I am surprised that no-one has brought up a neutrality argument yet.
The app is legal within Saudi Arabia and in fact published by their government.
Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left?
If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N?
Just to be clear I’d prefer this app not exist, and I would not be unhappy if it gets “unpublished”. I also think it would be cool if the major platforms just came out and made an unambiguous statement on what they will and won’t stand for.
Serious question: Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks?
I think it's pretty reasonable for the court of modern political opinion to pass judgement on the more egregious examples of injustice in the world. Yes, morality is relative, but there's a strong majority opinion on this - especially in the countries that build the technology platforms we're talking about.
Apple & Google should yank the apps, and we should hold their feet to the fire until they do.
I think Google should yank the app. I think Apple should be forced to carry the app or open their platform. Android users can install whatever they want. Apple should not be in a position to prevent iPhone users from doing the same.
To me if BMW said "You can buy this car but you're not allowed to drive to to Compton Los Angeles". The answer should not be "If you want to drive to Compton buy some other brand". It should be "Those terms are Illegal"
Unlike Google, Apple claims total dominion over what apps you can run on your iOS device. They have that control over 1.3 billion devices. That the largest amount of censorship control ever in the hands of few people. Political apps are blocked. Sex positive porn apps are blocked. I get that Apple shouldn't be forced to carry those apps on their store but until they provide alternatives I think they're in the wrong.
People generally respond to this they want Apple to censor their apps. That's not an argument for not opening the platform. You are always free to install only Apple approved apps regardless of if the platform is open or not.
if BMW decided to limit their cars to roads approved by BMW, that’s their prerogative. Who are you to tell a private company what products they’re allowed to make? The correct solution is for consumers to buy the product that suits their needs.
It’s worth pointing out that the BMW approved roads have much better fatality statistics than the unapproved roads, and there’s almost guaranteed to be an approved road that goes within minutes of where you want to go anyway. Oh and some of those approved roads are exclusive to BMW and they’re really well made.
Or you can get the Jeep Cherokee, which drives really well on that dirt track.
In this hypothetical I'm not saying that you wouldn't have the right to hack your BMW to let it drive on any road, if you are able to. But BMW aren't obliged to make it drive every road by default, nor are they obliged to make it easy to hack.
And lest you think this is an absurd example, we're already heading down this exact path with drones, of which many now default to being geo-fenced from flying in restricted zones. It won't be long before these restrictions become nominally impossible for laypeople to switch off without some kind of security key.
It depends on what you sign when you buy it. You may very well buy the right to drive the car but not the car itself (like a leasing where you don’t actually own the car until fully paid).
It's only confusing if you leave out the context as you did.
The parent's statement was that Apple should be forced to carry the app, unless they're willing to open the platform so people can sideload their own apps without going through Apple's store.
> Apple claims total dominion over what apps you can run on your iOS device
This stopped being true some years ago. You can build any app you wish from source and Xcode will sign it and you can run it on your iOS device—no approval or payment required.
That's an interesting argument you bring up here. Why aren't more people open-sourcing their apps? Especially with a client-server architecture, you can simply keep the server part closed. I'm an iOS developer, but there's usually not all that much of interest in the iOS client.
Serious question: Where do you start and where do you end then with majority opinions? If this app is a clear case, how about Erdogan‘s secret police app? So if Islamism isn‘t okay, what about Zionism? Just Israel’s right to defend itself or not so sure anymore?
Who holds Googles and Facebooks feet to the fire for collaborating with PRISM, giving your nude selfies to NSA personnel? [1]
Is there a majority opinion this is okay if some amount of terrorism or "terrorism" (depending who you ask) is thwarted?
IMHO, the answer here is there‘s simply no easy answers here, and if there‘s just one thing to learn, it‘s that the world is a place with a lit of different opinions and values.
> Would you be willing to make this same argument for a (hypothetical) Apartheid-era app that enabled whites to manage blacks?
Yes (but only begrudgingly). Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation. That means within their borders they can do as they please, even if we don't like what they do.
We fought one of the most devastating wars in history (the 30 years war [1]) trying to control what other people think, and at the end everyone agreed that sovereignty is a great concept [2][3].
Using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms is in stark contrast to the idea of sovereignty and signals to everyone else that that kind of behaviour is ok. That's how you get cold and hot wars.
> Using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms is in stark contrast to the idea of sovereignty and signals to everyone else that that kind of behaviour is ok.
On the other hand, not using our influence over Apple and Google to project power against Saudi Arabia and try to force them to agree to different moral norms signals that their norms (and the behaviour they cause and justify) are ok. And that's how you get millions of women horribly mistreated.
Sovereignty may be a great concept, but not when you use it to justify and normalize abuse. I feel like that should be condemned and not tolerated under any circumstances.
How do we draw the line in what norms to enforce? And who determines that those norms are actually better than the ones in place? It seems like this would be a great way for multinational corporations to become cultural and moral enforcers, which causes bad incentives to influence people towards consumption above all else.
I simultaneously feel like, in this particular case, neither are the corporations themselves the cultural and moral enforcers, nor is deciding on where to draw the line on which norms to enforce relevant.
The former because the rights groups which criticize the corporations are the ones driving the supposed change and enforcing their own morality. Rights groups are probably better moral arbiters than corporations, on account of there being less conflict of interest. And the latter because, while the line can definitely be very hard to trace in various, more ambiguous situations, I really don't think this specific case is one of those. It feels like a slippery slope argument to me, specifically: "If we enforce this, what else are we going to end up enforcing?"
I highly suspect "directly harmed" is a moral judgement, not an objective measure.
If female genital mutilation "direct harm"? If yes, does the same apply to circumcision of males? If yes, is denying jewish people a religious practise (and thus potentially entry to heaven) "direct harm"? Different people will answer this very differently, even in the same country and culture.
More applicable to this case: Is it ok for parents to see where their children are? Is ist ok for parents to get an alert when their children cross a geofence? If in a culture the husband is viewed as the guardian of his wife, is it ok if the husband uses the same app for his wife?
Note that I don't endorse any of these things, I'm simply saying that "are people being directly harmed by this product" is sometimes a deep philosophical or psychological question that is arguably harder than rocket science.
does the same apply to circumcision of males? Not to the same extent, because the harm is less - despite using the same word, cutting off the foreskin is objectively less harmful than cutting off the clitoris.
However, this is an area where the prevailing opinion is shifting as we speak. Male circumcision used to be normal (in the US), now it's considered in most polite circles to be somewhere between antiquated and barbaric. The loudest argument in favor seems to be "it's my religious tradition!" but ask the mormons how that argument faired WRT plural marriage and excluding blacks. Public opinion shifts slowly but it's not hard to imagine a future where even religion doesn't cut it as an excuse for cutting off bits of a baby's junk. We may revisit this question in a few more decades.
Is it ok for parents to see where their children are? Yes. Parents in every modern society are granted extremely broad powers over their children.
If in a culture the husband is viewed as the guardian of his wife, is it ok if the husband uses the same app for his wife? No. Women are not property. That's the moral judgement of modern society. Cultures which violate this moral judgement should do so without our help.
These are not thorny issues or deeply philosophical problems.
That description glosses over the context and compare female circumcision that is conducted in one area of the world with male circumcision of a complete different area of the world, creating the conclusion that whats matter is what bit get cut off.
If we look at African culture, which is the most common place for female circumcision, we find that male circumcision is quite different from what people might expect in both execution and purpose. The boys are much older, and the ritual is done in part to test the "warriors" ability to withstand pain. A boy who cries out in pain brings great dishonor to his family, and of course no sedative is applied. It is ritualized torture with religious attributes.
This does not make US and EU style of male circumcision more moral, but it does mean that when you say that "the harm is less" with circumcision of males, what we are saying is that ritualized torture is not as bad as cutting off the clitoris. I object to that. male circumcision in nations that practice female circumcision is one of the worst form of barbaric acts one human can do to an other human, and for the worst reasons.
Living in constant fear because of your gender and where you were born is direct harm. Being controlled by the opposite gender is a direct harm. Not being able to become educated because you are female is a direct harm to them AND men(and those in between).
But in this case why stop half way? Why sell them a phone (the OS) in the first place? Isn’t this (just like the app) condoning the behavior? Isn’t being their ally the same? Doing business with them in general?
Protesting the immoral behavior only by means that don’t really hurt your own bottom line is not actually doing much except cement the hypocrisy.
For better or worse multinational corporations are already widely adapting that role. See: the “transgender bathroom bill” mess where many corporations dropped their support for the state in a concentrated effort to get the bill repealed. Even if the corp’s leadership is not agitating in such a way, then its employees probably are in the shape of Employee Resource Groups.
> Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation. That means within their borders they can do as they please, even if we don't like what they do.
Sure, but no western agent is obliged to comply with the moral standards of Saudi Arabia, or any other country to that matter.
Apple, Google are complacent because they want to do business in Saudi Arabia. They're favoring profit over enforcing western morality within their operations abroad, and will continue to do so as long as they don't get too much scrutiny.
I was pointing out that the argument of sovereignty is flawed, since companies such as Apple and Google can at any time choose to respectfully withdraw their operations in Saudi Arabia if they feel their products and services are being used to curtail human rights.
Sovereignty in its own right cannot be used to justify complacency.
Which are partially Saudi. Good thing though there are competitors on the market, who dont give a damn on morals. Good thing those giants interwined buisness and morals, and now can be forced to retreat out of markets.
I like the idea that the Peace of Westphalia somehow is endangered by Apple or Google deciding to make business decisions that pertain to Saudi Arabia. I'm also enjoying your Total Commitment to this principle, extending to guarded support for the hypothetical "Apartheid Black Management App".
The fact that you're talking in hushed tones of reverence about the glorious principle of sovereignty in a discussion of Saudi Arabia is really just the icing on the cake.
What exactly are you trying to say? This post is nothing but empty snark. For example, are you trying to say that Saudi Arabia is not a sovereign nation?
The GP comment (about the Peace of Westphalia) is bananas and the dementors might be a little uptight when it comes 'snark' but you're way past snark - 'lol, reading comprehension much' is not snark it's just crappy namecalling. You should edit it out.
I am not overly convinced that paraphasing what I said to be way snarkier than it is, then referring to it as "crappy namecalling" is entirely valid.
You have even truncated my original quote to make it seem snarkier:
"to the point that you don't seem to be able to read any meaning into anything that seems a little snarky" -> "you don't seem to be able to read any meaning"
What I find tiresome is the overuse of the word 'snark' on HN to mean 'you disagreed with me but didn't show my arguments the hushed reverence of the drawing room'. As a result, every conversation at HN rapidly silts up with people straight-facedly raising disingenuous absurdities. We didn't quite make it to the Nazis, but seriously? "Apartheid-era South Africa should have been left alone because something something Westphalia."
You are exactly right: the comment is bananas. It is past due that it should be allowed to call a comment 'bananas' on HN without people crying out for teacher to come Save Them From The Snark.
I'm not a huge fan of snark as a stand-in for everything non-bland either. But that's beside the point, when you start telling people how they are incapable of reading or absorbing your great insight (which is basically what both of your responding comments say), you're past snark and into snarl.
This is one of the many reason why China is blocking foreign digital platforms and rolls out their own copies.
This way they have complete control of praticing their own norms and policies on their platform without large foreign compines saying what they should and shouldn't do.
Are you not arguing and attempting to impose a stance on others right now? You don’t know which countries we are from and if our governments are aligned.
There’s a thing called human rights and we should all stand up for them.
I feel like the only reason anyone is making this “but they are sovereign” argument is because the discrimination is in this instance against women and not against people who wish to use a compiler or run a specific OS kernel.
I wish people could see injustice as unjust even if they are not in the targeted group.
Ouch. There’s been a lot to think about over the course of this thread.
I think South Africa is a good example because there were wide ranging trade sanctions against them during Apartheid which could have supported actions such as yanking government apps as a matter of international agreement.
Overall though I don’t think it’s a good idea for FAANG companies to unilaterally wade into foreign policy or cultural influence even more than they already do.
Other commenters have made some good points that the platforms are already very not neutral, pointing to adult apps and arbitrary TOS violations as app store death penalty.
I agree that this is true but I remain broadly opposed to the idea that we must stop others from running code that we don’t like. Overall it doesn’t seem like the right mechanism to do politics.
That's a poor analogy, because in apartheid, individual black people did not have individual white "guardians" responsible for supervising their movements and behavior.
Would you be willing to make the same argument you're making for a similar app that allows parents to supervise their children? Would it depend on the age of the child in question?
And, for a more sticky question: even in the case of this app, does the consent of the supervised woman matter? Or are we willing to make the stronger claim that Saudi women are incapable of consent because they live in a strongly patriarchal society? Should we extend the same treatment to other instances of gender-specific religious and cultural practices?
It's not a perfect analogy; a "slave management app" just seemed overly anachronistic. I think the point is clear enough.
Would you be willing to make the same argument you're making for a similar app that allows parents to supervise their children?
Parents get broad supervisory powers over their children. That seems pretty universal and uncontroversial.
Would it depend on the age of the child in question?
Of course. The exact age of majority is not agreed upon even among the most progressive societies. I think we can all agree that parents should be able to make travel decisions for a 12yo. A 17yo is more complicated.
does the consent of the supervised woman matter?
This is a specious line of argument, since the app is being used against women who do not consent.
I wouldn't object if Apple and Google did withdraw the app because of these concerns, but there are still legitimate concerns about the degree to which commercial involvement in places with significantly different cultural values should be affected by cultural differences.
I think the more important question is: whose "modern political opinion" is the decisive one. Notice that even relatively politically close countries have diverting understanding of important cultural issues.
Think about sex-related subcultures in Japan and, say, US.
Not OP, but possibly illustrated child porn? Perfectly legal in Japan if censored correctly, illegal in France, Germany and other countries. See also the Mastodon and Pawoo split.
The issue with such an app is not the fact that it is being hosted but rather the fact it was created. Going after amazon will not change the fact that the Sauds think this app is moral. In fact it only distracts from the issue. Amazon is a company and wants profit. Saudi arabia is a sovereign country, which means it is the only entity involved that can truly enforce its morality. That anyone would think to first criticize Amazon is somewhat ridiculous in this context
This is a typical argument from 'neutral principles'.In this kind of thinking, the notion of 'being fair to everyone in a principled fashion that is easily and mechanistically describable' is more important than say, the notion of 'not oppressing women, even if the Saudis think it's OK'.
This is itself a value judgement and comes down to your opinion. Like the old joke about turtles, it's opinions all the way down.
It's also fairly obviously absurd; there are countries where public opinion and even the legal system are pretty much OK with rounding up gays and beating them up, or worse. You have to have a pretty hefty commitment to neutral principles to think that Apple and Google should be OK with the "Let's Beat Up a Batty Boy" app because it's OK in some country...
I'm trying to understand the 'neutral principles' line of thinking here. Obviously, the situation with this app seems straightforward on the surface (the app is immoral, it violates human rights), but articulating the reality of the situation is complex and requires nuance. Say I don't want to argue from 'neutral principles' but I still want to give other people's value systems a fair trial? Then I would consider things like the intentions and outcomes, right? Maybe there's a good reason that women in Saudi Arabia have legal guardians?
> .. but I still want to give other people's value systems a fair trial?
Why?
That's a moral judgement like any other ("we should exercise fairness and take seriously any system of values that operates within a recognized national boundary circa 2019"). It would suggest you are committed to that principle above other ones, like "the right of women to self-determination". If that's a decision you want to make, knock yourself out, but it leads to rather strange situations.
Note that I made it sound extra absurd by limiting in time and to national boundaries; but conversely I could take off that limit and have you giving Aztec human sacrifice fair consideration ("strokes beard... well, actually, given population pressures... ummmn... ").
You're still flailing around looking for neutral principles: considering "intentions and outcomes" doesn't get you out of trouble as who is to say what intentions and outcomes are good?
A homophobe in Uganda or Russia might claim that their intentions are "save our young people from the gays" and their desired outcomes are "now all the gays are dead or hiding" as a Good Thing; they would not recognize your principles ("don't harm innocent people for no reason") as valid.
In the end it just comes down to 'fighting your corner'. There is no magical conjuration trick that will make our values objectively better in some way that stands outside our values. Who cares?
You did not address anything OP raised. Maybe read this https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-criticism/ (it's short, concise and relevant) and try to articulate your stance here - who should have the authority to take these subjective moral decisions?
[edit: sorry it's not short at all, but self-repeating so just read a few and you're done]
I reread everything from OP, and everything from my post, and think I addressed it well enough. Both OP and many of the critics of Cloudflare are casting around, like the philosophical equivalent of a dog with a bucket on its head, hoping that the uninteresting question of "is there some magic neutral principle that will allow us to operate from day to day without making subjective moral decisions" (narrator: "there isn't") will be conveniently resolved with some appeal to local law, free speech absolutism, slippery slope fallacies, catchy Latin slogans, etc.
