• frozenspinach@lemmy.ml
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    13 hours ago

    I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics

    And I could see the point, kind of, even though it strained credulity on substance. He seemed more confused to me than die-hard partisan. But it’s really hard to square what was effectively a blanket statement endorsing R’s with his subsequent comment that it “was not intended to be a political statement” (paraphrase).

    • stardust@lemmy.ca
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      2 hours ago

      His whole defense hinged on making people believe Gail Slater being on the FTC meant she fought for little tech, but omitted her history leaving to became vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association which is a lobbying group for companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.

      The Internet Association—a trade group for big technology companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon—spent nearly $176,000 to lobby the California legislature last quarter, according to the Washington Post. It is now running misleading ads on social media asking Sacramento lawmakers to weaken the law.

      The group claims that surveillance-based advertising technology, which slurps up and broadly spreads consumers’ personal data without their knowledge, should be exempted from the CCPA. In truth, surveillance-based adtech is one of the worst privacy hazards that the law was designed to stop. It also provides little benefit to online publishers, and erodes trust between companies and their consumers.

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/lawmakers-must-not-let-internet-association-weaken-california-consumer-privacy-act

      That medium article that keeps being reposted from some random user with only that one article intentionally omits this work history after the FTC too.