A Question of Credibility

Google is being sued for invasion of privacy and for what approximates false advertising.

“Google expressly represented to users of its operating system and apps that the activation of certain settings will prevent the tracking of users’ geolocations,” says Patacsil’s suit, which was filed Friday in California federal court. “This representation was false.”
“Despite users’ attempts to protect their location privacy, Google collects and stores users’ location data, thereby invading users’ reasonable expectations of privacy, counter to Google’s own representations about how users can configure Google’s products to prevent such egregious privacy violations,” the complaint says.

The plaintiffs want Google to cease and desist and to destroy all data obtained “from unlawful recording and use of the location information.”

Let’s say Google is guilty as charged, and the court orders it to “cease and desist and to destroy all data obtained ‘from unlawful recording and use of the location information.'”  The trial hasn’t begun, yet, much less reached a verdict, so Google isn’t actually guilty of anything yet.

On the premise of guilt, though, my questions are these: on what basis would we believe that Google will have stopped collecting the data, and on what basis would we believe that the heretofore collected data have been destroyed?

What mechanism would exist to confirm any of that?  What independent body—capable of the forensic analysis required, since Google has claimed it doesn’t collect the data without prior permission and so unauthorized data don’t exist in Google’s systems—would do the verification, and how deeply and broadly would it be allowed to penetrate Google’s software and hardware systems in order to carry out any verification inspection(s)?

How often would that body—or those bodies, since multiple sets of eyes are better than a single one—be allowed to conduct those inspections and with how much notice (no notice at all would be optimal)?

A Minimum Wage

David Neumark, an Economics Professor at the University of California, Irvine, thinks he has an idea on how to implement “fairly” a minimum wage.  Unfortunately, his idea isn’t even good enough to be bad satire. He wants to

provide a tax credit of 50% of the difference between the prior minimum wage and the new minimum wage for each hour of labor employed. It would phase out at wages above the new minimum wage and, as wage inflation erodes, the value of the new minimum wage.

Thus, taxpayers would pay a significant fraction of each minimum wage—folks in New York would pay into the minimum wage of Seattle’s residents, for instance.  Worse, the employer in question would no longer be fully engaged in the wages of his own work force.

With this, Neumark thinks he can

transform the minimum wage into a more sensible redistributive policy.

This, of course, is a nonsensical oxymoron (excuse the redundancy). The only sensible redistributive policy, the only moral redistributive policy, is a voluntary payment of value for value received. That’s an exchange that can only be determined by the participants.  It’s also an exchange that keeps the employer and his workers fully and solely answerable to each other.

Voters think income inequality is too high, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must respond.

No, we don’t, and politicians who want to keep their jobs must recognize that.  Politicians must stop treating their poorer constituents like inanimate tools whose sole purpose is vote harvesting, and instead them like the human beings they are.