The world+dog knows that the following big companies lobby US politicians all the time and quite shamelessly push their own agenda irrespective of the views of individual people like the world+dog.
AOL, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter and Apple all spend unknown sums wooing politicos to their own points of view.
But now they have signed a letter to a man called Barak Obama are asking for laws to be reformed because following the Edward Snowden revelations, it’s clear to them that Big Brother is watching you.
Omissions from the list of the multinationals are Cisco and Intel, but let’s not get our knickers in a twist about this. The companies that have signed to the letter claim there are five principles that should be the pillars of “good practice”.
They are limiting governments’ authority to collect users’ information; oversight and accountability; transparency about government demands; respect for the free flow of information and the enactment of worldwide treaties to avoid conflicts between countries.
Principles? You can find the "principles" here.
We have already seen that several of these multinational companies that have signed this note to Obama don’t give a toss about the rights of individual human beings.
Nick Pickles, director of British watchdog Big Brother Watch, said in a note this morning: “Governments should not need to be told by private businesses that it is wrong to collect data on every citizen, through secret processes subject to little or no oversight.”
They should certainly take anything these eight multinationals have to say about privacy and politics with an extremely large pinch of salt. We don’t really want to see eight big monolithic organisations dictate any kind of political agenda.
↧
IT multinationals put in political oar
↧