This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Corbyn vows to ditch 'social mobility' goal and focus on social justice for all if Labour wins power — Andrew Woodcock, the Independent: A Labour government would ditch the goal of “social mobility” and instead focus on social justice for all, Jeremy Corbyn has announced. Decrying the decades-old target of increased social mobility as a failed strategy which helped only a “lucky few”, the Labour leader promised a new approach that would aim to give every child the chance to flourish. With shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, he launched plans for a Social Justice Commission to replace the Social Mobility Commission established by David Cameron’s government. The “meritocratic” goal of social mobility has been pursued by governments of all political stripes for many years, with the aim of making it possible for individuals to better themselves through their own efforts and abilities. But under Mr Corbyn, Labour argues that the concept has given credibility to the idea that “only a few talented or lucky people deserve to escape the disadvantage they were born into”.
• Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead — Cory Doctorow in the Economist: In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor. As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system. Which leads to:
• Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies — Cory Doctorow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Facebook's advantage is in "network effects": the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it (because more users increase the likelihood that the person you're looking for is on Facebook). But adversarial interoperability could allow new market entrants to arrogate those network effects to themselves, by allowing their users to remain in contact with Facebook friends even after they've left Facebook. This kind of adversarial interoperability goes beyond the sort of thing envisioned by "data portability," which usually refers to tools that allow users to make a one-off export of all their data, which they can take with them to rival services. Data portability is important, but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you're in the process of migrating away from.
• Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy — Rebecca Ananian-Welsh in the Conversation: The Prime Minister was quick to distance his government from the AFP’s actions, while opposition leader Anthony Albanese condemned the raids. But to those familiar with the ever-expanding field of Australian national security law, these developments were unlikely to surprise. In particular, enhanced data surveillance powers and a new suite of secrecy offences introduced in late 2018 had sparked widespread concern over the future of public interest journalism in Australia. The crackdown of the past few days reveals that at least two of the core fears expressed by lawyers and the media industry were well-founded: first, the demise of source confidentiality and, secondly, a chilling effect on public interest journalism.
• This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers — Susie Cagle in Medium: The PatronScan kiosk, placed at the entrance of a bar or nightlife establishment, can verify whether an ID is real or fake, and collect and track basic customer demographic data. For bars, accurate ID scanners are valuable tools that help weed out underage drinkers, protecting the establishments’ liquor licenses from fines and scrupulous state alcohol boards. But PatronScan’s main selling point is security. The system allows a business to maintain a record of bad customer behavior and flag those individuals, alerting every other bar that uses PatronScan. What constitutes “bad behavior” is at a bar manager’s discretion, and ranges from “sexual assault” to “violence” to “public drunkenness” and “other.” When a bargoer visits another PatronScan bar and swipes their ID, their previously flagged transgressions will pop up on the kiosk screen. Unless patrons successfully appeal their status to PatronScan or the bar directly, their status can follow them for anywhere from a couple weeks to a few months, to much, much longer. According to a PatronScan “Public Safety Report” from May 2018, the average length of bans handed out to customers in Sacramento, California was 19 years. […] The same report indicates that PatronScan collected and retained information on over 10,000 patrons in Sacramento in a single day. Within a five month period, that added up to information on over 500,000 bargoers.
• Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online — Gretchen McCulloch at Wired (cookiewalled): On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you. […] Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, "We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they're new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don't have to do that here."