“You betrayed us.” Thousands of customers email Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies who signed letter endorsing CISA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 23, 2015
Contact: Evan Greer, 978-852-6457
Email: press@fightforthefuture.org
“You betrayed us.” Thousands of customers email Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies who signed letter endorsing CISA
Digital Rights group Fight for the Future announces plan to leave Heroku / Salesforce web hosting service over support for cyber spying bill, calls for boycott in open letter
In less than 24 hours, more than 15,000 Internet users have sent angry emails to Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Symantec, and other technology companies who signed a letter supporting controversial cybersecurity legislation that experts say will undermine user security and privacy while failing to prevent cyber attacks. The public backlash has come with a simple message: “You betrayed us.”
Digital rights group Fight for the Future, known for its major role in the battle against SOPA and the net neutrality victory, launched YouBetrayedUs.org yesterday after a handful of technology companies began publicly lobbying for Congress to pass “Cyber Threat Information Sharing Legislation,” known in its current form as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).
Fight for the Future, who are currently Heroku / Salesforce webhosting customers, simultaneously published an open letter announcing their intention to leave that service for a provider who does not support privacy-killing legislation, and calling for a general Internet boycott of Heroku, an idea that quickly spread on popular sites among web developers like reddit and yCombinator.
The letter, penned by Fight for the Future’s CTO Jeff Lyon, reads, “Salesforce is actively supporting a bill that would undermine … trust. If CISA passes, it will be impossible for us to guarantee our own privacy policy with our users, because Heroku may broadly violate their privacy agreement with us to share information about our users with the government.”
“Any company that supports a bill like CISA or sits silently and allows it to pass is a company that can’t be trusted,” added Fight for the Future’s campaign director, Evan Greer, “These companies might think they’re invincible, but so did Myspace and Friendster. Internet users are fed up, companies that abandon their commitment to user privacy and security should expect the Internet to abandon them.”
The YouBetrayedUs.org campaign is just getting started. Fight for the Future plans to continue exposing companies that support anti-user legislation like CISA, and will work to get every popular website and tech company on the record about this crucial legislation. Many popular companies have opposed bills like CISA including reddit, Imgur, Namecheap, WordPress, and Mozilla.
This list will continue to grow as companies realize that their user’s expect them not just to take basic security precautions, but to actively fight for their privacy and civil liberties.
###