My stance here is that everyone has to make these subjective moral decisions all the time and that the hope that we can pull a neutral principle out of our ass and Resolve Everything is itself a moral decision and not exempt from moral criticism. It's just yet another value judgement: specifically in the Cloudflare case, it's that "the abstract neutral principle of free speech and the idea that companies shouldn't interfere with who they host" is more important than "maybe we shouldn't let those assholes from the Daily Stormer go about their business with impunity". I'm OK with you believing that if you want to, but it's just as much of a subjective moral decision to prioritize a quest for neutral principle over making your own ad hoc moral decisions (which you will wind up doing anyhow).
In short, it's subjectivity all the way down, so you may as well 'fight your corner'.
>"is it the right place for tech companies to be regulating the Internet... what I know is not the right answer is that a cabal of ten tech executives with names like Matthew, Mark, Jack, ... Jeff are the ones choosing what content goes online and what content doesn't go online."
I'm not sure the dog-in-a-bucket analogy holds. He has a moral stance, but he's not sure he should be exercising it.
Philosophically, he is a dog-in-a-bucket. Either be moral or don't; you don't get extra credit for agonizing a bit on the decision and suggesting that somewhere there might be some really good solution ("maybe there will be a broad multi-constituency committee of wise people who can decide for all of us who gets to be on the internet"?).
I'm sure as a businessman he knows exactly what he's doing. Some Pilate-level hand-washing ("I don't want to make this judgement, you know") is just good business - you can blunt some of the criticism from the Free Speech Absolutists ("Hey guys, I'm uncomfortable too!") while also saying farewell to your least favorite customer, the Daily Stormer. Putting the criticism up is also pretty astute in this regard.
That's not the target standard, that's a basic baseline. When you're worried about violating neutrality by denying service based on potentially subjective moral judgements, using at least the low bar of an almost-universally accepted set of rights is probably a good place to start.
> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals?
Yet all adult apps are banned, just because as US companies morals when it comes to sexual content are just very Disneyesque in that country. Even for 18+ year olds.
Yep. The point at which Google and Apple don't both ban apps even aimed at sexual minorities like kink people (even just dating apps) is the point they can cry that they don't make moral judgements.
They do, and they've decided that consenting adult's sexual preferences are worse than an app that allows a dystopian regime to track the movement of women so abusive men can control them.
> Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left?
Since Apple & Google created a walled garden, any damage the apps can do fall into their responsibility. If they wanted to avoid this responsibility, they should have created an open platform.
Not if you want neutral carrier protection under the law. As soon as you start to pick and choose you loose that protection and you are liable for illegal content on your service.
What would phone service be like if the carrier could decide who gets to use it and who doesn't? They are not held responsible for criminals using phones but if they decided who gets to use it they would be liable.
And they do. But what exactly is that line. Prurient content that empowers people? Banned. Content that literally allows control over non-consenting individuals based on their gender? Accepted.
This is like a serial killer who campaigns against littering. They have a line they won't cross, but we shouldn't accept it.
Counterpoint: Nobody owes the Saudis a publishing platform to push their app. If they want to fully self host it on servers within the geographical borders of the kingdom, they can. Good luck getting it to install on the majority of non-rooted iOS and Android devices.
I would encourage anyone running any 'cloud' based services for the Saudi government to discontinue serving them as soon as possible. This runs the gamut from basic DNS hosting, VM hosting (google/AWS/azure/whatever), email and managed service hosting (office365), everything.
They're welcome to have a go at fully self hosting everything for their own citizens on their own ISPs, inside the kingdom, with netblocks they don't advertise to BGP upstreams.
Nobody owes you anything either. I don't like your opinion. Your internet access will be cut tomorrow. Apple and Google ban you from using their phones. You are welcome to create, manage and host your own infrastructure though. Good luck!
Oh wait, most of the AS around you also prefer not to route your traffic. And your domain? Nah, DNS is also at their providers' whim and you are on a very popular blacklist.
Current evidence shows that the AS that I run backbone engineering for have hundreds of peers at some of the world's largest IX points, and a number of highly reliable upstream transits. I get the point of your comment, but the reason why my AS is not shunned by the global Internet community is that we're responsible citizens. Unlike some other ISPs that I won't bother naming.
Now, the bar to being a halfway decent and ethical ISP is not really so high these days. You have to actually go to extra effort and make things intentionally more complicated to fuck with your customers' traffic.
In North America, at least, part of that includes not censoring content and not even contemplating doing something like the Saudis do. I can guarantee you that if the C-level executives at my company were asked to implement something that was grossly in violation of the US constitution/bill or rights, Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, or similar concepts upholding the rule of law, they would refuse.
I feel for the people who run telecom and ISPs in Saudi Arabia, who need to implement technical solutions at the whim of a corrupt hereditary monarchy.
I debated whether it was even worth my time to write this comment, since your argument is weak and theoretical. Reality is that major ISPs don't cut each other off for arbitrary reasons. But I'd bet $5 you're not involved in the practical day to day logistics of things like establishing 100GbE PNIs between major ASes.
>Under Saudi law, every woman has a legal "guardian" who can restrict her travel to specific airports and routes, and get automated alerts when they cross borders.
What neutral argument do you really wish to have? The fact that their legal system is messed up won't make me say "oh, but by law you are not allowed...".
I think the parent poster’s point is that that’s a very western perspective of morality. Imagine if the tables were turned, and the apprent promiscuity promoted by apps like Tinder was deemed immoral by a country that’s more conservative. Should that app be pulled globally as a result?
To them the fact that we allow so much casually dating could be (and in middle eastern cultures often is) viewed as “wrong”.
I understand completely the parent's point of view, because I am confronted with hundreds of people like that on a daily basis. To be honest? I am tired of justifying insanity, despite the legal point of view, and despite the fact that tables are not turned. I am not a lawyer and I am not sitting at a round table, and I have opinions. And my opinion is that due to this "oh, by law, or by religion" we are throwing away every sort of freedom and respect our parents and grandparents fought so hard so that we could today give them for granted.
Tell me one woman in this world that likes to be treated less than a car to rent (take a look at the website, you even have to justify where to go and for how long. Basically with car2go a car is treated with more respect than a human being). But as someone might argue, it's not up to me to judge. Thankfully I live in a country that treats everyone with respect.
Well, I guess that we won't get to use all that great Saudi tech then. What a shame.
In the end it comes down to the fact that Western countries have the app stores. Enthusiasts for various middle-brow airport Big Ideas books can probably advance about a million different theories (many even plausible) that explain why these companies wind up being from California and not Saudi Arabia or Uganda.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're busy promulgating the morals of Saudi Arabia, while ensconced comfortably in California, you've got it coming when your friends and neighbours start pissing on your shoes. Tech companies make decisions all the time about apps that go well beyond the strict letter of the law in countries in which they operate (Exhibit A: adult content).
> If Saudis don't like it, they can roll their own, without our assistance, and without us profiting from any of it.
Be careful what you wish for. They have the money to do it. Cornering a market isn't that hard if you're doing it for strategic reasons rather than to turn a profit. And then what? We have to petition the Saudis to approve our apps?
Maybe it would be better if we didn't have a central party that controls everything for everybody, regardless of who it is.
It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running.
Thus, to prevent them, you will need regulation - which stops at the border. Saudi government will have their own, and you can be sure that it'll be the kind that enables what they want to do.
On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets.
> It would be, but the walled gardens that we have are not propped up by any legislation, so they're creations of the market. Enough people like them that they keep running.
That would be an argument if people were given the independent choice, but the choice is tied to the phone you buy. It's not much of a choice if both of the major platforms are tied to a walled garden and the alternatives are esoteric enough that most people aren't even aware they exist.
And it is regulation keeping them that way. Third parties would sell iPhones modified to add competing app stores if there weren't laws preventing it. To say nothing of the lack of antitrust enforcement as yet -- markets don't work when there is insufficient competition.
> On the other hand, we can boycott and embargo them. Much good that money will do them if nobody will touch it, or if the products developed with it are banned from most well-paying markets.
Then they would reciprocate, oil prices would skyrocket and the dollar would fail as the reserve currency, both because of the oil market and because other countries wouldn't want to accept it if US foreign policy becomes to seize them back from a country where they were used to make trillions in purchases over decades.
You could say "and we could nuke them" with about the same probability of that actually happening.
And what would you even use to justify it, while we continue to do business with China and a dozen other countries with similarly problematic records?
Taking down "blasphemous" content is immoral. More generally, allowing religiously-based morals to restrict the freedoms of those who aren't willing participants is immoral.
