A year after Snowden, tech firms must get their houses in order to Reset the Net 6 June 2014, by Madeline Carr

the extent to which we accept government surveillance. A certain antipathy and scepticism about going through conventional political channels to bring about change in this context has emerged, which arguably signals a failure of those elected to represent us.

Unlike February's The Day We Fight Back, which focused on putting pressure on Congress to make changes, Reset the Net is, in 's words, an opportunity to turn "political expression into practical action". He argues that this is an initiative "to protect our universal human rights with Tech companies want us all to reset the net. Credit: the laws of nature rather than the laws of nations". Reset the Net Look who's talking

It is perhaps questionable whether this campaign When you go online today, you are likely to offers a real solution, despite the big names encounter the Reset the Net campaign. Exactly involved. There are more than 2 billion people one year after the first revelations from Edward online and an awful lot of them will have to install Snowden about NSA spying, the campaign is encryption and privacy tools for this campaign to designed to mobilise organisations and individuals have any meaningful impact on to resist government mass surveillance. programmes such as Prism. It may well be that Reset the Net will be the very thing it doesn't want The organisations involved, including the to be – a public pressure movement rather than a Electronic Frontier Foundation, and , practical solution. want us all to take part in a "Thunderclap" – a boom intended to resonate through social media It's also interesting to see the campaign neglecting platforms, promoting an anti-surveillance message. to address the role of the private sector in hoovering up our data in the first place. The We're also being offered The Privacy Pack – a relationship between internet giants like Google selection of software and tips tailored to common and the US intelligence community remains computers, phones and tablets that, thankfully, ambiguous so their advice about locking out spies "literally anyone can use". might be a little hard to swallow. Prism couldn't exist without the sea of personal data that these Websites and the developers of mobile apps are corporations collect and redistribute hourly as part urged to integrate encryption software into their of their commercial activity. services to better protect user data. The biggest irony, of course, is that we're being Older and wiser urged to spread the word about Reset the Net and privacy abuse on – one of the most The past year has thrown up some real questions prolific providers of personal data to the NSA. This about our expectations about privacy online and is particularly significant in light of the

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announcement last month that Facebook's new Provided by The Conversation mobile phone app will allow the corporation to listen to our phone calls in order to "improve user experience". Looking critically at the private sector is as important as oversight of the NSA but it has been overlooked by this campaign.

Beyond software updates

With Reset the Net, we are once again being offered a technological solution to what is at heart a political problem – how we balance the often conflicting demands of personal privacy and national security.

It's exhilarating to witness and participate in online social movements that can bring about real change. The successful campaign against SOPA and PIPA shows how well it can work. These two bills, proposed in the US, sought to introduce prison sentences for accessing pirated content. Websites linking to others that hosted copyright-infringing content were also threatened with action, so Reddit and Wired got on board. The petition associated with the campaign attracted ten million signatures and the bills were eventually dropped by lawmakers.

The action taking place today is certainly evidence that governments will need to be much more responsive to public attitudes to surveillance, a year after we first started to worry about it. But the private sector plays a role too. At least some of the companies involved should probably acknowledge that if they want us on board.

This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons- Attribution/No derivatives).

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APA citation: A year after Snowden, tech firms must get their houses in order to Reset the Net (2014, June 6) retrieved 30 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2014-06-year-snowden-tech-firms- houses.html

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