At the beginning of the article I was like “That does not surprises me at all” but then you start reading:
> The increasing normalisation of these technologies on digital platforms, including social media, is bringing dark web functionality to the mainstream
> The Department’s engagement with Meta and other companies with ‘privacy first’ policies reveal a degree of seeming indifference to public safety imperatives, including in relation to children
Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times
Looking at the data that headline came from makes it much less clear (feel free to ignore the "Facebook Annotation" and focus on just the leaked/later released slide deck that was used to fuel those headlines: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te... (the headline came from slide 14).
I basically think of the department of home affairs as the morons that didn't realise 1984 was a warning and have mistaken it for a helpful instruction manual.
It's to be expected they want to eliminate any vestige of public rights in the name of safety, the safety of the state they believe they are protecting, not the safety of its citizens. Just look at the way they laud operation ironsides, the FBI turned ANOM into a giant entrapment scheme and was able to arrest no-one due to it being blatantly unconstitutional in the USA, while here in Australia, we have zero protections and the Federal Police round up every single person they can find, trumpeting the wild success of their largest operation ever... handed to them on a silver plater by the US FBI, and such bad police work that it was unable to arrest anyone in the USA...
Given that this is the same country where a whole bunch of harmless video games can't be played by adults because the government will refrain from giving them a rating, having the Australian government call out Meta really does have that "Worst person you know just made a great point" vibe to it. (https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...)
1984 was an instruction manual. Orwell based it off of his experiences writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. At the time his wife was a censor for the Ministry of Information. He was writing about 1940's Britain, not a hypothetical 1984 Britain.
> 1984 was a warning and have mistaken it for a helpful instruction manual
It may be a warning to the general population, but it's absolutely an instruction manual for those in power seeking to keep and further refine that power. They are very much not morons but quite the opposite.
Could it be that the intelligence services of the Five Eyes have all agreed it would be great to undermine encryption, but Canada and New Zealand have left wing / liberal / non-authoritarian governments, and the Democrats in the US don't want to weaken the security of (or campaign contributions from) US technology companies? That just leaves the UK and Australia to push for these awful policies, and pave the way for the other members to adopt them later.
Caring about children is actually a really good motivation for people improving the world. I don’t care how many people have abused the notion before, children suffering due to inaction or indifference is a bad thing and people know this intuitively.
"Think of the children; improve the nutrition of school lunches, and fund them so they're free to students" should probably be inside the Overton window.
"Think of the children; make sure the government can easily read everyone's text messages" probably shouldn't.
The problem with this line of thought isn’t the motivation though, it’s the lack of attention to the pros weighed against the cons, and how heavy the cons are in relation to the pros.
I can’t find a con to protecting the children. But what’s doubtful is whether you actually are protecting the children with this policy.
I don't believe this is realistic, but what if the policy could reduce online child grooming to near-zero? Would it be worth outlawing secure communication?
Well, those children are people, and outlawing secure communication is bad for people. So I would argue the calculus is still incomplete the way it's presented.
If the government has any intention to protect children, and intention at all, this is where they'd start. These kids really need it, and the government has all the control they could possibly want or need to do it. They not only utterly fail, they regularly cut funding to what little efforts exist to help these children.
So no, government does the opposite. Therefore their intention cannot be to protect children.
So what OTHER effects does this have? Well it greatly increases the government's ability to directly interfere in the lives of citizens. Which they, not seeing any irony, use to send more kids to their foster care -> juvie -> prison carrousel. In fact that this enables them to do more of that, is one of the main reasons to do this. Seriously.
