DeletedUser370
Well, thanks for this constructive response, thanks for having taken the time to do some research, that’s what I no longer dared to hope for in this thread.
Regarding my ‘tone’:
I’m really sorry that you thought I was being judgemental toward you, that was not the case. But my tone was suited to the thread, a thread that, although remained civilised, seemed to elicit no meaningful argumentation regarding main Fairphone claims.
I’ll add that I did not really start a discussion with you – still a welcome one –, you did. And you did it by saying that I’d made a lot of assumptions, without considering that I might have taken some time before writing my comments, and without having the courtesy to address me directly.
But I did not complain, I just went on with my argumentation; what I said was not tied to you, it was addressed to this undefined pack of incredulous people.
Your first message was not giving me much information, even so, I did not have the temerity to think I knew where you came from. Don’t take things personally, it is normal to see assumption-like messages, especially when they respond to short messages.
It was just an indiscriminate argumentation, if it doesn’t concern you, all the better!
Also, maybe that my comment was just provocative enough to elicit something meaningful…
By the way, I’m sure you also know those people saying they don’t ‘believe’ in organic. I’m convinced it’s the same phenomenon around here for some.
But again, it sounds that you think that I, on the contrary, am ‘automatically convinced’ by those kinds of claims. I am not naive, and I’m also aware of false good ideas, deceptions, and even sheer treacheries.
I already explained my reasoning in this thread a few days ago, or, as I answered you, it’s a matter of plausibility. And after some research, I did not find any kind of report, study or journalistic investigation exposing the lies of Fairphone. I’ll remind you that it was the tone in this thread, not that we have to investigate. So, understand where I’m coming from, just in this thread.
The question is, what do we do in the meantime?
Are we asserting that Fairphone is lying and that they’re all the same, or are we doing some research, preferably with a systematic method, like you did?
Because examining development aid through conducting case studies in the field is expensive, I wasn’t very surprised to find very few articles that seemed relevant/interesting.
Indeed. And it bothered me even more since it seemed I have the burden of proof, as someone trying to moderate some opinions.
Regarding the first Fairphone, I didn’t linger on it, since it’s the only device that was ODM, contrary to the others, which are OEM. That is not to say the study you linked might not have been useful to assess Fairphone’s truthfulness.
I did also specifically search for documents not on fairphone.com, on the basis that otherwise they would be seen as too partial around here. Your systematic search is better, though.
The last link, I linked it here five days ago, but got no comment. I agree, I’m also left unsatisfied, I would have liked to see some thorough independent and qualified attempts to test their claims.
It would probably be easier to find case studies on the organizations that Fairphone works with, such as Fairtrade Gold and The Impact Facility. That might be one way to approach a literature search. I don’t know, I can’t pretend to be an expert on this.
But in this case, Fairphone would not be held accountable for any kind of deception, at least not fully. Also, gold laundering is so pervasive that it would need really some appalling occurrences to ‘expose’ Fairtrade gold.
However, looking at the Fairphone 5 fair materials figure (p. 67 of the last report), I’m also disappointed to see that only 20% of gold inside the phone has been fair-mined, the remaining 80% being fair-mined gold credits, which might be a weak point regarding sourcing, but still, it seems too easy to unsubstantially criticise the only ones trying to do things differently, as some seem to do.
Thanks, I appreciate the Signal proposal, but for now, the usual suspects have been enough to get me the studies. I’m looking forward to your findings, hopefully we can get a solid basis and avoid pro- or anti-Fairphone assertions.