Kudos to Australia for Taking a Stand on Google & FB

Kudos to our buddies, large and small in the South Pacific, Australia and the tiny Solomon Islands for tackling the tech giants Facebook and Google, forcing them by legal means to stem their overt abuse of privacy of their millions of customers and their monopolistic control of their print media competitors. We, at the Jewish Voice have been blowing the whistle on these behemoths for years. They may finally have met their match.

Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing Facebook over its use of an app to spy on users for commercial purposes. The case accuses FB of false, misleading or deceptive conduct toward thousands of Australian consumers, after it had promoted an app, saying it would keep users personal activity data private, protected and secret and not use it for any other purpose, when it was actually being used to gather data to help FB’s business.

And that business was to sell the personal data collected to merchants and other clients for their use. All the private, personal information FB users tap into their computers is open for the company to read, record and use as they see fit. All members sign away their rights to privacy when they agree to the terms of their membership. It’s all in the fine print. In effect, they’re being sued for lying to their customers about the security of their privacy.

And the Solomon Islands, a speck in the Pacific, is also baring its teeth in anger and fairness, by announcing plans to temporarily ban access to Facebook. That country’s Communications Minister said the government is responding to personal abuse, defamation and lies spread on the social medium platform. “We found that people use it to abuse others….it’s not society friendly and people have been using it to discredit people and all sorts of abuse.” We agree. It’s about time.

Google, the other giant website, is faced by a new law enacted in Australia which forces the company to compensate publishers for news they research and report. The proposed law, intended to compensate publishers for the value their stories generate for Google’s free use, which would cost them millions, has provoked Google to threaten to disable its search engine in that island nation if this law is enacted. It’s no joke if we say, “How can you find out stuff if you can’t go to Google?” We’ll take a guess that at least 94% of online searches in the world go through that site. But realistically, local news agencies, hard-copy news-stand paper publishers have expenses that the web sites do not have, yet their news stories are carried free of charge by Google. In order to play fair, Google may eventually have to pay their news sources.

We at the Jewish Voice support such legislation and call for our government to fall into line with Australia to make a level playing field for all news agencies. Newspapers are quickly losing ground to their competitors on web sites. Although having many pluses, these huge on-line giants, Facebook and Google are also a threat to our freedom and democracy by their monopolistic strangling of our communication and political systems. Their control of our lives by making us dependent on them is quite frightening. They must be challenged. And that will be a problem.