Philosophy

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt and Google Corporation

/ Christopher Parsons

In recent months more and more attention has been directed towards Google’s data retention policies. In May of 2007 Peter Fleishcher of Google’s global privacy counsel established three key reasons for why his company had to maintain search records:

  1. To improve their services. Specifically, he writes “Search companies like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their search services. Analyzing logs data is an important tool to help our engineers refine search quality and build helpful new services . . . The ability of a search company to continue to improve its services is essential, and represents a normal and expected use of such data.”
  2. To maintain security and prevent fraud and abuse. “Data protection laws around the world require Internet companies to maintain adequate security measures to protect the personal data of their users. Immediate deletion of IP addresses from our logs would make our systems more vulnerable to security attacks, putting the personal data of our users at greater risk. Historical logs information can also be a useful tool to help us detect and prevent phishing, scripting attacks, and spam, including query click spam and ads click spam.”
  3. To comply with legal obligations to retrieve data. “Search companies like Google are also subject to laws that sometimes conflict with data protection regulations, like data retention for law enforcement purposes.” (Source)

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Genealogy and the ‘Net

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading some of Foucault’s Society Must be Defended. Over the course of the book Foucault will be radically changing his early positions, and I hope to note and discuss these changes as I come across them. This said, I’ve recently finished the first lecture and wanted to reflect on the power of genealogies, the fragmented character of the ‘net, and synthesize that with Wu and Goldsmith’s account of the Internet and Foucault’s own thoughts on power as repression. There’s a lot to do, but I think that it might be very profitable to at least toy around with this for a bit.

Genealogy

There is a tendency to try and capture knowledge in unitary architectures. Foucault equates this to trying to develop a unifying concept to explain the behaviour of each droplet of water that explodes from around a sperm whale when it breeches. In the very process of establishing a complex formula to receive this information, the act itself is lost.

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Review of “A cosmopolitan perspective on the global economic order” by Thoman Pogge

/ Christopher Parsons

Pogge’s general assertion is that the West’s influence in shaping the existing global social conditions is continuing to promote a monumental level of suffering that has, and continues to, kill more people than either Hitler or Stalin. While these claims may seem bold, Pogge’s paper attempts to justify his claims by defending himself against the following:

  1. That he is making a conceptual mistake by re-labelling actions harmful that are really failures to aid and protect.
  2. That he is factually wrong about the causal explanations of severe poverty.
  3. That he is morally wrong by presenting minimal requirements that are excessively demanding.

In addressing these issues, Pogge adopts a ecumenical approach – his approach is intended to convince adherents of all the major moral theories that his position is defensible from all of their objections. Moreover, by adopting a multiplicity of divergent lines of argumentative defence, Pogge aims to avoid creating a strategy that can be ignored by theorists on the basis that they hold hold contrary philosophical positions. Specifically, he will be addressing Lockeans, Libertarians, Rawlsians, and communitarians.

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“Principles of cosmopolitan order” by David Held

/ Christopher Parsons
shallow focus photography of brown globe

Photo by Ricky Gu00e1lvez on Pexels.com


Cosmopolitanism, broadly speaking, reflects on ethical, cultural, and political issues from the position that states and political communities are not the exclusive centers of political order or force.

Held begins his article in Brock’s and Brighouse’s The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism by differentiating between cosmopolitanism that shifts from the polis to the cosmos, and the Enlightenment’s cosmopolitan attitude of maturity and reflexivity. The former insists that individuals’ first allegiance is to humanity rather than the community, whereas for the latter cosmopolitan right “meant the capacity to present oneself and be heard within and across political communities; it was the right to enter dialogue without artificial constraint and delimitation” (11).

Held’s article is subsequently divided into four sections. The first identifies cosmopolitan principles, the second distinguishes between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ cosmopolitanism, the third justifies cosmopolitan claims, and the fourth section sketches how to transition from justifications to law. The ultimate aim is to understand the aim and scope of cosmopolitanism.

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