JRepin

The algorithms that Big Tech designed - and the genocide they assisted. The Listening Post explores how Israel’s killing campaign of Palestinians has relied on artificial intelligence to choose its targets. A dystopian nightmare serves as a marketing campaign for technology flawed by design, and deepens the global digital divide.

There is one class of AI risk that is generally knowable in advance. These are risks stemming from misalignment between a company’s economic incentives to profit from its proprietary AI model in a particular way and society’s interests in how the AI model should be monetised and deployed. The surest way to ignore such misalignment is by focusing exclusively on technical questions about AI model capabilities, divorced from the socio-economic environment in which these models will operate and be designed for profit.

The promise of AI, for corporations and investors, is that companies can increase profits and productivity by slashing their reliance upon a skilled human workforce. But as this story and many others show, AI is just today’s buzzword for “outsourcing,” and it comes with the same problems that have plagued outsourced companies and workforces for decades.

Highlighting, exposing, and actively working against the proliferation and normalization of surveillance technology is crucial in protecting human rights worldwide. At the Tor Project, we know that it is through collective awareness and action that we can all build and contribute to privacy-preserving technologies that aim to protect people everywhere from the prevalence of surveillance and oppression. It is equally important to hold companies accountable and recognize the source and enablers of surveillance tech, especially now as we see these technologies being aggressively utilized in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

This post delves into the impact of Israeli surveillance technologies in Palestine, illustrating how localized instances of its use can have extensive repercussions that pave the way for the widespread acceptance and global adoption of such oppressive practices.

There is a growing need for a global stance against the use of technology for oppression. Tech workers and the broader international community are urged to prioritize integrity over profit to protect privacy and prevent the deleterious impacts of pervasive surveillance on our lives. There is even more urgency to address these issues in the face of growing demand for surveillance solutions enhanced and exacerbated by AI.

Silicon Valley was supposed to be “different,” or so veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher wanted to believe. Facebook was going to bring people together, in the process strengthening our communities, our democracies, our world; Google was going to deliver the vast stores of human knowledge to our fingertips; Tesla was going to save us from fossil fuel-driven ecological collapse, etc., etc. For years, Swisher held onto a dogged faith in these companies and their “gauzy credo to change the world” for the better.

But then, in 2016, Silicon Valley “went off the rails.” Swisher dates this cataclysm to December 10, 2016, when the heads of the most powerful tech companies—including Amazon, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company—were “summoned to tromp into Manhattan’s Trump Tower and meet the man who had unexpectedly just been elected president and was the antithesis of all they supposedly represented.”

Last month, the Justice Department charged tech giant Apple with serious antitrust violations related to the iPhone. It’s a relatively aggressive suit — but likely an inadequate response to Apple’s outsize power.

"We, current and previous employees of Apple Inc., wish to express our disappointment and shock at the lack of care and understanding this company has given the Palestinian community, not only abroad suffering in Gaza, but also towards our own team members and anyone who supports them within our stores and offices. "

The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple’s sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is “privacy respecting,” which is attributed to Apple’s business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the “surveillance capitalism” hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's “pay or consent model”.

The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA.

In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple's new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon's ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations.

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

Call it "Apple exceptionalism" – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest.

Take the claim that Apple is "privacy respecting," which is attributed to Apple's business model of financing its services though cash transactions, rather than by selling it customers to advertisers. This is the (widely misunderstood) crux of the "surveillance capitalism" hypothesis: that capitalism is just fine, but once surveillance is in the mix, capitalism fails.

It turns out that the “Internet of Things” is full of automated snoops and spies. Data collection, now integrated into new car designs, is more pervasive than ever and is ushering in a brave new world of surveillance and corporate collusion.