Apple’s complicity in Chinese state oppression

Corporations don’t have character, they have incentives.

Bruce Schneier coined “feudal security” to describe the dominant Big Tech security model, in which you surrender your autonomy by moving into a warlord’s fortress (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) and in return get protection from the bandits that roam the badlands without.

The historian Stephen Morillo pointed out that this is more like “manorialism” than “feudalism.” As I wrote in January, digital manorialism works well (if the warlord wants the same thing as you) but fails badly (if they decide to sell you out).

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Google wants to kill third party cookies to protect you from randos doing tracking and targeting — but it wants to retain the ability to nonconsensually track and target you on its own:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/fighting-floc-and-fighting-monopoly-are-fully-compatible

Facebook promises to defend you from the next Cambridge Analytica, but it threatens to sue academics who scrape its political ads to see whether it’s really living up to its promises to fight paid political disinformation: