Microsoft and Google may have to surrender people’s data to Saudi Arabia after signing huge deals there::Saudi Arabia is seeking to be an innovation hub, but activists are warning that tech firms could be complicit in the repression of dissidents.
Money has no smell…
For those who keep parroting that poor big-tech has to respect local cultures and laws and that there’s nothing they could do, I remind you that atheists are literally considered terrorists in Saudi Arabia. So in theory, a court order could only invoke anti-terrorism as the motive and compel Google and Microsoft to hand over private conversations of suspected atheists and these companies would then say they did nothing wrong because they just complied with an anti-terrorism search warrant.
Not doing business in a country that is not your own is the easiest thing anyone can do.
I think it might be time to advocate for individual ownership of our own ‘data’
I don’t see any good reason why our data isn’t protected under law and any attempt to monetize should be done through contracts to each person who’s data is being used and payments made to those people
That relies on a country’s goodwill to implement such a idea. In europe with gdpr we are kind of going there and it’s already a massive mess. I find also kind of hard to define ownership; where does it ends? Is derivative data one’s ownership ? When properly anonymised? Plenty of fun in the field really.
Yet more proof that each and every company is willing to sell human rights. Some companies price it higher than others, but they all have a price.
I can’t believe I might go to Linux. It looks more appealing all the time.
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What are phone options?
I did once on a nexus 5. It was a pain in the ass, but it can be done. What phones are easier to get root access (is that the proper term? Idk. I think in Canada they can’t be carrier locked.)
I think fairphone has support for a foss os out of the box, other brands will take some more work and jailbreaking to get it working.
It’s unfortunate that until PostMarketOS gets better support for phones like OnePlus 6, you really only have the original PinePhone. The PinePhone shares it’s GPU with the Galaxy S2 (released 12 years ago). However, that OnePlus 6 support really is coming along. I still use my OnePlus7 as a bedside multimedia device and it works just fine.