Building and distributing or in any way being involved in the technology to track women in SA makes you directly responsible for the abuse that happens as a result.
Technology companies have a responsibility that comes with the power they enable, true it is very difficult to exercise properly, but in some cases it is very clear what is right and wrong.
> If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N?
I agree that not every situation is this easy to decide but this one -- women as chattel -- seems rather staightforward.
Corporations claim free speech rights (via corporate personhood) all the time. Not using those rights in this case seems to be quite a statement.
So your entire argument is based on your personal subjective valuation that it is straightforward.
The idea that a homosexual should be thrown from a bridge onto an oncoming train is as straightforward to a good many people as this is to you.
What you are invoking here is really 'US public opinion' or its related 'western world public opinion' circa. 2019.
If this is basically all the substance of your argument, then your position is no better than the moslem over there that thinks blasphemer should be beheaded.
Are you seriously saying that there are two sides to the whether women are chattel or not?
What's funny is that your specious analogies try to equate this argument -- for more freedom for the Saudi women -- to others where people's freedoms are being restricted.
Might I suggest you have another go at remedial logic.
Just because you can't define an objective standard doesn't mean all ethical systems are equally good. Personally I would take what is acceptable in the US/Europe over what's acceptable in the middle east.
They already block porn because it's sensitive in the US. Games where you shoot people in the head or drive people over is okay though. I can't see how this differs.
True, but it can be difficult for public relation on one side to censor LEGAL speech you disagree with locally (here in the US), and yet accept worse conduct remote. Same argument about Google in China.
Though I guess it only make sense if you consider that both practice bring profits in.
>If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality?
Apple and Google are, and their moral guideline is money. They are in the business of making money. If the content seems close enough to illegal and small enough revenue to not be worth investigating it, or if the content is legal but costs more to host than it brings in due to backlash, it will be censored. I would even guess that content that is illegal but brings in enough money won't be banned (unless a court order comes in that isn't worth the cost to fight).
One can just look at Reddit's history of banning content and see that it bans things not based on morals or laws but on when it stopped being a revenue generation. The allowed their most popular sub-reddit for years until moral outrage grew due to a news investigation, and then banned it under the guise of being illegal and protecting minors (despite the content not being illegal, as the federal government wouldn't have allowed to continue operating had it been).
Don't Apple and Google already block plenty of legal content they don't want to deal with? Consumers should force them to explain why they are willing to deal with this specific content.
I think you're spot on with your UN suggestion. I mean, didn't we (the world) establish the concept of human rights, exactly as an answer to this problem of bias? I think we could go a long way, if we simply required our technology to abide by the international human rights convention.
Of course this might be a problem for a lot more Apps than the Saudi women's-tracker.
Google shut down support for Project Maven, which was just running code in their cloud at retail prices. If you can impose your morality in a way that prevents the defense of the constitution of the country in which your company is incorporated, I don't see what the issue is with imposing your morality on a dictatorial foreign government.
I think we have to take a different stance. If you think a company is anathema for some position they take or product they offer, then stop supporting them. Boycott all Apple and/or Google products. Sell their stock out of your retirement holdings. Shed a light to others explaining why they should care and hope they do the same.
I also agree (as posted below) that a good place to start is the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We've collective agreed that this is a minimum line and should require all companies and countries to meet or exceed these requirements.
This is less about morals than it is about modern Western Civilization, and human rights. Given how Google and Apple are products of modern Western Civilization that benefits from human rights, it's a fair demand to expect these companies to call out blatant violations by powerful Nations on the same.
After all, if Saudi Arabia is unapologetic about Khashogi, or women's rights and defiant enough to break ties with Canada, Google and Apple can be defiant with the current international human rights council head!
I don't think the neutrality argument works here. Because by having this app Google and Apple are clearly siding with the Saudi government.
The neutral thing to do was not to allow this app, but to also not allow an app that for example, helps women get out of Saudi Arabia.
This app helps clearly helps the Saudi government, and the men that choose to oppress their women (not all of them do), control the Saudi women. It makes this task easier and so helping it (by giving it a place and spreading it in your app store) isn't neutral.
I agree. It's kind of pointless to demand from FB, Apple, Google, Amazon and other tech giants that they both don't interfere with freedom of speech and other freedoms and do promote various kinds of favorable social agendas at the same time. Also, KSA is backward as fuck, I just don't see how it's Google's fault that someone wants to live in the dark ages.
But ... the app is designed to prevent the freedom. The function of notifying is literally for the purpose of stopping women who don't want to live like that by people who force them to live in the "dark ages".
So, in other words, you are willing to ask Apple and Google to proactively police their apps, if they are designed to prevent freedoms on not. You'll probably need to ban any app related to Koran or Bible, because they condemn certain types of sexual preferences. Anything Catholic, Mormon, Scientology, got to go. So, when do you stop? How about apps used by Pentagon (Pentagon kills people)? Or banking apps that charge exhorbitant fees and 'prey on the poor'. It's a really fine line.
Again, you can with both want and not want for the tech giants to police behavior of others.
There is no thin line between app with catholic content or Koran and app that notifies male guardian of a women who is trying to cross the border. Nor between bank app that pays on poor. This app is not preying on vulnerable women trying to convince them to go back. There is also difference between policing apps that are designed "designed to prevent freedoms or not" and between policing apps that do in fact prevent basic freedoms.
This app is sending message to another person so that he can stop physically stop her and punish her. You can choose to ignore bank app and bible. You cant choose to ignore saudi police coming for you, because male guardian was notified.
But for that matter, sexual content is already heavily policed. It is not like the app stores ever claimed to be anything goes zones.
OK, let's take this argument even further. Suppose you are right. But the Saudis don't just discriminate against women. They also do against Jews, Shia and Christians. They also arranged genocide in Yemen. They've also sponsored atrocities in Syria. The list is long, really long. Clearly, Google is involved in KSA not only via the Google Play marketplace. It's quite likely that the government of KSA uses other Google products in its work. Microsoft as well. And I won't even go into the military industrial complex. Why stop with this app? There's rampant discrimination in KSA in the oil industry, for example. Are US companies involved in this industry in KSA complicit? Should they be prevented from working in KSA? Again, I just don't see how you can draw a line. You either have to take hands off approach or you need to totally embargo KSA, none of which seems satisfactory.
Typically, personal spyware apps are removed from both apple store and play store. That includes apps for abusive or jealous western partners that were meant to limit freedom of their partners.
You will be surprised I guess, but I would take issue with app that facilitates genocide in Yemen. As people did. People do take issue with IBM facilitating Nazi project during wwii. I would take issue with app that notifies Islamic State or whatever militia in Syria when high target leaves.
Putting pressure on stores to take away apps that do any of the above is fine by me. Because again, there is big difference between taking Saudi money and doing business with them on one hand and distributing spyware designed to limit freedom of victim and facilitate violence against her.
I disagree with you. First, spyware is installed without anyone's knowledge and this is not the case. Second, I can agree with you that any decent human being would be outraged. The reason of this outrage isn't this specific app, but rather how women are mistreated there.
So my question is this. We can all take moral high ground and demand that Google takes this this app down. But if you look at the situation broader, one can argue that the US government is a much bigger enabler than Google in this instance. Is there really a big difference how women are treated in Iran than they are in KSA, for instance? Iran is probably better off, though not by much.
Think about all that oil money that flows from US to KSA for decades. What is the real cause here? Is it just Google's failure to police their marketplace? Or have the Saudies always been this way.
Google is a very easy target here. Blame it on Google, pressure them to take the app down, problem solved. Or is it?
No, spyware does not have to be installed without anyone knowledge. Spyware is software that enables a user to obtain covert information about another's activities. The app that sends one partner wherabouts to another one without the first wanting it so is equal outrageous when used by jealous western girlfriend.
Ad second paragraph: how does that changes anything? Same app from Iran is same problem. Similar app watching Chinese dissidents is same issue. All would be against Google terms of services too.
You are also changing topics and goalposts. The "how to magically improve situation of women in every single oppressive country in the world" was not the topic of this thread. It was whether preventing this app constitute "asking Apple and Google to proactively police their apps, if they are designed to prevent freedoms on not" with implications for bank apps, bible and koran.
Of course pressure on Google wont solve problem. No single action will ever solve the problem. It might make the Google to contribute to the problem less. There is difference between passively not doing anything and actively contributing to the problem. That is fine.
Then again, keeping the app will not solve the freedom issue either.
I support the Google play model- if you want to have your app on the Google Play store it has to conform to certain standards, but the operating system allows you to install arbitrary APKs
You don’t need a bright and fast rule that covers every imaginable case. You can just decide the easy cases, like this, and you lose absolutely nothing in the process.
