearly as quickly as bandwidth so, while more of the web is becoming
accessible to people with low-end connections, more of the web is
becoming inaccessible to people with low-end devices even if they have
high-end connections.