well competition. while still in its infancy in a strike an estimated $35000000.00 people of haiti in the sports worldwide only 40 will compete in tokyo but speculation around whether the olympics will be cancelled . coupled with travel restrictions limiting access to premier training centers has made for an unprecedented and challenging debut for athletes i think it's a matter of just digging in and during the absolute best you can despite all of the external noise you've just got to block it out and just keep on. marching forward. hopefully towards chalking up he stood still in peak medal. al-jazeera caliber. this is. going to hear in the headlines the international criminal court at the hague has found uganda militia leader dominic when guilty of war crimes

a judge says that he ordered the killings of civilians abducted children al-jazeera stepped fast and reports from the hague it was a very long list of crimes that he's now been found guilty of 1st 61 accounts of the 70 account that he was facing the most important message from the judge though was that he is holding on when fully responsible for the crimes that he has committed because of course we know that he has been a former child soldier himself the defense has said that he is mentally disabled that he has stress syndrome and all kinds of mental illnesses but according to the judges that didn't matter when he was committing these crimes he was fully aware of what he was doing myanmar's military has restricted access to social media including facebook activists say the people have been arrested in mandalay demonstrating against the coup. chile has become the 1st latin american country to

launch a mass covert 19 vaccination campaign more than 210000 people have received their 1st dose most of them above the age of 90 there are new warnings about consequences for the world if developing countries don't get a fair access to covert 19 vaccines the red cross says that 70 percent of doses administered so far have been in the world's 50 wealthiest countries they say that this vaccine inequality could lead to further mutations of covert 19 a prominent lebanese activist has been found dead in his car after being shot locked in slim was a problem was a journalist and political analyst he also produced films that established an archive of lebanon's social and political history he was well known for his criticism of his ball up steam was in southern lebanon but his family lost contact with him on wednesday there's the headlines the news continues here on al-jazeera after inside story next.

the world's biggest tech giants are facing off your daughter and hangs in the balance facebook and apple or at all deserve a new lease on tracking users and to see what is it really about protecting people's downside could the tech giants conflict force change on the street this is inside story. hello to the program on kimbell we all know social media attracts a loss of what we say and do online you know the drill you google something you

thought about buying and then you hounded by ads for whatever that thing was seemingly everywhere you look well now 2 of the world's biggest tech giants appolo and facebook appear to be going to war of just how much does a tech companies should take and how much say uses should have apple's new ob dates will mean whenever he uses open an app. they want it to be tracked facebook's not happy about it so it's gone on the offensive rolling out pop ups of its own with the same kind of privacy options but spun in a very different way apple says facebook doesn't need so much data facebook says that dot is crucial to ensuring ads a personalized and without it small businesses will go on to here's what facebook has said. apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work which they regularly do to preference their own this impacts the growth of millions of businesses around the

world including with the upcoming i o s 14 changes many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their custom is with targeted ads let's have a listen to apple's c.e.o. mint on the privacy changes if a business is built on vista leading users on data exploitation on choices that are no choice is that all that it does not deserve our praise it deserves reform we should not look away from the bigger picture at a moment of rampant just information and conspiracy theories just by algorithms we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good and gauge the longer the better and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible. growing concerns about tech giants have pushed many countries across the world to introduced new laws to regulate them in december the e.u.

unveiled plans to place limits on the firm's they could be fined up to 10 percent of their global revenue if they fail to remove illegal and harmful content the us federal trade commission and a large group of attorneys general filed 2 separate antitrust lawsuits against facebook in december they accuse the platform of abusing its dominance in the digital marketplace and engaging in anticompetitive behavior another major battle has been brewing between apple and developers that make apps for its apps door the tech giant takes a 30 percent commission on in at purchases fortnight make an epic games file the lawsuit saying that's unfair and anti competitive. let's bring in our guests in washington d.c. rebecca mackinnon is director of ranking digital rights that ranks the world's most powerful internet and telco firms on the commitment to freedom of expression and privacy in london and michael deal who's next for a digital rights and regulation of faculty of laws at university college london and

