My dad still takes the actual paper Washington Post, the one that lands on the driveway with a thud, and he called me Monday morning going "did you see this Apple ad." Not an ad for a phone. A full page, dense with text, practically an op-ed, signed by eight companies that don't usually agree on anything: AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo. They ran it in the Post, the Times, and the Journal, and they put the same open letter up at reformgovernmentsurveillance.com, addressed straight to President Obama and Congress.
The gist: the government's surveillance practices need reform, and these eight are laying out five principles they'd like to see followed — limiting government's authority to collect user info, oversight and accountability, transparency about government demands, respecting the free flow of information across borders, and avoiding conflicts between different countries' laws. It reads exactly like you'd expect a letter written by eight legal departments to read. Careful. Measured. Not a single sentence in it that could be used against them later.
And look, I don't think this is nothing. Getting Google and Microsoft to co-sign anything is its own small miracle, those two have been suing each other over patents for years. But Ive been reading the Snowden stuff since June, the PRISM slides, the XKeyscore stuff, the bit where the NSA was apparently tapping the fiber links between Google's own data centers without Google even knowing about it, and its hard not to notice the timing here. This isn't eight companies discovering a moral principle. Its eight companies whose foreign customers spent the second half of 2013 asking very pointed questions about whether American cloud services could be trusted with anything. A German company I follow on Twitter posted back in the summer that they were moving off Gmail for their internal mail specifically because of PRISM. That's a business problem, not a philosophical one, and I think the ad is mostly aimed at that problem.
Which is fine! Companies act in their own interest, that's not exactly breaking news. I just wish the ad said that instead of dressing it up in language about the fundamental rights of users. If you want to say "this is bad for us commercially, please fix it," say that. It'd honestly be more convincing.
The other thing nagging at me is that half these companies are themselves the reason people don't trust anyone with their data in the first place. Facebook spent 2013 quietly walking back privacy defaults about four different times that I can remember. I deleted my location history off my phone last week just out of general paranoia and found out Google had eleven months of it sitting there, down to specific addresses, going back to when I moved apartments in January. That's not the NSA doing that. That's just Google, working as designed, because I signed up for it in some settings menu I never read closely. So when the same company signs a letter about respecting user privacy against government overreach, I believe the government-overreach part is genuinely bad. I'm just less sure the company thinks the concept applies to itself.
None of this is new territory for anyone reading this in December 2013, I know. It's been the story of the whole back half of the year, one document dump after another, and I imagine by January everyone's going to be sick of hearing "the NSA" as a phrase. But this particular ad felt different enough from the usual congressional-hearing news cycle that it was worth typing up. Eight direct competitors agreeing on wording, buying print ad space in three major papers on the same day, is a coordinated and fairly expensive thing to do. Somebody's PR budget took a real hit this week.
I don't have a tidy prediction for whether it changes anything in DC. Congress moves slowly even when it wants to move, and I don't think a newspaper ad, however well coordinated, moves a intelligence budget. But I did bookmark the site, and I'll be curious in six months whether any of the five principles actually show up in a bill, or whether this was mostly a very expensive way of saying "please stop, this is bad for us" in a font large enough for shareholders to notice.