When there are studies that show that, as a kid (on average, discarding extremes), you're better off abused at home than "taken care of" by the state. On average, you're better off without government help. For example:
(I do not deny that there are situations where state help is necessary. However, anyone that knows anything about the foster system knows that they don't help in such situations. These situations are too difficult/too much violence to deal with/no expected positive result/... and explicitly target kids with small or nonexistent problems because they're paid per child, based on the care provided. So 24/7 care for a problem-free toddler is where the financial incentives are for them. This even applies to medical problems: child has cancer? You're entirely safe from youth services. Why? Because caring for that child is too expensive ... the EXACT opposite you'd want to see them do, but, of course, financially it makes total sense. Ironically this means effectively random (poor) kids go to foster care, then juvie, then back home, because it's a financial disaster for foster care, institutional or otherwise, to take them back, so suddenly there's "no more need" for care. It's a financial disaster for the parents too, of course)
In fact there are studies that show that social workers REFUSING help to children (in reality to parents and schools) works very therapeutically, and actually fixes problems, by (amongst other things) creating a great need for the problem to get solved, rather than taking away the child, which of course takes away the problem without solving it, doing incredible permanent damage to kids in the process.
So, in THEORY they do this to protect children.
In PRACTICE they do this to damage children, and to do more damage to more children.
Like I said, I will concede this is abused as an excuse to do bad things, but that’s unrelated to the fact that actually doing something primarily because you thought of the children is good.
If some murderer says they killed their victim out of love, the conclusion isn’t that love is a bad motivation for doing things. Or to say that in theory love is good, but in practice it’s bad.
Of course, my point here is mostly about the intentions. The intentions here are not to protect children, as that would make very, very little sense.
I even abstract from both reasons of why the intent might be lacking. Are they outright evil? For example, are they using this as a deception to either push their own projects or even to sell real estate to these government efforts? Are lawmakers amoral? In the sense that they utterly don't care what they do, just how it'll be received. Or are they dumb/deluded? I imagine it's a combination of all 3 in reality.
It's just that maybe some of the lawmakers involved are deluded about what this does, but that's the most charitable interpretation possible.
The context of the phrase “think of the children” is that it’s used to justify policies (especially around surveillance and reduction of freedoms) that make society worse for everyone (whether they’re put forward by incompetence or malice).
You don’t think that people aren’t on board with things that do actually benefit children!?
I do think some people see this trope so often that they actually start to think consideration for children is a pointless or useless thing, yes. Heck, I think some have even decided it’s malicious.
Which side of the argument includes people who are on board with allowing backdoors into (otherwise) secure communication as long as it requires a warrant or some similar oversight? Because that's kind of how law enforcement has always operated (at least ideally) when it comes to violating freedoms.
The bootlicking side. There is only two options: a) encrypted communication that cannot be read by anyone except the software client and the peers communicating enforced by cryptography, and b) cleartext, cops and death squads.
Stop making consolations. Math doesn't care about warrants. There is no higher oversight than 256-bit symmetric ciphers.
The problem is that we don't really have any good ways to do that. If it's encrypted in flight but not end-to-end encrypted, for example, it's open to information being stolen, or people being stalked, or information gathered to groom minors (and later even evidence being deleted) by bad actors at the messaging platform's companies (such as sysadmins who have access - these kind of things have actually happened!). Further, all the private (and sometimes intimate) information that has been messaged is open to hackers if the security of that messaging platform is breached.
So the trade-off is that law enforcement have to look for other ways to enforce the laws - like they need to find one side of the message conversation and get a warrant to access the data stored on their phone to view the communications. Technology has actually given them far, far more scope for access into people's lives for surveillance than they've ever had! They are exaggerating the problems with things like end-to-end encryption because it's taking away a very effortless source of surveillance - something that they probably shouldn't have ever had (the ability to easily snoop on everybody's phone calls and messages, which we know in the US and other places that they did warrantlessly for many years).
> Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times
There's criticism of the "think of the children" trope because it's used to defend bad ideas using an emotional argument. The bad part is the smoke screen for bad ideas, not the defending children part.
Putting a particular emphasis on the privacy of minors seems like a good idea.
This is the same country whose prime minister tried to ban encryption because "the laws of mathematics are very commendable" but should nevertheless be subservient to the laws of Australia
I mean, he's right though. People who constantly bring up this "you can't ban math " meme make about as much sense as someone trying to argue you can't impose a speed limit because of the laws of physics.
Australia is sovereign and it controls the communication in its territory is the point.
Well, if they want to ban the communication of certain numbers and collapse their online economy that’s their problem.