also in washington d.c. eric knol who is the united states policy manager at access now a group that defends digital rights warm welcome to you all thank you for joining us here on inside story i'd like to begin with you if i can what's your take on this feud between facebook and apple has it been a long time coming and also with these changes who want to do you think is going to opt in and say yes i want to be tracked. yeah that's a that's a great question i think it's been brewing for quite a long time with or in some ways it's quite overdue so we've seen for many years is that companies like apple that control operating systems have tried to control what software can be run on their devices largely to ensure that users can easily leave their ecosystem and the value can be extracted from users such as your charging subscriptions to apps and have a company like apple take a slice now these companies have put on 2 different types of constraints on

developers of software they put on contractual constraints that limit what kind of apps can go into an app store for example no point to graphic apps and they put up hardware constraints limit what the apps can do using an individual's device and both of these are quite controversial because usually you don't have these kind of constraints when you put software on a computer and we've seen that apple isn't afraid to use these constraints to a certain vantage but equally that users are becoming more concerned about privacy and facebook have long made use of abilities to take where been tracking details from other apps and use them to build a profile of users particular trackers across the entire web so this kind of crackdown has been a long time coming in some ways but it's really over julia because we don't very little about the extent of that tracking on on apple devices in particular and would really like to know more but it's really a way in which firms learn a lot about individuals and i think they're becoming creeped out so maybe they

would say yes because my next question before we get into you know the specifics of these changes with facebook and apple can you tell us just how much doubt it is being taken when i use my phone when i when i go to facebook i mean how much do these companies know about. well quite a lot and facebook track to all over the internet right they don't just track you when you're using facebook because of the features that exist within. apps and within smartphone software they can track you as you continue to use other apps as well and they can also track you through your web browsing on other web sites so they they know quite a lot about issue they know where you are if you have your location data turned on

. they know what you're buying they know what sites you're visiting what you're liking it's better off and this this can obviously. they they they also develop profiles on people they infer various characteristics about people so not only your gender and your perhaps their sexual preference and your political affiliations in addition to products and services that you like and all this information is sold on the open market to advertisers but it can also be purchased and we know from from research that that this information is also purchased by various governments intelligence agencies etc and it is then used to track and target people for all kinds of purposes it's not to get very murky then it can all of it to bring you in so as we've been saying apple is introducing these changes

when it devolves out its new update facebook seems to be on the offensive saying it's going to also offer a pop up so people can say do you know do you want to be tracked although they don't using those words but mucks up the book has said that these changes will hurt millions of small businesses do you buy that argument. hi yeah thanks for having me on the show i am a i'm a little skeptical when facebook says that a particular privacy improvement will hurt small businesses i think that what they're really saying is that they're going to hurt facebook's own bottom line but they don't want to say that because that seems more unseemly so they would rather say that it's going to hurt small businesses i think we've seen various privacy improvements in the past you know 3 years ago or 4 years ago apple introduced in safari that they were going to prevent 3rd party cookies and we heard similar arguments about how the advertising is going to tank and how it's going to affect

small businesses and no one is going to want to buy out impressions on safari because they would be worth anything but what we've seen is that the advertising industry has ballooned since then and so to me that shows that it's possible to have privacy protections in place while while also allowing advertisers to her to earn good income michel via what about the way that facebook is going about making this argument i was interested to see that it has launched a campaign and a web site that goes along with this campaign where it shows a lot of small business own isn't and they can add their voice to this campaign. i mean it's very emotive isn't it all of these small businesses saying they'll be impacted and bandying about this number saying that i have a 60 percent drop in revenue for small businesses and it is very emotive the way that facebook is going about this is that. it certainly is well facebook don't mention is that over the last few years facebook so heavily restricted the ability

of small businesses to be able to access consumers without paying facebook so we've seen pages the year you have found pages that relate to businesses or to your local shops or artists that you might like when they just post on the battle my facebook it is now very difficult for that post to be seen what's called organically by users in the same way that you might see a friends post instead there's increasing need for them to pay to get even the people who subscribe to them to be able to see those posts so facebook of dumb extremely really hard lot of damage to small businesses over recent years and selling it in the sense of oh well they can't you know they can't reach anybody will these these companies can't reach the people who actually actively subscribe to them or have forms without having facebook anymore so i think that's a part of the merit if that's that's been really missed out by facebook in their own campaigns rebecca

a lot of the analysis of what's happening between facebook and apple right now a lot of analysts seem to come down on the side of apple saying good for them they're making these changes they're all about privacy great but surely apple can't be beyond recrimination it can't be all good right that her that just so you know my organization ranking digital rights going with access eric's organization and others calling for apple not to delay in implementing these features requiring . facebook to and other apps to to to ask users to opt in to this tracking we believe it's essential that people using network digital devices is going to have control over who who will collect what information about them and how that it's used and there needs to be a lot more transparency that's. said. you know apple you're right they are not

