I don't agree that you should be allowed to post people's private, identifying data to a public forum without consent.
This HAS to apply equally, because the idea that there is a universal set of right and wrong is incredibly naive.
A better argument here is how the laws aren't applied equally.
TrueCaller was used by the Chinese to harass and attack human rights activists, and it is essentially an index of everyone's contact list.
Yet, somehow, this doesn't bother Apple. 100% financially motivated.
But my point stands. These telegram channels that exist to distribute public data of people merely accused of being involved with the regime should be shutdown. The term here is witch hunt and I'll take a lot of convincing that innocent people haven't already been falsely accused
Apple as a distributor should have NO relevance to this. Apple is like a landlord who legally rented his shop to people who run it as a bar in which some people might meet to discuss protests. Should the police even call the landlord? Should the landlord act on this info?
If, as you say Apple is like a landlord, Apple can demand specific things in the contract (ie no pets) and the person renting needs to comply.
Not getting into the moral side of the argument of Apple Vs Telegram but want to point out that the landlord example isn't applicable in my opinion.
Those channels exist to spread private, identifiable data and this breaks the law.
A better version of your argument is Apple is the landlord where people are planning lynchings.
Again, I side with the Belarusians. But pretending this is different to China's doxxing of Uighurs is naive
The worst part is that this isn't even accurate. What this is really like is Apple sells a bunch of residences, the users are buying their homes, but for some reason all utilities/cable/internet/etc. has to go through the real estate company that the house was purchased from as they dictate what you can and cannot do in that house. Even stranger, it is now somehow the real estate company's place and responsibility to tell a telephone company that the real estate company allows to drop conference calls that mention the private information of some third party, whether the phone calls are coming from the houses purchased from them or not.
Out of curiosity, to which law are you referring?
I'm not being snarky here, I'm just not clear about which law(s) are being broken.
According to the Wikipedia page for Telegram[0], Telegram's team is based in Dubai, and the company is registered in the UK and the US.
IANAL, nor am I any sort of expert on US, UK or Dubai law. If you could expand on this, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#History
The problem with that belief is enforcement.
Because illegal numbers [0] are trivially shared, the only viable enforcement to prevent their sharing must have incredibly broad reach.
This ultimately collapses down into "users cannot be allowed to own and operate their own general purpose computer."
And while I'm open to arguments as to why the above is a straw man (I disagree), if you believe the above enforcement scheme is for the greater good then we have very different ideas about individual freedom and the relative value thereof.
Which is only a fallacy because data is a commodity, not because it's technically impossible.
And yes you can't really be forgotten, copies can always exist but it shouldn't be hosted readily if you don't want it to be.
Unless I'm missing something?
Both of which are contingent on end users not being allowed to possess strong encryption.
That doesn't characterize a general record of numbers/addresses, which more or less ensures some basic anonymity as connecting names to numbers doesn't do much outside some other qualifier, like, these people are the police who are suppressing our cause
No, it really doesn't. IMO it has to apply consistently. And it's easy to maintain cohesion / consistency here: If you have different rights, you get different rights.
Police have additional rights, particularly when acting in the course of their jobs - specifically, they have the right of violence. Seems reasonable to give up the "right" of protection-from-griefing.
No, police exercise and are protected by powers of government, these are not the same kind of thing as rights, and do not belong to the individual the way rights do. Moreover, the legitimacy of such powers is exactly dependent on the legitimacy of the government and the extent to which it observes the rights of the people subject to it's powers.
Is Tim Cook really qualified to be the ultimate authority of what speech is allowed or not allowed on a global basis, at least for all the billions of people who use their devices?
Similarly for Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. We cannot allow a very small number of corporate CEOs to make unilateral decisions about how to police speech across the globe.
Tim Cook is not qualified. No single person is.
That suggests either:
Apple stay out and the discussion moves to Telegram
, or
Apple and others need a formalized process, just like we use for other conflicts.
A case needs to be made, rules of order, etc... and a decision comes from all of that, not what makes more money, or what might cost money.
