- Part 1: Amid #DeleteFacebook Fervor, Experts Say Time to Tackle Big Data Profiteers
- A social media platform like this "is the ultimate surveillance tool: an addictive product that's optimized to collect and analyze the intimate details of our lives."
- Part 2: Uproar After Congress Sneaks Attack on Digital Privacy Rights Into Omnibus Spending Bill
- Attaching it to massive spending deal, lawmakers rush through controversial bill that allows law enforcement to hand over personal data without a warrant.
- Related: Can We Be Saved From Facebook?
Compiled by David Culver, Ed., Evergreene Digest
Can We Count on Your Help Today?
Evergreene Digest is a small nonprofit with a big mission. Every day of the week, we publish the most important breaking news & views for the progressive community. To remain an independent news source, we do not advertise, sell subscriptions or accept corporate contributions.
Instead, we rely on readers like you, to provide the "people power" that fuels our work. Please help keep Evergreene Digest alive by making a contribution.
Thank you,
Dave Culver, Publisher
Part 1: Amid #DeleteFacebook Fervor, Experts Say Time to Tackle Big Data Profiteers
Whatever the specific solution, former Facebook investor Roger McNamee and former Facebook operations manager Sandy Parakilas argued in an article for The Guardian on Monday that it is "past time that the U.S. recognize that data is too important to be unregulated." (Photo: TechCrunch)
A social media platform like this "is the ultimate surveillance tool: an addictive product that's optimized to collect and analyze the intimate details of our lives."
Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
Thursday, March 22, 2018 | While the pro-Trump data firm Cambridge Analytica has received a flood of media attention in recent days following reports that it harvested the personal information of over 50 million Facebook users, advocacy groups and experts are warning against allowing focus on this scandal alone to obscure the fact that major tech companies have been allowed to build an entire industry by exploiting the personal data of everyone who uses their platforms.
"The fact is that companies like Facebook and Google are the real malicious actors here—they are vital public communications systems that run on profiling and manipulation for private profit."
—Yasha Levine
Judging by the popularity of the hashtag #DeleteFacebook—which went viral on Wednesday night, much to the dismay of CEO Mark Zuckerberg—many users of the social media giant agree that Facebook should bear the brunt of the criticism for a data breach that it did nothing to stop and that its "data-fueled" business practices made possible.
Jake Johnson, staff writer, Common Dreams
Full story …
Part 2: Uproar After Congress Sneaks Attack on Digital Privacy Rights Into Omnibus Spending Bill
Critics of the CLOUD Act "are rightfully pointing out that it jettisons current human rights protections in favor of vague standards that could gut individual rights." (Photo: Electoric Frontier Foundation)
Attaching it to massive spending deal, lawmakers rush through controversial bill that allows law enforcement to hand over personal data without a warrant.
Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
Thursday, March 22, 2018 | Buried in a 2,232-page government spending bill that the Houe passed Thursday is a piece of legislation that digital privacy advocates warn "expands American and foreign law enforcement's ability to target and access people's data across international borders."
The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data or CLOUD Act (S. 2383 and H.R. 4943) would add an official provision for U.S. law enforcement to access "the contents of a wire or electronic communication and any record or other information" for people all across the globe, regardless of where they live and what that nation's privacy laws dictate. It would also create a "backdoor" into Americans' data, enabling the U.S. government to bypass its citizens' Fourth Amendment rights to access and even use their data.
Jessica Corbett, staff writer, Common Dreams
Full story …
Related:
Can We Be Saved From Facebook? Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
Illustration by Rory Kurtz for Rolling Stone
The social media giant has swallowed up the free press, become an unstoppable private spying operation and undermined democracy. Is it too late to stop it?
Help grow the movement! Share this story with your friends.
Tampa Bay Times Editor’s note: Paul Tash, the chairman and CEO of the Tampa Bay Times, graduated from Indiana University in 1976. He was the speaker Saturday at the undergraduate commencement, where he delivered these remarks.
Part 1: Saving Net Neutrality on the federal front
NPR‘s headline (3/30/18) employs the passive voice: 16 Palestinians killed by whom?
Related: Fired VA Secretary Shulkin Issues Dire Warning: Vets should not have to wait years for benefits.
Part 1: The Danger of Evangelicals – It’s Not About Hillary Anymore
Jason Ackley 925 via Getty Images
May 1, 2018 | The word is out: The Senate will be voting in mid-May on the CRA resolution to overturn the FCC’s disastrous repeal of Net Neutrality.
Part 1: Minnesotans: Stop the proposed PolyMet mine
Part 1: An Empire Built on Fear at Home and Abroad
Special Project
A timely, compact, and utterly compelling exposé of the myriad contradictions besetting U.S. national security policy. John Dower has written a powerful book. —Andrew J. Bacevich, author of America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History
Part 1: The Pentagon Wants to Spend $716 Billion Next Year
Part 1: Billy Graham and the Gospel of American Nationalistic Christianity
All of it comes down to a disrespect and disregard for women, especially women of color. If we focus on the power analysis, the answer is staring us in the face. There is no time to waste. Everyone has to be all-in for rebuilding unions.
Participants walk toward the U.S. Capitol during the Women's March on Washington Jan. 21. (CNS/Bob Roller)
What we know about illegal immigration from Mexico
In “The End of Policing,” Alex S. Vitale argues that police reforms implemented in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri — from diversity initiatives to community policing to body cameras — fail to acknowledge that policing as an institution reinforces race and class inequalities by design.
