"In order to responsibly develop new technologies, it is critical to ask 'how will this be used for evil?'"
In a world of widespread, suspicionless surveillance of protests by law enforcement and other government entities, and of massive corporate union-busting and suppression of worker organizing, Feedly decided they should build a tool for the corporations, cops, and unionbusters. Protests, Feedly seems to say, are something that us customers should constantly fear will turn violent and therefore surveil in order to protect our "assets" -- not something we might want to, oh I don't know, support or participate in. [...]
Feedly has claimed that they didn't even consider the possibility that a tool to track protests and strikes could be misused. It would be startling if that was true, but it stretches credibility that a company clearly targeting the cybersecurity industry might not consider that software can be misused.
Now, instead of decommissioning the tool to go back and do the absolute bare minimum of thinking around its impacts, Feedly has been promising on Twitter that they will do a week of research and then make a decision. [...]
It seems like we may be leading up to a "we investigated ourselves and we found we did nothing wrong" situation, but I suppose time will tell.
