Uber, Google, Facebook refuse to help President-elect build his muslim registry

segun akande

December 19, 2016 5:05 PM

The registry is a database that could help the government track muslims, and tech firms are not interested in making that happen.

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One of the hallmarks of

Mr Trump has not wasted any time in getting to work since his shock election win in November, and might already be on the lookout for tech firms ready to help build a registry of all Muslims in the United States.

The Muslim registry, if built, will be a database, which the government could use to track, and in certain cases, target Muslims.

The world’s biggest technology companies have been quick in coming out to say they will refuse to build a registry if a request is made by Mr Trump’s presidency.

Head of Public Relations at Microsoft, Frank X. Shaw, said in a statement, “We are opposed to discrimination and we wouldn’t do any work to build a registry of Muslim Americans”. Twitter also told the tech platform, the Verge that it would never participate in such a project.

After a leaked email between colleagues discussing the project was released by Buzzfeed, Facebook released a statement saying it would not help build a registry of Muslims - or any other group - and it has not been asked to do so.

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Google has also responded by saying they are glad they haven’t been asked to build a registry and if they are asked, they definitely wouldn’t do it.

Other companies that are shutting down Donald Trump’s dreams include Automattic, which owns Wordpress; Uber; and Medium, which allows users post dissenting views under pseudonyms.

Apart from putting a major dent in Trump’s questionable ambitions, the decision by these companies is a statement for the independence of technology from other interests.

It is impossible to quantify the amount of power in the information and capacity that these firms have. In order to protect the public interest and avoid the misuse of that power, the walls between technology and the power of the state must remain thick, strong and insurmountable.

segun akande