perfect on the one hand they're the only company digital platform that we evaluate that does not track users all across the internet on the other hand they're very opaque about how they enforce their rules. about what apps can and cannot be in their app store they have historically and many many businesses and app developers complain about the arbitrariness of and lack of transparency about how their rules are enforced who they're taking down and why cetera so is so apple can do a lot more about about its. transparency around content also they lack transparency about actually how they inforce their ad content and ad targeting rules themselves. they do have advertising as well so they themselves have have areas where they certainly need to improve and this is

a point. that others were making before is that at the moment we have these sovereigns of cyberspace we have apple we have facebook that are controlling so much not only about what we can and cannot do in our digital lives and setting rules. you know but they're basically serving as a form of private governance and we don't have a great deal of choice we can use i phones we can use android devices. with google app stores there's not we have the very small number of companies that are controlling a great deal of our lives and unfortunately while some governments are trying to step up and regulate to some degree other governments are actually taking advantage of this because they themselves want to track their own citizens both at home and. as they move around the world and that is so is so it's

a situation which one scholar from harvard's 1st on has evolved called surveillance capitalism in which people and knowledge about what we're doing what we can do what we can say is exploited not only commercially but by anybody who controls power over a network and eric something that documents around the world at least trying to tackle is a misinformation the spread of misinformation and also radicalization you know people get down these halls of conspiracy theories and one thing leads to another is there a chance that by not striking so much dasa that they might be less of that because there's less dasa going into an algorithm might that be impacted here yeah i think you know all of this sort of leads feeds into the same sort of you know apparatus of how social networking works and one of the things that social networks do is

they have algorithms that. you know promote certain content over others and take someone's life of one particular thing and they'll say ok so if you like that maybe you'll like this you know and the same thing is true about you know other apps you use or other websites you visit and big big companies like facebook and twitter and google and those folks are tracking that and they're trying to monetize that and the way they do that is they keep you on their service more and they than that feeds into the ok what keeps people online more it keeps the incendiary stuff it's the stuff that evokes anger or some other kind of emotion that makes people want to stay on service for longer more ads maybe but more and that's. never never ending cycle of. being used. and so if there's less data to be. able to feed that apparatus i think there's probably less less likely that

misinformation just for a short run so rampant on these farms but i think that's not the whole story i think this book and other platforms need to take more responsibility and be more active and be more transparent about what they're doing on misinformation disinformation especially about the most harmful stuff around elections or public health or those sorts of things they need to be taking more responsibility and doing more to protect the source michael v a when we come back to that argument from facebook that it is possible to have both personalized ads using go dasa and a level of privacy do you 8 do you believe that and b do you think that the public believes that given the levels of trust with big tech right now given the history given cambridge analytic or all these things that will be witnessed. this is a very controversial area it's really hard to discuss apple you make a lot of money from hardware and software and not so much from an advertising

business of any type this doesn't mean they're not interested in personalization your people like things like you have voice assistance be personalized google on the other hand have business model let's party like facebook where they track people across apps on the internet and use it to deliver or facilitate the delivery of other however google unlike facebook also control infrastructure not just android is rebecca mackinnon site but also google chrome so what google are doing is really instructive of this space google are trying to do a lot of personalization of targeting within the google chrome browser so not send the data to google but heavily capture everything you do inside chrome on even on your computer or your phone and use it to deliver adverts now they'll say we don't get this data all we do is make your phone heavily personalize the world to you we could use any data that's on your phone we're not seeing it ourselves these companies don't care about your data per se. they care about the ability to optimize that's right disagree electrician azuba friend and those who've talked

about this area they care about the ability to personalize and make money from you and that's something that those who control infrastructure like apple and google can do but facebook struggle so we see here facebook at piggybacked on apple and google's infrastructure and can be kicked off that as well but apple and google are looking to try and say they're daring to privacy while doing things that may be questionable and what we're seeing google do with the power of the how many people use chrome will be very interesting for competition in power in the years to come and people don't really like being hyper personalized even if facebook or google or apple cut open up their danger and read their e-mails it still feels a bit creepy or will you know maybe the definition of privacy needs to take that into account before we move on from from this point i want to ask you maybe it's a little bit personal but you're a lecturer and digital rights do you use facebook or do you use. i don't use google chrome marigot i use a browser that use chrome but i use firefox and i have