But what these idiots frequently ask for is a backdoor key to encryption that only the government can use. It’s frustrating to see weapons-grade technical ignorance in our leaders when we have an increasingly technical society.
Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times
Oh I tend to flag those arguments as BS but you can never count them out. The problem is aside from the perfunctory, the strained and straight-up-false claims, there are a few places and context where children do need protection and some people quite determined to victimized them - and naturally people strongly emotionally invest where the protection is needed. And that creates a degree leverage that can be even when an audience is sophisticated - look at the many people defending Apple's neural hash absurdity here (risks re-litigating it but sure). Oh, and the way "think of children" is every censor and snoop's cry tend to detract from useful ways of protecting children (most of which don't have to with lots more electronic surveillance).
I really hate this "why won't anyone think of the children?" argument. It's right up there with "because terrorism".
I mean the government isn't technically wrong but the same can be said for locking your doors and not having an always-on camera in your house the police can pull up anytime they want so it's always a question of where you draw the line.
Whenever a government complains about a company this way I actually take it as a positive signal about that company. That's where we are right now.
The government should never be allowed to be "not technically wrong", it must be held to account and made to prove why the course of action it is taking will result in something the public desires coming to pass. It can't just be "oh we need this because... reasons"
I'm not sure you understood my point: I'm arguing against this not for it. "Because children" and "because terrorism" don't trump everything else. If they did we'd have always-on cameras in our homes so the government needs to argue why the loss of privacy is justified and their stated reasons are insufficient.
This is a good point. Government is always in a battle between good and evil: protecting citizens from evil corps (food safety), and actually being evil (i.e. backdoors on encryption).
> Government is always in a battle between good and evil:
Is it? It seems to me gov't is about enriching those that have found themselves in positions of gov't office and their cronnies. Long ago has gov't no longer been concerned with the well being of its citizens.
I think you’ll find a lot of very dedicated, well meaning people in government service. Especially at the local level. You have to actually talk to them and get to know them, of course, before you can judge their intentions.
If you instead base your opinion off the attention whores you see/hear in media, then yeah you’re going to be distrustful. That’s because those people optimize for being in the news. They are a small fraction of the political world.
This is an example of resulting, where you look at the outcome and not a process. I personally believe it’s an ineffective way to understand the reality of a situation, but each to their own.
I could have been more specific by saying elected officials. These are the people whoring themselves out, and I'd assume those working closely with them. The rest of the staff are probably there on the hopes they might parlay the experience into their own candidacy one day, but I do know there are people that are "answering the call" of public service. Sadly, they don't have enough of a voice to sway.
There's also the non-political gov't employees that do the actual work. There's plenty of stereotypes about them too, but for the most part, I'd agree they're just people with a job living their life.
I’m genuinely curious - what makes you think the typical politician is whoring themselves out and should not be evaluated as if acting in good faith?
I totally agree for the politicians who we frequently see in the media, like Ted Cruz. But that’s such a small, non-random selection that I hesitate to generalize.
What makes you feel comfortable in making such a generalization?
Not an Australian but I've observed Aussie politicians of all shades making the same stupid arguments on encryption for more than a decade, perhaps closer to two. I don't think this can be solved by voting Labor in lest they be given some lessons on elementary mathematics and data security.
Our only hope at this point is a hung parliament that can wedge the parties on progressive issues. I won't mention any particular parties to avoid inflaming the conversation, but I'd strongly advise all Australians look at the parties' track records and policies on surveillance, and particularly whether they're willing to consult with orgs like Digital Rights Watch in forming legislation.
The pace of new legislation has been far, far higher and the powers granted much more broad under the LNP than it ever was under Labor. Under Labor as well, with most of the bad ideas that they came up with (like the internet filter, that has just recently basically been legislated by stealth as the eSafety act by the LNP) they were able to be persuaded to drop them.
But I'm mostly hoping for a hung parliament to keep them in check (couple more Indies and maybe another Greens MP). Labor's gutlessness in not voting against the LNP's bad laws because they were scared of the media response has shown this is needed. But experience shows that even under a Labor majority we'd be seeing far less of the bad laws coming before Parliament.
