There’s not much to add to a brilliant take-down of the toxic and completely tone-deaf platform just launched called Clubhouse.

…demonstrates a growing chasm between attitudes in the United States and Europe about data governance, as Silicon Valley continues to export its technology and ideals around the world. Scraping is the same technique that controversial start-up Clearview AI, popular with law enforcement, has used to amass its facial recognition database. Although it’s received cease-and-desist letters from Facebook and Google (who themselves would not exist but for scraping and, in the case of Facebook, scraping non-public information), Clearview AI defends its practices on First Amendment grounds. In Europe, where data governance is more concerned with the fundamental rights of individuals than with the rights of corporations, techniques like scraping and the repurposing of publicly accessible data conflict with core principles in the General Data Protection Regulation, such as purpose limitation, notification and consent requirements, the individual’s right to object to certain processing and more. Clubhouse is already under investigation by data protection authorities in both France and Germany for violations of data protection law.

Perhaps it’s a bit unfair to say that the United States across the board has the same attitude, as many people disagree (myself included, hellooo!).

More accurate in my mind is to say there is a chasm between irresponsible bad-actors thriving in an unregulated United States (e.g. Silicon Valley) and Europe.

This perhaps is explained best in the next section of the article, which really struck me as a repeat of the Google Bus story.

While there are bad attitudes in the United States, they in fact have a growing chasm from other people in the United States.

It is that kind of exclusivity and bogus ennoblement expressing false privilege, all done by design, that makes Clubhouse so inherently and willfully evil.

Clubhouse’s gaslighting on privacy and security concerns pales in comparison to its disregard for accessibility. In its quest for exclusivity, Clubhouse has managed to exclude large swaths of the population.

Boom. The author just described the infamous Google Bus.