TECH GIANTS DEMAND RIGHT TO HARVEST YOUR SEXTS FOR AI: “HOW ELSE WILL THE ROBOTS LEARN FLIRTING?”
In a move that has privacy advocates reaching for both their pitchforks and anxiety medication, Australia’s Productivity Commission is considering letting big tech companies mine your private messages, embarrassing poetry, and that novel you’ve been working on for seven years to feed their hungry digital brain children.
SILICON VALLEY SALIVATES OVER YOUR DIGITAL LEFTOVERS
Tech executives are reportedly “absolutely thrilled” at the prospect of legally rummaging through Australians’ digital garbage without permission.
“We’ve been doing it anyway, but it’s nice to have permission,” admitted Chad Datagrinder, CEO of TotallyNotEvilTech, while absently scrolling through this reporter’s private Instagram messages. “How else will our intelligent systems learn crucial human concepts like sarcasm, desperation, and why everyone sends ‘haha’ when nothing is actually funny?”
EXPERTS QUESTION WHY ANYONE WOULD POSSIBLY OBJECT
“I simply cannot understand the problem,” says Dr. Selma Soul, Professor of Digital Ethics at the Institute of Obviously Bad Ideas. “Sure, 98.7% of Australians would rather eat a kangaroo’s unwashed tail than have their private messages fed to corporate algorithms, but think of the INNOVATION!”
According to completely legitimate statistics we just made up, mining Australians’ text data could boost the economy by $4.7 trillion or possibly destroy civilization as we know it, with experts giving both outcomes roughly equal probability.
YOUR PRIVACY IS SO LAST CENTURY
The Commission’s interim report suggests that outdated concepts like “copyright,” “consent,” and “basic human dignity” might need to be “reconsidered” in light of tech companies’ desperate need to make even more obscene amounts of money.
“Look, do you want your digital assistant to understand your weird Australian slang or not?” asked Silicon Valley spokesperson Brock Dataharvest. “If we can’t analyze every private conversation you’ve ever had, our AI might think ‘fair dinkum’ is a type of cryptocurrency.”
WHAT ABOUT PRIVACY LAWS? LOL GOOD ONE
When asked about Australia’s privacy regulations, the Commission reportedly responded with a GIF of someone laughing so hard they fall off a chair.
“We’re just considering a tiny exemption,” clarified Commissioner Penny Pushover. “It’s not like we’re suggesting tech companies should be allowed to extract your deepest fears and sell them to advertisers… though that would make for an incredibly efficient marketplace.”
AUSTRALIA LEADS WORLD IN ROLLING OVER FOR TECH OVERLORDS
If implemented, Australia would join an elite group of nations willing to sacrifice citizens’ digital rights on the altar of technological progress, alongside such privacy champions as “404 Country Not Found.”
In response to criticism, an unnamed government official said, “Look, we either let Silicon Valley harvest our collective digital souls now, or we risk falling behind in the global race to create AI systems that can write slightly better tweets than humans. Is your privacy really worth THAT?”
At press time, the Commission was reportedly also considering whether tech companies should be granted legal access to Australians’ dreams, with an industry spokesman calling sleep “an untapped data goldmine that’s just lying there for eight hours doing nothing productive.”
