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Wel, its not easy to ban some big tech services from your life, but IMO, now is a good time to evaluate what can go. I have been toying with killing FaceBook f

by lynx23 3y ago

Wel, its not easy to ban some big tech services from your life, but IMO, now is a good time to evaluate what can go. I have been toying with killing FaceBook for at least two years, this is likely a good moment to actually make it happen. THe USA is not trustworthy when it comes to datd privacy. Nor is any government. But opening the doors to send everything oversees to the "big brother" is simply not acceptable. I am not an US citizen. Since the EU obviously doesn't care for my citizen rights, I think it is time to vote for leaving the EU as well.

shadowgovt 3y ago
FWIW, replacing big tech with small tech doesn't really solve the problem unless you're willing to go all the way and sysadmin your own physical on-prem hardware. In my experience, small tech is even riskier because they have similar technological capabilities as big tech to aggregate data and less oversight. Google, for all its ills, has an incentive to protect user privacy: people stop sending them money if they think Google is letting rando criminals harvest userdata, and governments get really antsy if they can't provide audit records for where the data goes and how it's secured. User trust is a lot more valuable to Google than risking that data, and (while the way Google uses the data can be cringe from time to time) the data itself is extremely secure, relatively speaking. Smaller firms can be bribed by those criminals, or bought by another firm with a different idea of privacy, or they simply go under and it turns out the data was unencrypted this whole time and, oops, the physical hardware storing the data just got auctioned off without a proper scrubbing, or some mid-level engineer had a copy of the whole user database on their laptop, or etc. And governments are worse at chasing the long tail of small firms; the legal process is better tuned to plop Meta and Google's lawyers' asses in the chair of an inquiry board than the lawyers / CEOs / garage-bound owners of a thousand small firms.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Well, I wasn't trying to say that small tech is better in any way then big tech. It is just that most for most standard users, most valuable data is likely going to big tech companies. Also, I disagree with your analysis, I wouldn't trust big companies more then small ones, for whatever reasons. US based is US based, and that is that. If the EU obviously fails to protect my data as a citizen by forcing these global players to keep the data roughly local, I am out.

by lynx23 3y ago

shadowgovt 3y ago

FWIW, replacing big tech with small tech doesn't really solve the problem unless you're willing to go all the way and sysadmin your own physical on-prem hardware. In my experience, small tech is even riskier because they have similar technological capabilities as big tech to aggregate data and less oversight. Google, for all its ills, has an incentive to protect user privacy: people stop sending them money if they think Google is letting rando criminals harvest userdata, and governments get really antsy if they can't provide audit records for where the data goes and how it's secured. User trust is a lot more valuable to Google than risking that data, and (while the way Google uses the data can be cringe from time to time) the data itself is extremely secure, relatively speaking. Smaller firms can be bribed by those criminals, or bought by another firm with a different idea of privacy, or they simply go under and it turns out the data was unencrypted this whole time and, oops, the physical hardware storing the data just got auctioned off without a proper scrubbing, or some mid-level engineer had a copy of the whole user database on their laptop, or etc. And governments are worse at chasing the long tail of small firms; the legal process is better tuned to plop Meta and Google's lawyers' asses in the chair of an inquiry board than the lawyers / CEOs / garage-bound owners of a thousand small firms.

lynx23 3y ago
Well, I wasn't trying to say that small tech is better in any way then big tech. It is just that most for most standard users, most valuable data is likely going to big tech companies. Also, I disagree with your analysis, I wouldn't trust big companies more then small ones, for whatever reasons. US based is US based, and that is that. If the EU obviously fails to protect my data as a citizen by forcing these global players to keep the data roughly local, I am out.