Carina C. Zona> Caring about software can be a political act. Governments, schools, nonprofits, mutual aid groups, and public-interest organizations need tools that do not depend on surveillance capitalism. They need software shaped by people who care about accessibility, translation, editorial workflows, security, privacy, and long-term maintenance.
>
> As Paul said, defaults rule the world. Defaults are not neutral. They express values, whether we admit it or not. Free software lets us argue about those values in public. It lets us change the defaults. It lets us ask not only “Can we build this?” but “Who does this serve?” and “Who could this hurt?”
jdmI express that a little differently though:
_Defaults are not neutral. They enact political values._
Looking at Chrome's example from yesterday's news, its default of downloading a 4gb model file to each user enacts political values including
* Everyone should be paying for unlimited bandwidth
* Everyone should have large storage devices with lots of free space
* Conserving energy doesn't matter
* Conserving bandwidth doesn't matter
* Pollution doesn't matter
* Consent doesn't matter
* Disclosure doesn't matter
* Usefulness doesn't matter
* The user doesn't have the right to delete unwanted material from their device
One default, embodying and imposing right-wing political values. Be rich, be profligate, be wasteful, be disrespectful, be subservient to the tech oligarchy, be docile.
Look into your software and ask whose interests are being served by it and whose interests have been deemed unimportant. Its core politics are embedded in that.
FxChiP@cczona not to mention "be born in the right place" -- some locations don't *have* good internet or unlimited bandwidth plans, etc...
@fxchip yeah the list could go on a lot longer, and tje original writeup did a good job of pointing several out including that many people globally don't have high speed connections and/or can only get capped mobile bandwidth. It takes a very specific worldview to presume to bottleneck someone's connection and tap out their full month's allocation (potentially exceeding it, with expensive surcharges!) without disclosure or permission.
Mr.Mark "The Sharpie King"@cczona
Wait, what? Please explain like I am five, what did chrome do or what are they trying to do?
Wait, what? Please explain like I am five, what did chrome do or what are they trying to do?
@markmetz whoa, that is a rude demand outside reddit. I'm not a homework bot. The full analysis is at https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install and many tech publications wrote followup articles which are findable via web search or mastodon search.
Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!
Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.
@cczona
Sorry! I did say, please! (but then again, it shows how much time I spent on Reddit 😬)
And thank you! I’m doing my best to de-Google but it’s not easy.
@markmetz there are a lot of search engines other than google. You'll find one you like.
@cczona
I’ve been using Qwant for search.
Where I’m stuck is that someone set up my business domain emails using the gmail workspace interface.
And a problem I’ve run into all too often is that sometimes a form or a website will refuse to cooperate in Firefox, or Safari, and it will only work in Chrome. Especially banks and things like that in the USA.
I’ve been giving the Helium browser a try, and I really like it so far.
I’m glad I stumbled across your post and read that article, I’m more motivated than ever to get the help I need to figure out how to get the hell away from Google!
samiamsam
Don RayGoogle’s “Don’t be evil” motto was always just a sales pitch, but they’ve pretty much turned it on its head. Now it’s more like “Don’t not be evil.”
Background from Wikipedia:
By early 2018, the motto was still cited in the preface to Google's Code of Conduct:
"Don't be evil." Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But "Don't be evil" is much more than that...
The Google Code of Conduct is one of the ways we put "Don't be evil" into practice...
toolbear#🌶️@donray
I don't think Carina brought up the motto. You might be mansplaining.
https://tech.lgbt/@toolbear/116491702989098488
I don't think Carina brought up the motto. You might be mansplaining.
https://tech.lgbt/@toolbear/116491702989098488
Paul CantrellHa, I was going to quote-boost this with a link back to my talk…then looked upthread and realized it started with a response to my talk. Small world.
I very much agree with what you wrote! The original talk didn’t work through that line of thought, nor did it make the FOSS connection that Matthew did. It just made the assertion that defaults create most of tech reality for most people in practice, even when it’s possible to change them. Your post is an important addition, and I’d come to that talk.
@inthehands I gave it from 2012-2018, called Schemas for the Real World and Consequences of an Insightful Algorithm!
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/schemas-for-the-real-world-py-con-2015/46892493
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/consequences-of-an-insightful-algorithm/51180591
In the latter I think you will vibe with the section "Lessons From The Professional Ethicists."
Schemas for the Real World [PyCon 2015]
Social app development challenges us to code for users’ personal world. Users are giving push-back to ill-fitted assumptions about their own identity — name, gender, sexual orientation, important relationships, and many other attributes that are individually meaningful. How can we balance users’ realities with an app’s business requirements? Facebook, Google+, and others are struggling with these questions. Resilient approaches arise from an app’s own foundation. Discover how our earliest choices influence codebase, UX, and development itself. Learn how we can use that knowledge to both inspire the people who use our apps, and to generate the data that we need as developers. == META == Author: Carina C. Zona Conference: PyCon 2015 City: Montreal, Quebec, Canada Date: April 11, 2015 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYYfVqtcWQY URL: https://us.pycon.org/2015/schedule/presentation/426/ - Download as a PDF or view online for free
gsec@cczona the user *has* the right to uninstall unwanted software and the moral obligation to do so, *especially* with software that has the properties you've listed.
@gsc yeah you would think so. But in the Chrome example, it actually redownloads the 4gb model to the user's device if they have deleted the file. So the Chrome team stand in defiance of what we imagine to be a universal value.
Qybat@cczona Also the value of "AI is so great we don't even have to ask if people want it, of course they do. Some of them just don't know it yet."
@Qybat The underlying attitude is so hostile, condescending, and elitist: "Some end users are so stupid that they dislike AI and would even try to prevent its download to their device. So as superior intellects we are entitled to override and circumvent their preference. We are entitled to force complete strangers to adopt, and make sacrifices for, a technology they don't want."
It's fascist values all the way down.