It exists, sort of. There's a "halal search engine"[1]. Iran has something like the Great Firewall of China.[2] Saudi Arabia has official censorship, and they're open about it; there's a web form for requesting that something be censored, and blocked sites divert to a page saying it's blocked.[3] It seems that Iran's system is fairly tight, but the Saudi system isn't really that strict.
On the other side, there are multiple "kosher ISPs" with cloud-based filtering. There are even "glatt kosher" ISPs.[4] "The Secured program will block pornography and violence; Secured Plus will also block women wearing intimate apparel; Secured Squared and Protected will filter out any immodest clothing; and Sealed will enable access only to sites with religious and modest content." In Israel, there are "kosher phones", which are either voice only or can't access the web at all. They just run rabbi-approved apps.[5]
Anecdotally, VPNs are incredibly popular in Iran and the government hasn't had a great deal of success in blocking their usage. Unlike the Chinese GFW, the government entities in Iran that want to run a nationwide firewall are not able to attract the 'best and brightest' network engineers. The sort of Iranians who might be qualified to implement such are not living in Iran, they're living in Los Angeles and working for six-figure salaries in US dollars.
An important note regarding the "kosher" ISPs - they're opt-in. Anybody who has an account with a "kosher" ISP is free to cancel and get an account with an unrestricted ISP. That makes them qualitatively different from Chinese etc. ISPs where people have no choice but to submit to censorship.
I don't think a real argument can be made that morality is subjective. If morality were subjective then the choice would be clear, no, Google and everybody else should respect other peoples' morals.
But things like slavery and the Holocaust make that determination, well, difficult. To say that morality is ultimately relative is ultimately to condone societies choosing to do really repugnant things to people.
There is a line to draw. That much is certain. The only question is where. I don't think we should be charging into the Sentinel Islands like a bunch of idiots and destroying their culture. But Apple choosing not to technologically enable the Saudis to further disenfranchise their women seems to be worthy.
In 1807, Britain passed the Slave Trade Act, outlawing slavery throughout the Empire. Passing the law wasn't enough to actually stop the slave trade. So the British Empire established the West Africa Squadron at considerable expense, to curb the illegal trade.
At first the squadron was hampered by the need to remain on good diplomatic terms with other European countries, but soon they signed treaties allowing Britain free reign to interdict and search ships they suspected of carrying slaves. At it's height, one sixth of the resources of the Royal Navy was devoted to curbing slavery.
What should be the arbiter of morality? I don't really know. But the public willingness to devote considerable social resources to stamping out an awful practice is a gift we shouldn't turn away.
Another example is the Latin American drug trade. The liberal-minded thing to do is to legalize drugs so that the cartels can't profit from them. But history teaches that cartels are in the business of doing nasty things, not in any one nasty business. So if they can't make mountains of cash funneling drugs across borders, they'll make hills of cash funneling humans.
It takes cross-border cooperation to smash these quasi-states, as they largely managed to do in Colombia.
Saudi Arabia is not interested in rapid social change, many many countries are doing the best they can to resist the destabilizing effects of Western technology on their traditional cultures. China has their Great Firewall. North Korea is closed off completely.
Maybe they have a point. But the West can't put the genie back in the bottle, we can't go back to a world before the Internet. And the elites in these traditional societies are perfectly fine profiting off of the tech when it's convenient for them.
So I don't really have much of a problem with Apple deciding to stick their neck out, or with us placing a moral onus on them, to stop facilitating the exploitation of humans.
Neutrality is a moral viewpoint in itself. It's the viewpoint that nobody is actually wrong, that simply by being a country you have a right to have your moral views respected. In the specific case of app stores, it's the viewpoint that everyone deserves to have the things they're doing made more efficient, and that helping anyone speed up their work is virtuous.
(Neutrality, by the way, is IBM's present defense of Dehomag's actions in World War II: there was a market opportunity in Germany, market opportunities are not inherently immoral, and by the time Germany's morality was beyond the pale, it was too late to say no. See https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss .)
And this isn't really neutrality, anyway. It's neutrality between the views of the powerful. The morality of Saudi Arabia is in scope; the morality of the Unabomber isn't. The morality of the LDS Church is in scope; the morality of Jews who object on religious grounds to the actions of the state of Israel isn't. The morality of China is in scope; the morality of non-authoritarian Communists isn't, because they lost all the Communist countries to authoritarians.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
In situations of injustice, choosing the side of the oppressor is not always a bad thing, It's sometimes beneficial to let oppressor get it's way. You need to look and evaluate the whole picture before making a decision because constant local optimization is not always the best global strategy. Your goal is to win the war, not the battle.
This seems like a significant distortion to me. Neutrality can mean that people who provide infrastructure and services may provide them to everyone without being considered to endorse particular uses or users. That doesn't mean that either the infrastructure or service providers or the advocates of neutrality literally believe or assert that "nobody is actually wrong".
From another angle, neutrality can mean that no one, or no entity of a certain type, should have or should exercise certain powers of judgement or discrimination. This also does not mean that nobody is wrong.
This is true across all sorts of situation in which many different entities refrain or are urged to refrain from making particular kinds of judgements or interventions, and there are lots of potentially powerful reasons for such restraint—quite a lot of them having to do with Schelling points that different people can (eagerly or grudgingly) agree on to stop conflicts or disagreements from escalating or infecting everything.
The internet I grew up with was a champion of free speech and exchange of ideas. No matter what they were. It’s very sad to see that it’s being taken over calls for censorship on so many different levels. I do find the nurtrality aspect to be very hypocritical though. The same communities that demand ISP infrastructure be kept neutral at all costs will often support content censorship in numerous other ways.
This topic (and the associated app) has been getting a lot of press in Australia recently, due to recent cases of Australian customs refusing to acknowledge asylum claims from Saudi women who have made it to Australia and sending them back to an uncertain fate in Saudi Arabia. Also tactics like Australian officials intercepting fleeing women at transit points (such as Hong Kong) and turning them over to Saudi authorities. See the first link below.
Background on the methods used to control women in Saudi Arabia:
thatoneyouthrow got flagged for commenting on the hypocrisy of the tech Elite for their support of a government in Saudi Arabia that kills journalists and oppresses females with no apologies - that funds radical Islam throughout the world - in the comments of an article discussing Apple and Google distributing government oppression apps on their stores.
It is odd. The keep from being too meta, I pose this question (since it seems like a controversial stance): Should Google and Apple formally decline to host applications in their stores that actively assist governments in oppressing their population? This isn't a philosophical discussion about how we are already tracked by phones, or how Facebook knows everything. This app literally is built by the government to check women in, so they do not have freedom of travel.
In an ideal world, it would be nice if we (governments, individuals, businesses etc) didn't support oppressive regimes and other bad actors. But would we though? Take Amazon - we know that they are almost as bad as Walmart on a host of issues, but how many of us would give up the convenience of one click shopping? It would be inconvenient, sure, but it is much easier for an individual to stop shopping at Amazon than for companies to give up billions of dollars in profit and answer their shareholders (to whom nothing matters but profit).
I am not saying Google/Apple is right - just pointing out that almost all of us are hypocrites at some level, some more than others.
Be the change you wish to see in the world. Smartphones are now essential, so you can't completely avoid doing business with at least Google xor Apple, but you can absolutely give up one-click shopping. I've never used it. I've never had Amazon Prime. It's been multiple years since I last bought anything at all on Amazon. I've used Uber less than five times (and Lyft none), and the last time was over three years ago.
Don't act like these services are essentials. They're nothing but tiny conveniences. And while your individual boycott won't have an impact on their bottom lines, their entire existence depends on hundreds of millions of people in your exact situation, giving in to defeatism or not even caring in the first place.
Exactly. We seem to forget that our parents lived just fine and even happily without most of these instant-gratification and convenience services. It is possible, if we try.
There are people who often apply this logic to smartphones and even internet access, which is wrong. Those things are now as necessary as cars for participation in society. But there are plenty of other modern products and services that are very much just conveniences, many of which come from the companies with the most scandalous headlines.
There are plenty of (nontrivial) services, devices, etc. that you simply can't use without a smartphone any more. Most of that dependency is artificial, but it exists nonetheless.
Does it hurt to have priorities and pick your battles? Oppression, especially state-sponsored, of women and minorities is way higher concern to me than Amazon's many and varied infractions.
There's also a problem of feasibility: Fairphone eventually conceded on their idealized fair trade product after an amazing effort. There's also world hunger and disease resulting in serious but avoidable death.
