This week is big news in tech: Uber behaved badly. A huge document dump reveals that it deliberately broke laws to roll out its services as widely and quickly as possible. Of course, the company can blame the disgraced former CEO. “We’re asking the public to judge us on what we’ve done over the past five years,” the devout-sounding statement reads. Where do you arrive at this? Should Uber have paid a higher price for its actions? Or was acting fast and breaking things the only way to disrupt the taxi industry? Drop us a line in the comments. Meanwhile, here’s this month’s update.
Surveillance in a postroe America
We have the implications of overthrowing Roe v. Wade, which is expected to push about half of the states in the US to ban or severely restrict abortion. One thing that stands out: Law enforcement technology is much more advanced than it was in 1973 roe was decided. At the time, the easiest way for the police to catch illegal abortions was to raid a clinic, perhaps on the basis of a tip. If a woman was not caught in the act, it was very difficult to prove that she had an abortion. The doctors who performed them were the prime targets.
Today there is a massive surveillance infrastructure that is made possible in large part by the data clouds we all create every day. Prosecutors can subpoena location data (particularly in the form of geofence warrants, which request data on everyone who is in a particular location at any given time), searches and social media posts, as well as data from fertility and health logging apps. A proposed EU regulation designed to make it easier to catch child sexual abuse material could have the side effect of giving US prosecutors more powers to scan phones for messages about abortion. Not all records require a warrant either: Automated license plate readers can be used to prove that someone drove out of the state to have an abortion — or drove someone else, for which he could be prosecuted for complicity in a crime.
This means that online platforms will also try to avoid prosecution for inadvertently helping people get abortions. In any case, Meta has suppressed some abortion-related content for years. The changes in the law are likely to make companies much more cautious. A taste of how this might work is what has happened to sex workers since the passage of FOSTA-SESTA, a 2018 law that allows platforms to be sued for hosting content that promotes or facilitates prostitution. It has caused social media platforms, payment processors and allegedly even food delivery apps to suspend or shadow sex workers. It will be difficult to tailor that response from state to state, so it could affect people even in states where abortion is legal.
None of these law enforcement methods are new; they have been used for years to catch criminals. Only people in half the country can now be turned into potential criminals. It should also make you think: how could your data be used unexpectedly to charge you or someone else?
China in the driver’s seat
The world is struggling to move to electric vehicles, and as our special series reports, China is leading the way. Nearly 15 percent of new vehicles sold there in 2021 were electric, compared to 10 percent in the EU and 4 percent in the US. It already has some of the biggest EV makers, and manufacturers like Foxconn (which makes most iPhones) revolve in cars. Chinese companies make more than 50 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and have cornered a good chunk of global lithium supplies, and the country controls at least two-thirds of the global lithium processing capacity. It explores the thorny problem of creating a massive public charging network compatible with many different car brands – the absence of this is one of the main reasons why adoption in the US has been slow.
All this means that your first (or next) EV will increasingly be Chinese. “And then?” you may say. Isn’t just about everything you own Chinese-made? Well, but consider the national security implications of hundreds of thousands of essentially mobile sensing devices — very fast and heavy devices that, at least in theory, can be remote controlled— roaming the streets, sending untold amounts of data back to their manufacturers, who are under the thumb of an increasingly harsh superpower government. The West panicked when it decided that network equipment made by Huawei might be used for espionage, and that stuff doesn’t even have wheels†
