Facebook

I was rather annoyed this morning - annoyed of Epsom even - to read that Facebook are planning to provide unbreakable communications facilities to all comers - all comers who will include a small proportion of criminals and worse.

I believe that governments need, on occasion, to be able to read communications and that it is wrong for large and very profitable corporations like Facebook to block that need.

And as far as the privacy gang is concerned, I would say that we have to trust our elected governments to do this sort of thing. Properly managed, government access to communications is far less of a threat than the ability of said criminals and worse to use platforms like Facebook to do their thing, completely out of sight. Facebook not providing such facilities will not stop them doing their thing, but it will make it harder. Hopefully, too hard for a lot of them.

Governments have been intercepting, opening and reading mail since mail was invented. Ditto telephone conversations. And reasons of state have been around since states were invented, reasons which are still around in the age of the Internet.

Publishers of the printed word - like newspaper proprietors - have long had to take responsibility for what they publish. And if they get it wrong, they might well be damned.

So the Facebooks of this world have got to start taking more responsibility for what they do, for what they are enabling - or eventually they will be squashed.

PS: and it is no part of Facebook's business to provide facilities for dissidents in places where governments are not trustworthy, for one reason or another.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/making-statement.html. The point at which I abandoned this particular ship.