You could call this hypocrisy if you want but it's a matter of resources available to fight for these causes.
For the things that make a smart phone smart. We expect people to be able to find locations without directions, access arbitrary information, receive email, use eTickets, access calendars, etc - on the go, at any time of their day.
Smartphones aren't really about phone calls or sms.
thatoneyouthrow got flagged for his personal attacks on people.
The quote "None of these men care about women or LGBT unless it's legally enforced." is clearly untrue, and simply doesn't address what is a multi-faceted issue.
It's worth noting that if citizens of the US are concerned about this, then the citizens have the power - via government - to fix this by imposing trade sanctions.
For the sake of argument here, consider a different perspective.
Can the voting US public really make a difference to foreign policy with the UAE\Saudi Arabia?
===
There's a grey area that's worthy of discussion, but we the voting public and as voters for democratically elected governments have cracked the shits with governments and international businesses for much less than what Saudi Arabia have done as a hostile, extremist sovereign third party has achieved. The only difference with Saudia Arabia is the ridiculous amount of financial influence they hold and this blurs borders on the cost/value of morality.
Most companies are beholden to their share holders to make a profit, but at which point do write a line in the sand and say, we no longer allow money to grey the lines on what we consider morale and immoral?
===
Also consider the US voting public are losing their shit about a wall at time of writing. That's a fairly black and white concern when you consider the implications and rather obvious cost benefit (slim to none). The border wall is potentially the biggest white elephant that's gone to US policy in recent times. It's not going to work. And it's going to be incredibly expensive if it is built. Yet... a strong portion of the public still want it built. And it will be at the expense of schools, public health, infrastructure, disaster relief.
Now consider.... you think the US voting public have the collective nous to make an international impact on US foreign policy with an extremist, wealthy 'ally' like UAE\Saudi Arabia? Sincerely?
I don't have the same faith in the public hive mind as you. But... I don't have another option that can help besides publicly discussing the point as we are. For all the benefits of how much better life is for those living right now vs prior generations. We do an exceptional job at shitting in our own beds over and over again.
I think the public can make a difference. It was done with the TPP.
A more effective and simple solution is mandatory eVerify. What is the cost of illegal immigration? For example there's no study on the cost of deportations. There's about ~180k people deported annually? https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/05/crossing-attempts-at-us-sout...
The expense of schools has to do with the ever ballooning amount of administers, not teachers. Spending on admin increased and decreased for teachers. As of 2016 more than half of those involved in education are not teachers. Furthermore few countries outspend the US per pupil. In several states education is paid for via bonds and not out of the general fund. The country doesn't have a tax collection problem, it's got a spending problem. As long as people can vote to spend other peoples money, they will.
I think it is worth noting that Saudi Arabia doesn't have any popular ground level support (as far as I can tell).
Yes, money buys influence. But that only goes so far in the face of widespread hostility. The "they took money from XXX" negative argument does really work if everyone hates XXX.
>Yet... a strong portion of the public still want it built. And it will be at the expense of schools, public health, infrastructure, disaster relief.
You are drinking up propaganda if you believe this to be true in the slightest. The US extremely rarely has a balanced budget and there is always room for politicians to take on more debt for their projects.
The entire position of AOC at this point is to give up the facade of government brining in revenue to pay for any proposals. All questions about payment are answered with whataboutism pointing at a different unfunded liability.
Neither party cares about balanced budgets. The wall, tax cuts, the green new deal, whatever do not take away funding from other programs because the federal government no longer fundamentally operates that way.
Funding is only cut for political gamesmanship at this point.
We've banned this account for trolling. We don't want trashy internet flamewars here, irrespective of how right your views are or you feel they are.
It's not hard to express your views without breaking the site guidelines. Plenty of other users have managed it in this thread. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I posit that there are two issues here: profit and rights for women. Now it seems to me that the real issue is profits over the rights of women. But please educate me on how this is a "multi-faceted" issue if I have left something out.
Maybe Apple and Google are entitled to make money from Saudi Arabia's oppression of women? Once again, please make your case.
No I don't believe that Google or Apple should make money from the oppression of women. I believe this app is free, so they don't appear to be in this case. Nevertheless, I'd like to see it removed.
But nor do I believe that Sundar Pichai or Tim Cook were aware of this app previously or had any personal responsibility for it.
Nor do I think they should be vilified for shaking hands with MBS prior to the murder of Khashoggi, and especially not prior to the Yemeni war.
I believe at the time there was an optimism that MBS would be a positive for change. Remember the optimism around when he announced the changes to allow women to drive...
They let you download the app... but they do NOT host the service. That's run by the Ministry of Interior.
EDIT: I had a paragraph below this saying the laws were really the problem and would still exist without the app.. but I forgot one key point: how easy it was to subvert the system before the app existed. I've removed that section. I fully support removing the app from the app stores and forcing SA to go back to the old system.
I agree, but I don't see why we shouldn't do both. We should press both Google and Apple to remove the app, as it helps out a horrible practice. What next, a database on female genital mutilation? Both Google and Apple have removed apps for far more trivial reasons.
It doesn't matter if the system would still be in place - hosting the app is still aiding and abetting, and carries full ethical responsibility as such.
I don’t agree with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s stances, but I also feel like keeping a list of each state that violates human rights is not in Tim Cook’s or Sundar Pichai’s job description. If we are just being honest with ourselves the list of countries in which you can do business approaches 0 if we call out the violators. Secondly, the last time I checked a company’s mandate is to abide by the laws of the country in which it conducts business and to make a profit for shareholders. I’m all for exceeding this goal, but it should not be incumbent upon a company to follow the geopolitical climate and react.
> Not a perfect one, but if enough people want something, they have the tools to make it happen.
Not if they live in heavily gerrymandered districts or in deep-blue/red states, or if they are affected by voter disenfranchisement, or if they cannot afford leave their job to go to vote.
As long as people enjoy the products well enough in practice they'll agree (enough). Diamonds, Chocolate, borderline slave labor with no environmental laws providing cheap electronics to name a few.
This isn't a case of keeping a list of abusive states, it's a case of hosting an app which is literally part of the mechanism by which an abusive state abuses people.
A lot of assumptions here. Do they know that is the explicit purpose of the app? Has it been reported? Again I don’t agree with their policies, but who’s job is it to keep track? I would think the press. However since the business mandate seems to be peddling outrage it’s easy for things to get lost in the Twittersphere.
According to Business Insider's reporting, in addition to setting travel restrictions for dependents (which includes adult women in KSA), the app also allows you to pay parking tickets.
Its alarming how these increasingly powerful and consolidated silicon valley groups preach progressive morality but practice regressive totalitarianism.
Why "radical feminist activists" as opposed to just "feminists?"
Objecting to companies only embracing progressive or feminist ideals publicly for the sake of PR or marketing while not actually taking any risks within their own culture isn't exactly radical.
Because radical feminists activists are subset of feminists. Feminism itself has many different strands and it make sense to specify which one you mean. I wanted to be quite specific in which argument exactly I mean.
The service is run by KSA. If google removes the app, they can still offer it through a website , or SMS. I don't see why they wouldn't ban it , considering they have banned far more innocuous stuff.
I'm pretty sure you can find a group seeing the existence of a platform for managing X (replace with something you disagree with) the same provocation. Does that give them an licence to retaliate ?
How far do you go through the rabbit-hole of so called "provocation" before it's deemed "too much" ?
Yes, the app is ridiculous. No, tech companies don't need to become morality police for the world. Perhaps removing scams and malware should remain the bar for policing apps.
Its hard for Google to point to some TOS violation when roughly half the app ecosystem revolves around tracking people in order to manipulate their behaviour (ads, gambling, etc). Their app is doing what most mobile apps are designed to do. Its just more successful than usual since the creator is a nation state.
There's a lot of discussion here, but I don't see the important question being asked:
How (and whether) the removal of this app will help the women in Saudi Arabia:
1)In the short term
2)In the long term
I.e. if the alternative to using the tracking app is not being able to travel (in the realities of that horrible state), then removal will make life of many women worse in the short term.
Calls for bans and removals are the easiest form of moralizing without addressing the actual problem in any way.
The same kind of logic brought us FOSTA/SESTA, which few people here are happy about. Let's not fall into the same trap.
You don't help bad people do bad things. Period. End of discussion.
If they still do it without your help, that's unfortunate; and yes, you should probably do something to stop it. But if they do it with your help, then you are directly responsible for it, and the rest of us have a moral obligation to hold you responsible.
The effect of the ban on women will be nearly nil, since the system was in place before apps existed. If there is any difference, it'll be positive, because the "guardians" won't bother setting the notifications up.
