pauloppenheim

FTA:

Here, too, we can all drop our job descriptions to solve this problem. Big tech needs to rapidly build and scale a cloud-based national ventilator surveillance platform which will track individual hospital I.C.U. capacity and ventilator supply across the nation in real-time.

Such a platform — which Silicon Valley could build and FEMA could utilize — would allow hospitals nationwide to report their I.C.U. bed status and their ventilator supply daily, in an unprecedented data-sharing initiative. I have no doubt that the tech brain trust now sitting at home on Zoom can mobilize to get this done.

The article presents an economic model of privacy. While I think that is important (and part of the argument for the indieweb - https://indieweb.org/ ) there are more arguments to be made about privacy, including not only the individual, but also collective harms that the violation of privacy can impact. That argument is challenging to make, because harm changes depending not only on the individual or group and their reason to need privacy, but also on the type of information gathered, and the possible uses of it, which change over time. That kind of shape-shifting argument is challenging to get across, so I can appreciate something simpler. However, when I hear the framing of this as "the problem" I feel nervous, because I hear that as reducing consideration of other possibilities.

I was in the room for one of the meetings with Microsoft's senior leadership as a representative of a Seattle-based civil liberties group.

Which group?

It depends what you mean by "trustworthy". The brand has existed for a long time, primarily as a vendor of gaming accessories. They have been making laptops for a few years now.

There are certain companies now that are very much interested in answering the question of "trust" with more explicit criteria. One is https://puri.sm/ and another is https://minifree.org/ - the trust concern there is having an open source firmware boot process. Depending on what your needs are behind your need for trust, this might be closer to what you're looking for.