When people say "big tech" firms are bad, they sometimes don't have much logic backing up their arguements, however, I would like to shed some light on these issues, well, at least "my light." My arguements may be different from yours, which is understandable, and as such, I am open to civil debate.
When people think of malicious big tech firms, Google (well, technically Alphabet, INC.) is often the first to come to mind, as they are known for ~92% of the global search engine marketshare (as of April, 2022), ~64% of the global browser market share (as of the same time), and two of their sites (Google Search, Youtube) comprise the top two domains visited worldwide as of the same time. The monopolization is alarmingly enough, especially when paired with their privacy violating "ecosystem," which spans from consumer environments, to enterprises, and alarmingly educational environments. However, their lack of respect for consumer privacy has led to the U.S. government hitting them with 1984-like "keyword warrants", a false "privacy-respecting" advertising system, and attempts to harm democracy and freedom.
On monopolization, the alternatives are there, are simple to use, and for the most part offer feature parity with services such as Google Search, software such as Google Chrome, and often are even based off Google-financed software, such as Naver Whale (Google is a known financier of the Chromium "engine's" development); so are people stupid, brainwashed, or merely complacent? The answer is likely yes to all three. I think part of it at least is laziness, "I don't want to take 30 seconds to change the search engine on my cell phone," "I don't want to take a few minutes to set up a new email account and tell people to stop emailing my GMail account," etc. Another part may be ignorance, "I don't know about any alternatives," "everyone uses Google Search/Maps/Chrome/Drive/Docs, so why shouldn't I?" etc. However, as I am not a psychologist and have no interest in purusing psychology as a career path, nor do I have the resources or time to survey millions of people, the answer will never truly be made clear.
To cap off monopolization, my main concern is the use of Google services in educational institutions, since is Google is storing the data of often knowing adults, it should be more worrying that they are storing the data of unknowing children, often without their parents' consent. In the USA at least, while people are dismissing parental bills of rights as far-right nonsense by people on the left of the aisle, they often provide great protection from schools, administrators, and teachers forcing children to use privacy-violating services and software, such as Google (and its "Workspace for Education" service), Microsoft products, and proctoring software.
On the governmental side of things, Google has been served with numerous keyword warrants in the USA, which order them to surveil the browsing activities of anyone who searches for a certain subpoenaed term (i.e. a telephone number, address, email address, SNS [social-networking-service] screenname, and/or name, the possibilities are endless!; this usually coincides with a notable court case, seemingly); for example, if there was a case revolving around "Robert Everyman" and the government served a warrant for people searching for "Robert Everyman" on Google, and I searched for "Robert Everyman", I might expect a not-so-pleasant greeting from the feds when I wake up in the future. On the other hand, Google fights foreign-issued warrants; so apparently only the USA may spy on Google users.
When it comes to internal surveillance, Google is constantly at-odds with organizations and governments such as the European Union and the state of Texas. Even then, for every new rule, Google tries to develop a workaround, such as the so-called "privacy sandbox" (don't let your children play in this "sandbox", they may walk out traumatized... even if they don't know it, since big tech hides things real well), which in-theory is a good technology, since it "anonymizes" users into "cohorts" based on browsing habits to generate semi-targeted advertising, however, Google goes about this with "FLOC" (Federated Learning of Cohorts), which pulls data direct from a user's complete Chrome history (its unclear if it pulls data "purged" from a Google account or not), and likely tracks clicks on advertising (and manifest v3 will likely break adblockers on Google Chrome anyways).
On democracy, this is 100% opinionated, but algorithms control what you read, and by extension, will be most likely what you think about, are likely to buy, and your behavior in regards to challenging the algorithms (for the gen-x edgelords, "algorithms try to make your ability to rage against the machine absolutely useless). When the internet contained primarily chronological timelines and indexes, you would see things as they happened, not "as the algorithm decides to use said things to influence human behavior."
I'll keep this one short and simple, since Meta (short for Meta Platforms, or as I'd rather call it, Metadata Retainers, LLC.) is accepted as a universal evil of sorts, complete with an overly robotic, greedy CEO (Mark Zuckerberg), creepy "virtual reality" technology, and a platform nearly irresistable to teenagers (at least in the western world), in fact, they don't even know what they're doing with the data mined from you. So please, AVOID.
Yet another one that can be kept short, albiet as the least evil, most likely. All three of the firms currently named here were participants in the NSA's PRISM program, so they are likely all complacent in more programs; however, I've heard people alledge that Windows has "federal backdoors," and short of users being dumb enough to leave OneDrive sync and telemetry enabled, there's no clear evidence of any such backdoor existing (outside of a few schizo posts online, unless the schizophrenics are right, and there's a backdoor that has been blatantly hidden from us [and, no, _NSAKEY doesn't count, as nothing has been confirmed.]) Still, avoid Microsoft services and unhardened Microsoft software.
Copyright 2022, Econobox_ (d.b.a konat.neocities.org)