And comparing this to FOSTA/SESTA doesn't make any sense. Those laws didn't ban something that is unambiguously evil - they banned a whole bunch of random stuff under the guise of targeting sex trafficking. The equivalent here would be if I was demanding that Google and Apple ban all tracking apps in general, on the basis that they're used by "guardians".
If the effect on women will be nearly nil, then does it all become a PR question?
In that case, couldn't it be useful to keep the app if only to keep track of how many people this policy affects?
I drew analogies to FOSTA because even FOSTA's intended effect (as stated) was negative. Yes, it actually made it a bit more difficult to do sex trafficking online (along with adversely affecting tons of other people). As a result, traffickers are harder to catch.
The "don't deal with the bad guys" approach sounds great, but even an embargo doesn't often work: see what years of sanctions got us with Cuba, NK, and Iran (in terms of improving the lives of people in those countries).
Because it matters for assigning responsibility. Same reason why we jail crime accomplices, even if they can prove that the crime would have happened if not for their participation.
What you propose is basically assisting in oppression on the basis that it would have been even worse otherwise. That is a recurring theme in apologetics, especially so in WW2. They don't sound at all convincing, and I'm not aware of anybody getting off the hook with such claims.
It's certainly a question worth pondering. I don't see why the default assumption should be that this app is a net good though.
I wonder too, if this app didn't exist, and they didn't let women travel at all, if their society would pay a cost that would eventually become untenable. Thus, while it's possible this would be bad in the short term (not demonstrated though) it's possible that it would also be good in the long term (also not demonstrated).
In my opinion, without really compelling evidence, we should opt not to participate in the subjegation of women.
>I don't see why the default assumption should be that this app is a net good though.
It should not, and I agree with your assessment. Wish there was more thought in the same vein.
It's just that women are missing from discussion of the effects of the course of action taken. People talk about how it would affect market share, but not day-to-day life of women in other threads.
> The app doesn’t track women, the government facilities do so (e.g. security checks at airports), they send SMS messages to the guardian when his minor son/daughter or his wife/mother/adult daughter leaves the country through a government check point.
It’s basically up to the person running passport control that day but first of all they also need their other travel documents like their passport if they are flying internationally.
They are often not allowed access to them (Not denied access in any legal sense, but their families will “look after” the documents making it hard to gain access to such documents). But if it’s the case of a foreign national returning home their home country can provide emergency travel documentation and help see the person thought passport control.
But if they are not a foreign national, they have little options. They will often (but not always) try and contact the legal guardian of the woman (if they are not already present, but as you said without the app. I presume they are also travelling without their “legal guardian”) and return the women to their family if they are instructed to do so by them.
Technology only gives you gadgetry, not morals. Hasn't anyone in Silicon Valley realized this yet? They're building a huge technological cage to control the masses.
A coworker literally said this in response to me raising objections over Saudi investment: "I believe Chomsky remarked that socially responsible investing is a contradiction in terms." And I must say, the logic is impeccable: money is incompatible with morals, therefore morals are worthless.
There's far more egregious things. For instance in Western Africa there remains massive child slavery. The reason this is relevant, as if it wasn't by itself, is that that slavery is then facilitated in bringing you your tasty chocolate treats from companies such as Nestle, Hersheys, Mars, and more. This has been going on for decades and has been brought to court multiple times - the companies always win with generally negligible media coverage. Lack of media coverage notwithstanding, AP did run a new piece on it... 3 days ago. [1] Seafood is another huge industry where you see lots of slavery in its harvesting and production. Incidentally, Nestle also shows up there with their Purina brand.
This is not a 'what about chocolate or seafood' but a general frustration I have with people today. They (and this is not directed at you) are grossly misinformed on the state of the world, even though the information is more readily available than ever before. They protest completely inane stuff like it's the end of the world, while completely ignoring the tremendous human rights abuses throughout the world that continue to this very day. If people shined a light on these 24/7 it's possible that something could happen. Even back to Saudi Arabia, not only is there their treatment of women but they still literally crucify people, still literally execute people for "witchcraft and sorcery", and much more. These stories do receive one off coverage, but nothing compared to e.g. a scientist who wore a shirt with some scantily clad girls. Makes all of 'social media justice' look like little more than a bunch of useful idiots. [2]
In an ironic coincidence it seems that AP has now removed that article from their site with no notice or explanation. It is still available in Google's cache -- swap to text-only or disable scripts to avoid AP's script from killing it on load. This [1] seems to be the same article. That link is also available on archive.org [2] should it be the case that the articles are facing legal threats from the chocolate industry.
This is a country that literally crucifies, beheads, and stones people to death as a form of judicially sanctioned execution. A country where sorcery is a crime on the books (actively enforced, too), and atheists are officially designated to be terrorists.
I am aware of the repression of women in SA but I didn't realize they weren't even allowed to leave the country. The addition of real time tracking technology just makes it that much more horrifying. Imagine being a woman trying to escape domestic abuse and being returned to your abuser when you try to flee.
What we really need with respect to Saudi Arabia is a popular campaign similar to the one that was directed at South Africa in 1980s. Boycott everything they have a stake in. Push your government to embargo everything they buy or sell. They're in a much weaker position than SAR, too, in terms of what they need to import, so it'd be much more effective.
They’re still the predominant player in the world oil markets, and the leader of OPEC. Oil is too deeply ingrained in the modern economy to seriously consider boycotting them, and even if possible, the resulting economic shock from a successful boycott would be severe.
Software isn't the only investment they do though. They also invest in electric car companies (which prompted Musk to threaten to go private), companies that do major infrastructure/construction, industrial manufacturing, virtual reality and machine learning, chemicals and materials, aerospace, etc. Not using an app is easy, but if you really want to escape them you'll have a fairly hard time doing so. They even own 25% of Arm Holdings, so better toss that cell phone and tablet.
Less, though. So Lyft it is. Not that there’s really any way you can ever control who owns shares of a public company, but if the government or its proxy is on record as a large shareholder, that’s something.
“Activism” without sacrificing convenience. Perfect. I suppose the really important part is that you get to tell your friends why they’re not as woke as you whenever they get an Uber.
It’s interesting seeing people admit to their fake outrage nowadays.
It’s interesting that we’re all terrified of big tech’s growing base of power over our lives, yet more and more we expect big tech to take care of problems that governments are typically responsible for.
Big tech is already very powerful, and there are very few feasible ways to stop that. But it is a bit more feasible to demand that big tech use its power in certain ways. They are already at the point where almost anything they do will have an impact with moral implications, the way that an elephant walking through a field is going to crush some flowers or grasses. (See, for instance, Twitter aiding the Arab Spring by basically just existing, Facebook aiding the Rohingya genocide by basically just existing, and WhatsApp enabling mob violence in India by basically just existing.)
So, we might as well demand that they step on the things we wish them to step on.
This quickly leads to unintended consequences. What happens if a large group of people (perhaps wearing red hats with a four letter acroynym) decide they want big tech to step on a flower you hold dear?
I don't think I'll be able to prevent them from making that demand simply if I don't make demands either. (I certainly don't think that they're not smart enough to realize that a demand could be made until they see me make one, for instance, nor that they're that exact shade of polite that thinks this is an illegitimate tactic until they see it used at which point it becomes legitimate.) So I don't think this is, in any way, a consequence.
Even asking big tech to step on them seems to have a better chance of accomplishing my goals.
> I don't think I'll be able to prevent them from making that demand simply if I don't make demands either. (I certainly don't think that they're not smart enough to realize that a demand could be made until they see me make one, for instance, nor that they're that exact shade of polite that thinks this is an illegitimate tactic until they see it used at which point it becomes legitimate.)
It's not that they won't make demands, it's that they'll use your demands to legitimize theirs. If you don't make any then you can credibly defend against theirs by saying that nobody should. If you do, what will you say to theirs? Do as I say not as I do?
> Even asking big tech to step on them seems to have a better chance of accomplishing my goals.
If my demands were going to be listened to, then no legitimizing is necessary for anyone. If legitimizing were necessary, then their demands are useful because they legitimize mine, no?
I'm not interested in defending against theirs by appeal to some principle that I don't think anyone believes in either way. I'm interested in making the case that I'm right and they're not. If I'm not right, I shouldn't win the argument, they should. And I am right and big tech is run by people who aren't smart enough to understand why, we're all screwed anyway so whatever.
I have trouble distinguishing the "don't legitimize it" argument from, say, "You shouldn't engage in political attack ads because it legitimizes the other side using them," "You shouldn't have an army because it legitimizes other countries having an army, and what if they invade you one day," and so forth. Without some concrete reason to believe that the other side either wouldn't or couldn't use a tactic, refusing to use it on principle is just planning to lose.