a face not that i want it because i have a complaint against them with the irish regulator for their inability to adhere to access right and i'd actually advise the us can do this now if you want to see what facebook i have collected about you. since i made this complaint maybe just a few just slightly you can go into your pretty settings on facebook and look at downloading or accessing your information and clicking the button that says off facebook activity you'll see a glimpse of just how many websites and apps they're tracking that you don't even know they're inside so advised us can can do that on their own accounts or facebook or instagram or similar and maybe get a vision of exactly the kind of data that apple's change is trying to deny facebook access to maybe sit down before you before you vote for you download that information i'm sure it will be shocking to many people are. rebecca about to come back to you how much pressure is facebook and apple under right now from governments particularly in the u.s. and the e.u.

over how they used asa but also about how much power they wield. well of varying degrees i mean here in the united states u.s. congress continues to kick back and forth various proposals for a conference of federal privacy law but the problem is these these companies which are headquartered here in the united states are not subjects' domestically in their in their home market to the kind of robust privacy requirements that that we really need and that could then affect users all around the world and so that is 11 issue there i think we will eventually get a privacy law but whether it really achieve the kind of both transparency and user control that is needed is a big question and in europe you know you have the general data protection. regulation the g.d.p.

our there's also something called the digital service act which is being discussed . that other other guests can also talk about a bit more which is going to require more transparency around the out algorithmic amplification the more impact assessment is cetera to try and really. impose greater transparency and accountability about how these companies operate but. we really are in a situation where where the you know the this digital economy has evolved you know it has gone very far and in its evolution and now society is only just starting to understand the political implications economic implications how how this economy exacerbates inequality in loss of different ways who has control who doesn't and our governments aren't well equipped to really address this

unfortunately. i'd like to bring you back and how do you think that this battle between apple and facebook might impact the industry longer to will it have any longer term change. it's a good question and it's still sort of up in the air and i don't have. a crystal ball or anything like that i suspect that there will be a little bit of an adjustment time while advertisers sort of figure out what to do here as they did when safari blocks their party tracking 3 years ago but what i what i want to focus on rather than the effect on the industry is that these are user pro individual changes that apple is implementing and you know as as others have said people view this tracking as creepy as intrusive someone who sees an ad that they think that followed them across the internet or an ad that was based on

something that they 'd just said out loud recently those people are extremely unlikely to click those acts the people who are going to click the as of the ones who actually wants to buy the particular product or service that is being sold to them and i think that having users opt in so that actually will lead to more engagement because the people who want to be advertised to will opt in and those people be more likely to quit the ads make a very good point just before i move on that has happened to me when i think talking about something that i got facebook and all of that not being advertised to for the thing i was just talking about but hadn't written down anywhere on the internet why is that. we don't really know the companies have been steadfast in their refusal to or their denial of using microphones to serve ads and technically those statements aren't forcible i believe under under current law in the united states under the deception theory so i'm inclined to believe them

although i have very very skeptical because like you i've also back when i was a facebook user and an instagram user i also had ads that were served to me for what i could what i could view as no other reason as i just said the words out loud in the last 6 hours so we really don't know what's happening there but it certainly i would sort of be interested in knowing more it is interesting isn't it. the amount of times that happens and then you kind of left questioning like is this at my head or is this reality listening to me it is very concerning we will have to leave it there for a time a big thank you to all that guests are joining us here on inside story rebecca mackinnon michael the aisle and eric. and thank you 2 for watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website is there a dot com and to further discussion you can go to our facebook page that's facebook dot com ford slash a.j. inside story you can also join the conversation on twitter our handle is at

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shop cause of the viewfinder asia series on al-jazeera. we know what's happening i read and we know how to get them they feel that others can often fires are still going on the way they tell the story isn't what can make a difference. 1200 hours g.m.t. here on al-jazeera i'm kemal santa maria and these are the headlines the international criminal court at the hague has found it ugandan militia leader dominic guilty of war crimes a judge says he ordered the killings of civilians and abducted children on going was part of the lord's resistance army but he himself was abducted by the armed group at the age of 10 and forced to become a child soldier the chambers there for convicted only going over total of $61.00 crimes can prove.