[pp.int.general] controversial survey from google institute

[Justus Römeth]

Hello Karo

I am sorry, but painting Facebook or google as 'evil' has nothing to do
with politics and everything to do with dogma, and afaik the pirate parties
went out to fight against dogma and misinformation but for every person's
right to know what is going on (transparency) and decide to withhold any
kind of information from most entities (and the ones where you can't
withhold all information to, ie governments, should then be forced to be
able to aggragate as little information as possible, but as much
as necessary to function in a productive way).

Both FB and G offer services where in return to you using them they can
profile and save your data, use it to let algorithms create a profile of
you and then offer you commercials based on that profile. Facebook also
forwarded some information to second entities and partners, especially as a
reward for using third party 'apps' within facebook (where you gave your
consent for doing so, but who reads licence agreements nowadays...?)
Both also likely forward the information they have on you forward to the US
government upon request, which they are obliged to as companies based in
the US (and, as opposed to Twitter, decided not to fight).

Once you realize those risks, or implications, it is up to you as a user to
decide whether you want to use the services those two companies offer, and
give up part of your privacy as the price for it or not. It is not up to
political parties (or governments, for that matter) to tell citizens that
they can or can't do that. They have to force the companies to provide as
much transparency as possible, as well as control them that they keep their
end of the bargain (don't give data to other companies unless the customer
has allowed that, allow the user to withdraw his consent for them having
the data like the new EU privacy initiative, ...)

Now I have not seen the survey, so I don't really know what you are talking
about. To think that we are 'good' and google is per se 'evil' is wrong,
however. Especially if you keep in mind that in the light of transparency
there should not be that many internas pirate parties can forward to the
hiig to begin with. Even though the HIIG is financed by big parts from
google it doesn't have to mean that google pulls all the strings in the
institute (that would be contrary to what google has been doing so far and
contrary to their formulated goals and practices).
You bring out some pretty strong accusations. But do you have any proof
that google will use information it has about PPs against us? Has there
been a precedent in that? If not maybe you want to use weaker language the
next time.

kind regards

Justus

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 2:33 PM, carlo von lynX <lynX at pirate.my.buttharp.org
> wrote:

> I have spoken out against filling out the survey for
> hiig.de, the controversial Google institute that was
> recently opened up in Berlin.[1]
>
> I was told PPint has been distributing the survey to
> all members. Has any thought been put into the political
> relevance of this survey? You can bet it will be used
> against the German Piratenpartei, which is obviously
> the cause for this investigation, but also against
> the pirate movement worldwide.
>
> While the Pirate Party movement seems to get its ideas
> straight about Facebook being evil, it underestimates how
> the recent moves by Google are actually much worse than
> anything Facebook does.[2]
>
> Please stop this hidden cooperation with Google. Just
> because they paint their logo black on SOPA day they're
> not on our side on most political issues.
>
>
>
> [1]
> http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/die-such-wurzel-berlin-bekommt-ein-google-institut/4382666.html
> [2] http://gizmodo.com/5878987/its-official-google-is-evil-now
>
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
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>
>
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