> If my demands were going to be listened to, then no legitimizing is necessary for anyone. If legitimizing were necessary, then their demands are useful because they legitimize mine, no?
That's assuming you're in a symmetric position. If they show up and argue that we should censor pornography using a definition that covers most forms of gay culture, the pro-gay coalition and the anti-censorship coalition may comprise enough of a majority to prevent it.
Whereas if you show up and argue that we should censor apps you don't like, maybe they don't have enough support to defend against you even with the anti-censorship coalition.
So you win the battle and the war continues. But now the anti-censorship coalition is dead, because you can't hold together a bipartisan coalition that only benefits one party. So when the other side comes back and wants to censor gay culture again or remove apps that "violate immigration laws" or demands that search results not be "biased" against religious conservative viewpoints, you'll have given up ground useful in preventing those things.
> I'm interested in making the case that I'm right and they're not. If I'm not right, I shouldn't win the argument, they should. And I am right and big tech is run by people who aren't smart enough to understand why, we're all screwed anyway so whatever.
That's assuming winning is binary, either you get everything or nothing. But it's possible, indeed likely, for both sides to lose by just hacking each other to death piece by piece.
When censorship is made easy, it happens more often. The ban list grows until we end up in beige neutrality hell and the only thing left is pop music and corporate propaganda.
And it's not just about convincing the tech companies. If platforms don't censor, people can respect that and fight their battles without them. But once you bring them into the fray, you're going to get calls for legislation. Then it's Congress deciding what's allowed and what isn't, which they've repeatedly proven to be spectacularly bad at even when they have good intentions, and more to the point the opposition is in the majority as often as you are there.
> I have trouble distinguishing the "don't legitimize it" argument from, say, "You shouldn't engage in political attack ads because it legitimizes the other side using them," "You shouldn't have an army because it legitimizes other countries having an army, and what if they invade you one day," and so forth. Without some concrete reason to believe that the other side either wouldn't or couldn't use a tactic, refusing to use it on principle is just planning to lose.
What happens when you apply that logic to other scenarios? Preemptive nuclear strikes. Concentrating your political opposition into internment camps, or just murdering them as Stalin did. Licensing publishers so that only information pre-approved by the state can legally be distributed.
The other side could do it so we'd better do it first? Pretty glad that wasn't JFK's policy or Reagan's.
There is a difference between having the ability to do something and actually doing it. It's the difference between having an army and invading a foreign country.
Yes. The app makes it much more difficult for women to subvert the oppression. Before the app the government used little paper slips to grant travel permission, now the "guardians" get SMS notifications when a woman's passport is scanned.
I’m not advocating that anybody DDOS their SMS system with fake alerts. But at least an app protects against that to a greater degree than an SMS solution. The app creates a safe space for oppression.
The app is not the technology that makes this possible. It's just a webview around their website, and the SMS messages (not push notification) are sent directly to the phone via the cellular network.
Will anyone be able to silently leave the country if this app was pulled from the store? No, the SMS messages would still be sent, because they have nothing to do with the app.
On one hand I think Apple and Google should drop this, and never should have hosted it. On the other hand I disagree with your assesment that “every little bit helps.” Too often these largely symbolic acts do little more than assuage guilt, they don’t improve anyone’s life. Think of it this way, if you’re riddled with cancer, and I offer you a single dose of chemo, you might reasonably complain that I’ve done nothing for you. If I then shrugged and said that at least I tried, and every little bit helps, you’d be well within your rights to laugh in my face.
Sometimes helping just a very little bit is as good as doing nothing, or even worse, because doing nothing at least is unequivocal in terms of moral culpability. In this case we’re talking about Saudi Arabia, a country with vast riches because we all buy their oil and kiss their asses. It’s like my government (U.K.) crying about Yemen while selling the Saudis more weapons.
Helping is a good idea, we shouldn’t host these apps, shouldn’t sell them weapons, and frankly shouldn’t dare to pat ourselves even slightly on the back for it.
What the fuck is going on in this thread? It seems that either numerous pro-SA trolls are hard at work, or SV liberals are suddenly just fine with women being kept on digital leashes and treated as property?
"Apple and Google accused of hosting Saudi gov't app that tracks women " is a weird phrasing. It's absolutely, 100% verifiably true they host it, as the article plainly states:
>Both Google Play and iTunes host Absher, a government web service that allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders, and to get close to real-time SMS updates when they travel.
Kind of beside the point, too. The bigger news and greater surprise is that the Saudis have an app to track & apprehend women who try to leave! Like "What an outrage that Google hosts this" isn't quiiite what I was thinking...
In saudi arabia, women are property. This is no different than an app to track a stolen car or lost pet. Compared to all the stuff men are allowed to do to/with their women... this app is probably the least outrageous wrong. We need to get mad at the countries who support the real physical harms, those that enable abuse or at least do very little to prevent it.
And the UK. They have turned a blind eye several times when saudi women have asked for help while traveling in the uk. And all those countries who refuse saudi women refugee status.
We changed the submitted title ("Apple and Google accused of hosting Saudi gov't app that tracks women") to the HTML doc title. Perhaps the submitter was attempting to follow the site guidelines ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."), but introduced some confusion in the process.
I'm loosing touch here, why is this not a manufactured controversy and instead an actual complaint that has any merit?
Why aren't we "accusing" ISPs from routing to the website?
"Accusing" wayback machine of caching it?
"Accusing" CDNs of not null-routing it?
so this article gets to masquerade Apple and Google's power consolidation as a good thing and you guys eat it up? I'm going to call my publicist and start my own word games if this is so effective.
The only reason they would take down this app is because its more like a web page inside of an executable wrapper, which does violate their quality policy.
They arent responsible to anybody here, and the faux protest will only gives the options of switching to one of thoss two services or becoming a luddite.
70% of the mobile devices in Saudi Arabia run Android.
Outcome 1- Apple bans Absher but Google does not. Absher usage continues. Android gains market share over time.
Outcome 2- Apple and Google both ban Absher. Android users install it via sideload from the government website. Carriers preload the sideloaded Absher app onto new phones. Absher usage continues. Android market share grows over time.
I don't see a victory here other than taking a moral stance.
Outcome 4 - Saudi mobile phone carriers partner with Chinese device manufacturer to deploy custom built versions of Android with 'play protect' ripped out, and Absher app as a non-removable default install.
Basically think of what you could do if OnePlus went fully evil and built an 'evil' version of OxygenOS, their custom android variant.
Outcome 5 - After the custom evil Android is a success, Saudi men decide that the default government app isn't enough. They decide to have all their wives chipped/tagged when they take them in for their vaccinations.
A Saudi startup that basically is the 'Google Nest of oppression' becomes a unicorn company by plugging into the GPS from the chip which enables new forms of tracking. They'll get live video feeds, sentiment analysis and child rearing effectiveness scores all rolled into one app. Multiple wives? No problem - you can compare and contrast all of them in the app.
So glad everyone got Google to remove the original app, instead of thinking of ways to combat the root cause of the problem. At least there's another unicorn startup because of it. /s
Not sure how you see a connection between flat-earthers and the Saudis' treatment of women? It's fine for people to believe the world is flat - it doesn't hurt anyone.
This is in the context of using terminology that G/A lawyers and app approval personnel use, where no humanity is considered and everything strictly objective, eg "if <rule>, then application version denied".
I'm sure Apple will take a stance now that their PR team has to deal with this, but without any eyes on an app, the app can throw moral values to the curb and will only be obligated to follow the approval guidelines.
Agreed. Plausible deniability is maintained but the facts are the same. We, as a society, need to move away from the silly idea that companies should be moral judicators.
If we’re going to continue to allow these companies to enjoy as much power, money, and influence as entire nations, why wouldn’t we expect them to be moral leaders? From my perspective it would seem they are precisely the kind of people we want pushing for basic human rights.
The comment was in fact heavily upvoted. It takes time for the vote totals on a comment to work themselves out.
I'm personally responsible for HN and can tell you that "keeping Saudi Arabia happy" has never entered my awareness until you brought it up.
We just banned your throwaway account for trolling. If you continue to use HN for flamewars, trolling, or personal attacks, we will ban your main account as well.
The app is legal within Saudi Arabia and in fact published by their government.
Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left?
If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N?
Just to be clear I’d prefer this app not exist, and I would not be unhappy if it gets “unpublished”. I also think it would be cool if the major platforms just came out and made an unambiguous statement on what they will and won’t stand for.