Minority Report 2.0: Behaviour, not content
Behaviour, not content. Said John Anderton, Chief of Facebook PreCrime.
A few days ago I observed that the “Facebook War Room” set up to monitor the European Elections of 2019 really seems to be the opposite of the Fight Club, and full of elephants. On that occasion, I wrote that one of those elephants is “SO bad it deserves a separate post”, so here it is.
Among other things, says the article I commented, thanks to end-to-end encryption, Facebook and WhatsApp employees:
“just don’t look at content on WhatsApp - Other people could join the group and see the content, but we aren’t.” Behaviour, not content seems to be the new mantra. (A mantra that arguably played a role in Facebook’s fresh row with Brussels about trans-European political ads.)
Behaviour, not content???
Behaviour, not content is not an improvement. It is just the fully automatic inference, without oversight or limits that builds the Californian-style surveillance state. “Behaviour, not content” is a nightmare straight out of Minority Report. Really.
While we are at this, one word more about end-to-end encryption: what if Facebook used end-to-end encryption to neuter the EU Copyright Directive?
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