cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/1867431
Lately I’m running into more and more situations where I am forced to patronize a private company in the course of doing a transaction with my government. For example, a government office stops accepting cash payment for something (e.g. a public parking permit). Residents cannot pay for the permit unless they enter the marketplace and do business with a private bank. From there, the bank might force you to have a mobile phone (yes, this is common in Europe for example).
Example 2:
Some gov offices require the general public to call them or email them because they no longer have an open office that can be visited in person. Of course calling means subscribing to phone service (payphones no longer exist). To send an email, I can theoretically connect a laptop to a library network and use my own mail server to send it, but most gov offices block email that comes from IP that Google/SpamHaus/whoever does not approve, thus forcing you to subscribe to a private sector service in order to do a public transaction. At the same time, snail-mail is increasingly under threat & fax is already ½ dead.
Example 3:
A public university in Denmark refuses access to some parts of the school’s information systems unless you provide a GSM number so they can do a 2FA SMS. If a student opposes connecting to GSM networks due to the huge attack surface and privacy risks, they are simply excluded from systems with that limitation & their right to a public education is hindered. The school library e-books are being bogarted by Cloudflare’s walled garden, where a private company restricts access to the books based on factors like your IP address & browser.
Where are my people?
So, I’m bothered by this because most private companies demonstrate untrustworthyness & incompetence. I think I should be able to disconnect and access all public services with minimal reliance on the private sector. IMO the lack of that option is injustice. There is an immeasurably huge amount of garbage tech on the web subjecting people to CAPTCHAs, intrusive ads, dysfunctional javascript, dark patterns, etc. Society has proven inability to counter that and it will keep getting worse. I think the ONLY real fix is to have a right to be offline. The power to say:
“the gov wants to push this broken reCAPTCHA that forces me to share data with a surveillance capitalist — no thanks. Give me an offline private-sector-free way to do this transaction”
There is substantial chatter in the #fedi about all the shit tech being pushed on us & countless little tricks and hacks to try to sidestep it. But there is almost no chatter about the real high-level solution which would encompass two rights:
- a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
- the right to be offline
Of course there could only be very recent philosophers who would think of the right to be offline. But I wonder if any philosophers in history have published anything influential as far as the right to not be forced into the private sector marketplace. By that, I don’t mean anti-capitalism (of course that’s well covered)… but I mean given the premise is that you’re trapped inside a capitalist system, there would likely be bodies of philosophy aligned with rights/powers to boycott.
I don’t know of any philosophers but I’d only add that disadvantaged people face the same issues from a different perspective.
They can’t afford a mobile phone or internet connection. It is not ‘easier’ for them to transact online.
Indeed. In Belgium there is the “Gang des Vieux en Colère”, which basically translates into the gang of angry elders. These people are on my team for sure, however for different reasons. Ironically, they seem to exist exclusively on Facebook so if you are anti-Facebook you are excluded.
There must be similar activist groups around the world. I just wonder if they are organized well enough to have an international coalition somewhere.
I don’t know about philosophers per se, but I do know that the European branch of the Free Software Foundation has been campaigning for a law mandating that any software developed for a state be made FOSS so that, even if you have to use it, you can at least hypothetically see what it does with your info. That would somewhat address the issues you raise here.
I wholly support that. Italy has a “public money → public code” law but it doesn’t go far enough (e.g. it only forces development by the gov to be open source; the gov is still free to buy non-FOSS).
But I must say FOSS does not solve any of the issues I raised. At best it would probably force the gov to push a FOSS CAPTCHA instead of a Google reCAPTCHA, but the significant problems will persist even if the EU FSF has its way. Gov staff would be switched to Thunderbird for accessing their email, but as a civilian I would still be facing the MS Outlook server which would still reject my connection from a residential IP address as I attempt to directly send an email to the public office.
The Right to be forgotten might give you some sources to follow up on. Seems to be related to your general ideal.
Governments have always hired “contractors” for various services. So having some interactions with private business in the course of government dealings is not new. But there has been more privatization of services in the past century and I think particularly in the last few decades. In some respects, privatization can be a more economical way for a government to deliver a service - despite that the private company extracts a profit. But there are also many examples of privatization leading to excess costs. I think personally that privatization causes some of the same symptoms in the private firm as having monopoly power.
But the power of the government to coerce your cooperation undoubtedly extends to their hired minions.
The govs excessive use of private companies (esp. large corps) is a big problem that seems quite hard to tackle. My main gripe here is more fixated on situations where I am personally forced to interface directly with a private company in order to do a gov transaction.
E.g. consider this story:
http://techrights.org/2022/03/20/brussels-police-facebook
When a victim goes to the police for help and they say “find us on Facebook”, for me that’s far more damning than if the police were to hire Facebook to maintain servers but let victims access the data without registering for a FB account and agreeing to FB’s terms.
Yes, that would be infuriating.
