If you are going to promise users privacy, then you really need to follow through. Tea Dating Advice, a service that advertised itself as a safe space for women to anonymously share information about former partners—to warn others about abuse and cheating—says that it is locked down. Users are not allowed to take screenshots, and the app says it verifies that its users are women.
Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.
For most of history, communicating with a computer has not been like communicating with a person. In their earliest years, computers required carefully constructed instructions, delivered through punch cards; then came a command-line interface, followed by menus and options and text boxes. If you wanted results, you needed to learn the computer’s language.
This is beginning to change.