[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

Fri Dec 2 07:23:05 UTC 2011

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris <tom at tommorris.org> wrote:

>
> I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the
> general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might
> reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do
> quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world
> that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that
> (your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more
> efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?

If you were interested in making a well formed analogy, you might
go about it by thinking about what would be the reaction if the
streetmaps google makes began to be tagged in such a fashion
that people could plan their routes so they wouldn't have to look
advertising billboards which had risque themes, such as lingerie
advertisements or perfume advertisements or they could plan
their route so they wouldn't have to pass through neighbourhoods
where certain ethnic groups live, while travelling. The reason that
will never happen of course, is because Google has this principle
of not being evil, which the WMF could usefully emulate.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]