This is likely really the US government's stance, reflected in the governance of one of the US's most dependent client states. A change in political leadership of Australia is unlikely to change its government's overall attitude to online government surveillance.
It's followed US policy for many years, and the only reason it's worse than the US is that the US has robust constitutional protections against unreasonable surveillance.
A lot of articles are using the 'metaverse' term to describe concepts that already exist. The Financial Times defines it as: "(noun) a virtual world where users appear as avatars to socialise, work, shop or play." [0]
With this definition, virtual reality headsets aren't needed, as it already describes multiplayer video games with regular devices. That's why there are so many recent articles linking Microsoft's recent acquisition of Activision to the idea that Microsoft is trying to get a foothold in the "metaverse" (i.e. virtual reality, not necessarily with headsets).
It sounds like the issue here is that Facebook won't share all the data it collects on its product (i.e. Facebook users) with the Australian government? My understanding is that since the Cambridge Analytical issue, Facebook now manages all its data access in-house, so if you want to buy targeted advertising access from Facebook, you don't get to buy the product lists/categorizations directly, you have to submit your ad content to the Facebook advertising department, who then serves them directly to the product?
I rather doubt Facebook is actually planning on implementing end-to-end encryption of the kind that would allow Facebook's product to hide their own data profiles from the Facebook advertising department, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the site. Targeted advertising based on Facebook's internal library of product data is the bread-and-butter of that outfit, isn't it?
However, the product wants at least the illusion of privacy and Facebook wants more product, so it appears to be saying to the Australian government that it won't allow them to snoop on the product's data profiles.
However, the whole thing could just be public posturing for PR purposes, and in reality they may have maintained backdoor access to product data for the NSA/GHCQ/FiveEyes etc. as per Snowden revelations about the PRISM program, which anyone can look up.
> My understanding is that since the Cambridge Analytical issue, Facebook now manages all its data access in-house
That was the case since, at least, I joined FB via an ad-tech acquisition, mid 2010s. We had a feature that allowed customers to host their own assets. That was the first thing that we had to remove after integrating with the FB stack.
/edit: the CA scandal was ~ mid 2010s, my statement doesn't help. We joined before the scandal, by quite some time.
> My understanding is that since the Cambridge Analytical issue, Facebook now manages all its data access in-house, so if you want to buy targeted advertising access from Facebook, you don't get to buy the product lists/categorizations directly, you have to submit your ad content to the Facebook advertising department, who then serves them directly to the product?
I think the Cambridge Analytica issue is orthogonal to this - what you describe is standard supply-side advertising practice for much longer than since then.
Yes. CA got all that data through the API. They paid users to take a mechanical turk survey that requested large fb perms. which the time included a lot of data on their friends, beyond their own single profile data. That has been shut down.
> I rather doubt Facebook is actually planning on implementing end-to-end encryption of the kind that would allow Facebook's product to hide their own data profiles from the Facebook advertising department, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the site. Targeted advertising based on Facebook's internal library of product data is the bread-and-butter of that outfit, isn't it?
Well they might claim to add e2e encryption. But it won’t be true e2e. Will be fake like WhatsApp. They will still read the messages for advertising.
I thought it was interesting how newspapers were handling the name change. The Washington Post and The New York Times are both continuing to use Facebook whenever possible, with most articles using "Facebook" in the headline and contents of relevant articles this month. They only use "Meta" when they have to (e.g. when a government is specifically dealing with Meta as the parent organization of FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp, versus Facebook alone).
Does anybody else see a continuation of the Murdoch-Zuckerberg feud here? Australia is probably the most Murdoch-aligned country in the world, so it's no surprise they have a problem with Meta. You can also go back to the whole hullabaloo a few years ago after Trump got elected and see that the three nations who hauled facebook over the coals (UK, US, AU) all have a agenda-setting Murdoch media presence.
His family still owns and controls massive percentage of the Australian media landscape. Instead of Fox News we have Sky News, the names change but the agenda was set in place by management selected for alignment with a wold view favourable to the Murdoch family. From the top it becomes corporate culture and gains the veneer of not being just Murdoch’s mouthpiece, but the agenda is still firmly pointed their direction.
