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