In this brave new digital world, the most effective oversight had come from an unlikely and surprising source: white-collar tech workers within Google
The most pressing moral, political and social issues of our time converge in and at Google. As the largest and most successful “big data” company, Google has the unfettered power not just to shape – but to declare (in the words of Shoshana Zuboff) – our futures. The data that the company harvests, sells and uses to create automation systems literally determine our life chances: how we are interpreted and understood by police and military technologies, our credit scores, our access to healthcare, our professional reputations, how much we pay for goods and services, and our ability to obtain work.
Unlike in the 20th century, when competitive capitalism both spawned and responded to the power of labor unions, social movements and business regulation, in today’s political world, Google – and its ilk, Amazon and Facebook –operate in a seemingly impenetrable vortex of power. Government regulators, despite clarion calls by scientists and social scientists, have repeatedly failed to even properly investigate what the company’s immense and fast-growing power may mean – much less to rein it in. The inscrutable “black box” within which Google operates shows little sign of cracking in the face of new and old privacy and anti-trust laws.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2V9Mj77