Murdoch part owns Foxtel, owns Sky News (Australia), as well as 70+% of newspaper readership around the country (almost 100% of newspapers in my state).
Don't underestimate the reach of Sky News too - it's big on YouTube and they signed a deal just a little while ago to put it free-to-air in many regional areas (which is really bad - their 'Sky After Dark' program is just as bad or worse than much of Fox News). As well, they provide it free as one of the channels available on 'ParlTV' which is what supplies every TV in Parliament House, and pay airlines and public transit agencies to get it shown on screens in airport lounges, train stations, etc.
These discussions too often devolve into a simple privacy vs surveillance discussion. It's frustrating because it's so much more nuanced than that. Authenticity is super important. Controls and auditability of surveillance power usage are too.
> Meta is planning to encrypt users’ messages on Facebook and Instagram, but has delayed the plan until 2023.
> The Home Affairs submission claimed that this move will “provide predators with the ability to evade detection as they connect with multiple vulnerable children anywhere in the world and develop exploitative grooming relationships”
Wow, the Australian government sucks big time.
All they have to do is say "child molesters" and the Australian public gives up their right to private communication online?
Translation note: The first "you" is singular, while the second "you" is plural.
The majority might, perhaps, get the government they deserve. The minority who lost the vote can't rationally be blamed for an outcome they opposed, yet they suffer right alongside.
> All they have to do is say "child molesters" and the Australian public gives up their right to private communication online
Not quite, but since our news media and government has been captured by monied interests, it is difficult for the public to be well informed on issues, and easy for the government to get away with anything provided it aligns with the desires of big business. And of course, old media (Papers, TV) are jealous of new media (Meta).
104 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 89.3 ms ] thread> The increasing normalisation of these technologies on digital platforms, including social media, is bringing dark web functionality to the mainstream
> The Department’s engagement with Meta and other companies with ‘privacy first’ policies reveal a degree of seeming indifference to public safety imperatives, including in relation to children
Come on people, that old “and the children?” trope? Australian government is really embarrassing some times
Although a lot of their moderation logic is evaded with simple measures such as adding simple watermarks to images/videos.
I'm not letting my children, my family, myself anywhere near that cynical cesspit of destruction.
It's to be expected they want to eliminate any vestige of public rights in the name of safety, the safety of the state they believe they are protecting, not the safety of its citizens. Just look at the way they laud operation ironsides, the FBI turned ANOM into a giant entrapment scheme and was able to arrest no-one due to it being blatantly unconstitutional in the USA, while here in Australia, we have zero protections and the Federal Police round up every single person they can find, trumpeting the wild success of their largest operation ever... handed to them on a silver plater by the US FBI, and such bad police work that it was unable to arrest anyone in the USA...
Just disgusting... All of it.
They turned it into a giant trap, but entrapment has a specific legal meaning and I'm not sure it applies to the ANOM case.
> 1984 was a warning and have mistaken it for a helpful instruction manual
It may be a warning to the general population, but it's absolutely an instruction manual for those in power seeking to keep and further refine that power. They are very much not morons but quite the opposite.
What is it with the Commonwealth?
"Think of the children; make sure the government can easily read everyone's text messages" probably shouldn't.
I can’t find a con to protecting the children. But what’s doubtful is whether you actually are protecting the children with this policy.
I think that it would not.
This is the result of government taking over the protection of specific children:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...
If the government has any intention to protect children, and intention at all, this is where they'd start. These kids really need it, and the government has all the control they could possibly want or need to do it. They not only utterly fail, they regularly cut funding to what little efforts exist to help these children.
So no, government does the opposite. Therefore their intention cannot be to protect children.
So what OTHER effects does this have? Well it greatly increases the government's ability to directly interfere in the lives of citizens. Which they, not seeing any irony, use to send more kids to their foster care -> juvie -> prison carrousel. In fact that this enables them to do more of that, is one of the main reasons to do this. Seriously.
