Live long and prosper.
Cool.
I will, for sure.
I’m happy to have gotten to spend a lot of time already in Taiwan.
That’s very cool. I guess I’ll look forward to seeing what people do.
That’s really cool. Do people who participate in that go on to do other civic projects?
Definitely fun. Is there a future project you’re most excited about?
Yeah?
It’s hard.
Yeah.
Besides education, do you think there are ways to provide better access to…?
Sure. One of my friend’s did a lot of research on sort of user communities of these websites and found that it’s not as equitable…
Even thinking about Wikipedia, it’s still very biased in terms of…
I’m just having something in the open so I study on actually democratize access to…
I guess you mentioned Ethan Zuckerman. Do you feel a lot of connection to his work?
Yeah. It’s just exciting to see any amount of radicalness in government. That’s very rare and nice.
[laughs]
The future of digital civics in Taiwan sounds very exciting.
That’s right.
I guess I have not thought too much about that. OK, there’s a lot to think about. I don’t know if I have other questions.
I’ll have to think about this. This is an exciting thought.
Sure.
I don’t know about that.
It’s hard to conceptualize because Facebook governs so many parts of connectivity, it’s not just news articles and it’s not just political discourse. It’s so many other things.
Interesting. I wonder how this will play out for everywhere else. I think…
OK.
Interesting.
That’s very interesting. I don’t know what is currently happening in Australia but I thought Facebook just gave up on publishing these articles there.
What would data union log be like?
Are the laws much different here than in the US?
That would be wonderful. That would be a great change. I would think that the GDPR does allow something like this, but no one has done it. That shouldn’t be a reason why people can’t get their data out of Facebook, but there just isn’t a new place for people ...
Certain businesses might have a harder time, or Facebook implemented policies about what can be posted, certain businesses wouldn’t be able to post on Facebook. It’s not a true public platform that serves everyone equally. These companies have a lot of sway on our attention. They are very addictive. One ...
There’s no reason per se why Facebook can’t do the same thing. Even just a benign UI change could negatively affect businesses if Facebook were to change some aspect of their websites.
One thing that I’ve heard about and I don’t know exactly how true or exactly how this works, for example, a lot of people in the US rely on Yelp for business. There’s been accusations or situations where Yelp will make it harder to find certain businesses that don’t subscribe ...
They are. I would love to see open infrastructure replace some of those things. I mentioned Facebook business pages. That is in some ways a harm waiting to happen.
That’s wonderful. I alluded to this. What I worry about is that private companies will take over more and more core functionalities for people…
America’s very big cities solve lots of individual problems, you don’t see very much.
I would like to see something more radical. I think that the civic tech stuff that people do in the US is useful but there’s just so much work to do. Code for America does useful things. I’ve had friends who’ve worked there and done something very great for a ...
I don’t know much about what’s currently happening in the Biden Administration. I have friends who work in civic tech in the US. Some people work at USDS or 18F or various other things.
It’s possible. There will be a lot more flexibility to travel.
It depends. That’s true, I can be of places I’ve been able to work from here, which has been very nice Google policy at some point, post vaccination, will be I am in some office.
It’s a surprisingly good job. I feel very lucky to be able to do it.
To like, “Oh, we’re building a feature that tells you if there was an earthquake nearby, let’s do it in such a way that we don’t accidentally track your location while you use this feature.”
It ranges from like, “OK, people will rely on this database. Let’s make sure that this database has very strong access control. So random engineer can’t read people’s data in the database.”
I work with engineers at Google to ensure that they have taken privacy into account when they design and build.
It could be harm to it, because any company that stores your data for you has the potential to cause harm to you. A lot of my job is to try to minimize the potential for that harm or ensure that harm doesn’t happen.
I think of my job as like harm reduction for Google, like people have to use Google. People do use Google.
Now, I work at Google. I work as a privacy engineer.
