Technology companies, free expression and privacy

Apple has come under heavy scrutiny and criticism in recent months for abusive supply chain labour practices. Its decision to join the Fair Labor Association has been hailed as an important step in the right direction: a public commitment to its responsibilities in respecting and protecting the human rights of its workers, as well as an acknowledgment that it needs help from a multi-stakeholder initiative such as the FLA in both identifying and solving its supply chain labour problems. 

Now the online activist organization SumofUs has launched a petition calling for an ethical iPhone 5, and others are calling for a conflict-mineral free iPhone.

How about an iPhone that respects and protects users’ right to free expression and privacy?

In April 2011, researchers exposed that Apple iPhones were logging and storing detailed information about users’ movements, unbeknownst to most iPhone users. Apple later fixed what it described as a “bug” in the phone’s operating software.

The incident, however, was one of many that exposed the lack of meaningful effort by company programmers and engineers to prevent their software and hardware from collecting and exposing users’ private communications to potential abuse – be it by criminals or governments or other companies.

In the fall of 2009, Apple officially launched the iPhone in China in partnership with a domestic mobile carrier, China Unicom. As a condition for entry into the Chinese market, Apple had to agree to the Chinese government’s censorship criteria in vetting the content of all iPhone applications—or “apps”—available for download on devices sold in mainland China. (Most apps are created by independent developers— individuals, companies, or organizations—then submitted to Apple for approval and inclusion in its app store.) On Apple’s special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer. Apple similarly censors apps for iPads sold in China. So much for that revolutionary, Big Brother–destroying Super Bowl ad. Apple seems quite willing to accommodate Big Brother’s demands for the sake of market access.

Apple’s censorship problems reach well beyond China into unexpected places. In March 2010 Apple shut down, without notice, an iPad application for Stern, one of Germany’s biggest magazines. It had published erotic content in the printed magazine, and that content along with all other magazine content was automatically duplicated in the iPad app. This content is perfectly legal in Germany, but because some pages of a specific issue were deemed in violation of Apple’s app standards, the entire magazine was censored through the app store. Apple told another German magazine, Bildt, that it had to alter content if it wanted to keep its app.

Companies like Apple, combined with Facebook, Google, and many other digital platforms and services have created a new, virtual public sphere that is largely shaped, built, owned, and operated by private companies. These companies now mediate human relationships of all kinds, including the relationship between citizens and government.

They exercise a new layer of sovereignty over what we can and cannot do with our digital lives, on top of and across the sovereignty of governments. Sometimes – as with the Arab spring – these corporate-run global platforms can help empower citizens to challenge the sovereignty and legitimacy of their governments. But at other times, they can constrain our freedom in insidious ways, sometimes in cooperation with governments and sometimes independently. The result is certainly not as rosy as Apple’s marketing department would have us believe.

While Apple has now acknowledged its labour and broader human rights responsibilities in the context of conflict minerals, neither Apple nor most other companies in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector have recognized another equally important set of responsibilities for their users’ right to free expression and privacy.

Unlike companies that produce sportswear or toothpaste, the value proposition of Internet-related companies relates directly to the empowerment of citizens. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook have won the fawning adoration of media, policy makers, and much of the general public because they have made possible positive, historic change in the world by creating whole digital worlds through which citizens can congregate in cyberspace and share information, ideas, and offline action. Yet at the same time, most of these companies have demonstrated a shocking blind spot when it comes to a key element of public trust: accountability.

Having altruistic-sounding mission statements like “Don’t be Evil” on a corporate website is well and good, but how can people be sure a company is living up to its own purported high ethical standards—any more than they should trust that a sovereign is good simply because he says he is? In the long run, an Internet-related company’s value proposition is questionable at best and fraudulent at worst if it rejects the need for accountability.

Recognition of this reality—largely forced by congressional threat of legislation in 2006—is what brought Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft to the bargaining table with human rights groups, socially responsible investors, and academics to set up a multi-stakeholder process focused on free expression and privacy. Following nearly three years of dialogue and negotiation, in late 2008 they launched the Global Network Initiative (GNI), dedicated to helping Internet and telecommunications companies uphold their users’ and customers’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy around the world in ways that are credible and accountable.

The GNI’s structure borrows heavily from elements of a number of existing multi-stakeholder initiatives, several of which have been operating for a decade or more, as part of an effort to hold companies accountable to basic environmental, labour, and human rights standards when governments fail to do so. None of the member companies have avoided missteps or problems since joining. But at least they have made a public commitment to work with a range of stakeholders to improve their practices and be held accountable to their commitments.

Since GNI’s 2008 launch, only two more companies – Websense and Evoca – have joined. Conversations – which may or may not bear fruit in the coming months - are underway with a number of companies on both sides of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, it is ironic indeed that many old-fashioned brick-and-mortar companies in the food, beverage, and fashion industries, and even a number of oil, gas, and mining companies, are much further along than the world’s most cutting- edge and disruptive Internet-related companies when it comes to accountability.