When there are studies that show that, as a kid (on average, discarding extremes), you're better off abused at home than "taken care of" by the state. On average, you're better off without government help. For example:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583
(I do not deny that there are situations where state help is necessary. However, anyone that knows anything about the foster system knows that they don't help in such situations. These situations are too difficult/too much violence to deal with/no expected positive result/... and explicitly target kids with small or nonexistent problems because they're paid per child, based on the care provided. So 24/7 care for a problem-free toddler is where the financial incentives are for them. This even applies to medical problems: child has cancer? You're entirely safe from youth services. Why? Because caring for that child is too expensive ... the EXACT opposite you'd want to see them do, but, of course, financially it makes total sense. Ironically this means effectively random (poor) kids go to foster care, then juvie, then back home, because it's a financial disaster for foster care, institutional or otherwise, to take them back, so suddenly there's "no more need" for care. It's a financial disaster for the parents too, of course)
In fact there are studies that show that social workers REFUSING help to children (in reality to parents and schools) works very therapeutically, and actually fixes problems, by (amongst other things) creating a great need for the problem to get solved, rather than taking away the child, which of course takes away the problem without solving it, doing incredible permanent damage to kids in the process.
So, in THEORY they do this to protect children.
In PRACTICE they do this to damage children, and to do more damage to more children.
If some murderer says they killed their victim out of love, the conclusion isn’t that love is a bad motivation for doing things. Or to say that in theory love is good, but in practice it’s bad.
I even abstract from both reasons of why the intent might be lacking. Are they outright evil? For example, are they using this as a deception to either push their own projects or even to sell real estate to these government efforts? Are lawmakers amoral? In the sense that they utterly don't care what they do, just how it'll be received. Or are they dumb/deluded? I imagine it's a combination of all 3 in reality.
It's just that maybe some of the lawmakers involved are deluded about what this does, but that's the most charitable interpretation possible.
You don’t think that people aren’t on board with things that do actually benefit children!?
Stop making consolations. Math doesn't care about warrants. There is no higher oversight than 256-bit symmetric ciphers.
So the trade-off is that law enforcement have to look for other ways to enforce the laws - like they need to find one side of the message conversation and get a warrant to access the data stored on their phone to view the communications. Technology has actually given them far, far more scope for access into people's lives for surveillance than they've ever had! They are exaggerating the problems with things like end-to-end encryption because it's taking away a very effortless source of surveillance - something that they probably shouldn't have ever had (the ability to easily snoop on everybody's phone calls and messages, which we know in the US and other places that they did warrantlessly for many years).
There's criticism of the "think of the children" trope because it's used to defend bad ideas using an emotional argument. The bad part is the smoke screen for bad ideas, not the defending children part.
Putting a particular emphasis on the privacy of minors seems like a good idea.
This is what you get in a political system dominated by lawyers.
Australia is sovereign and it controls the communication in its territory is the point.
But what these idiots frequently ask for is a backdoor key to encryption that only the government can use. It’s frustrating to see weapons-grade technical ignorance in our leaders when we have an increasingly technical society.
Oh I tend to flag those arguments as BS but you can never count them out. The problem is aside from the perfunctory, the strained and straight-up-false claims, there are a few places and context where children do need protection and some people quite determined to victimized them - and naturally people strongly emotionally invest where the protection is needed. And that creates a degree leverage that can be even when an audience is sophisticated - look at the many people defending Apple's neural hash absurdity here (risks re-litigating it but sure). Oh, and the way "think of children" is every censor and snoop's cry tend to detract from useful ways of protecting children (most of which don't have to with lots more electronic surveillance).
I mean the government isn't technically wrong but the same can be said for locking your doors and not having an always-on camera in your house the police can pull up anytime they want so it's always a question of where you draw the line.
Whenever a government complains about a company this way I actually take it as a positive signal about that company. That's where we are right now.
Is it? It seems to me gov't is about enriching those that have found themselves in positions of gov't office and their cronnies. Long ago has gov't no longer been concerned with the well being of its citizens.
If you instead base your opinion off the attention whores you see/hear in media, then yeah you’re going to be distrustful. That’s because those people optimize for being in the news. They are a small fraction of the political world.
There's also the non-political gov't employees that do the actual work. There's plenty of stereotypes about them too, but for the most part, I'd agree they're just people with a job living their life.
I totally agree for the politicians who we frequently see in the media, like Ted Cruz. But that’s such a small, non-random selection that I hesitate to generalize.
What makes you feel comfortable in making such a generalization?
Hopefully in less than six months the party in Government will be different, and things will be at least slightly better.
In spite of me living in Romania, I love their Honest Government Ads.
Honest Government Ad | Hung Parliament - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnzaiYrvvrw
But I'm mostly hoping for a hung parliament to keep them in check (couple more Indies and maybe another Greens MP). Labor's gutlessness in not voting against the LNP's bad laws because they were scared of the media response has shown this is needed. But experience shows that even under a Labor majority we'd be seeing far less of the bad laws coming before Parliament.
https://theshiftersofmelbourne.bandcamp.com/album/left-beref...
With this definition, virtual reality headsets aren't needed, as it already describes multiplayer video games with regular devices. That's why there are so many recent articles linking Microsoft's recent acquisition of Activision to the idea that Microsoft is trying to get a foothold in the "metaverse" (i.e. virtual reality, not necessarily with headsets).
[0] Paywalled, but the quote is the starting sentence: https://www.ft.com/content/8903afb9-5206-4994-8bfd-e74b8f208...
I rather doubt Facebook is actually planning on implementing end-to-end encryption of the kind that would allow Facebook's product to hide their own data profiles from the Facebook advertising department, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the site. Targeted advertising based on Facebook's internal library of product data is the bread-and-butter of that outfit, isn't it?
However, the product wants at least the illusion of privacy and Facebook wants more product, so it appears to be saying to the Australian government that it won't allow them to snoop on the product's data profiles.
However, the whole thing could just be public posturing for PR purposes, and in reality they may have maintained backdoor access to product data for the NSA/GHCQ/FiveEyes etc. as per Snowden revelations about the PRISM program, which anyone can look up.
That was the case since, at least, I joined FB via an ad-tech acquisition, mid 2010s. We had a feature that allowed customers to host their own assets. That was the first thing that we had to remove after integrating with the FB stack.
/edit: the CA scandal was ~ mid 2010s, my statement doesn't help. We joined before the scandal, by quite some time.
I think the Cambridge Analytica issue is orthogonal to this - what you describe is standard supply-side advertising practice for much longer than since then.
Well they might claim to add e2e encryption. But it won’t be true e2e. Will be fake like WhatsApp. They will still read the messages for advertising.
https://nypost.com/2020/06/10/how-facebook-helped-feds-catch...
Huh? We don't get Fox News here. He's been an American citizen for a long time now.
Don't underestimate the reach of Sky News too - it's big on YouTube and they signed a deal just a little while ago to put it free-to-air in many regional areas (which is really bad - their 'Sky After Dark' program is just as bad or worse than much of Fox News). As well, they provide it free as one of the channels available on 'ParlTV' which is what supplies every TV in Parliament House, and pay airlines and public transit agencies to get it shown on screens in airport lounges, train stations, etc.
> The Home Affairs submission claimed that this move will “provide predators with the ability to evade detection as they connect with multiple vulnerable children anywhere in the world and develop exploitative grooming relationships”
Wow, the Australian government sucks big time.
All they have to do is say "child molesters" and the Australian public gives up their right to private communication online?
Translation note: The first "you" is singular, while the second "you" is plural.
The majority might, perhaps, get the government they deserve. The minority who lost the vote can't rationally be blamed for an outcome they opposed, yet they suffer right alongside.
Yes, that's true.
> All they have to do is say "child molesters" and the Australian public gives up their right to private communication online
Not quite, but since our news media and government has been captured by monied interests, it is difficult for the public to be well informed on issues, and easy for the government to get away with anything provided it aligns with the desires of big business. And of course, old media (Papers, TV) are jealous of new media (Meta).
You underestimate how apathetic the Australian public are on matters outside of their immediate 'go to work / pick up the kids/ go to bed' routine.