Them and the ecosystem of data brokers and marketing companies that are invisible to consumers and yet do far, far sketchier things with personal data.
Like, remember that thing where cell carriers were literally selling real-time user-specific location data to, essentially, anybody who could pay? And probably still are? I can't conceive of how people can be so angry at "Big Tech" but not at these shadowy fuckers who are doing so much worse things wrt. your data.
> Like, remember that thing where cell carriers were literally selling real-time user-specific location data to, essentially, anybody who could pay? And probably still are?
Or before that, when they caught flak for header injection[1]. Which is still a thing according to the "Subscriber ID Headers" section of [2], just gated behind a whitelist instead of sprayed out to everyone. It'd be interesting to know if the rise in HTTPS traffic has reduced the utility of that, or if they've found a mitigation for that inconvenience.
You are setting a false dichotomy. Most people that care about privacy are angry at _both_ ISP stalkers _and_ BigTech stalkers.
That being said, BigTech has developed significant stronger capabilities for aggregating and exploiting the data at scale, and using it for manipulating mass behavior. It's their business model: serve ads and curate content for maximum $$$ and engagement. For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide. Given the death of net neutrality things may change, but for now ISPs have a lot of ground to cover to become as noxious as BigTech.
> For better or worse, ISPs just pass bits around on behalf of their customers, without deciding which bits to show and which to hide
Comcast does DPI and will inject "warnings" into your port 80 traffic if they see you downloading bits they disapprove of. They've also been caught blocking sites multiple times; it is always a "mistake", but somehow also always something like this:
You're also forgetting Verizon's magic headers, various carriers' zero rating, mining DNS requests, AT&T's Room 641A, and about 50 years of other charming behavior.
No, I'm not "setting a false dichotomy" at all, actually. I could be wrong, but I'd bet some amount of money that less than 1 in 10 Americans who have an opinion about "Big Tech" (in the sense that if you say those words to them, they will provide an opinion) have any meaningful knowledge of these less-visible players outside of the services they provide directly to consumers.
("Oh, Verizon? That's my phone company! Yeah, their customer service is pretty bad but it's cheaper than T-Mobile, so...")
That's the point of my comment. It may be a dichotomy, but from my observations of "regular people" it's certainly not a false one. IMO your viewpoint here is a very tech-centric one, and doesn't accurately represent "most people".
Data brokers are a part of big tech as much as apple and Netflix are.
Apple has a more aggressive stance than most companies but even they are pathetically far from being privacy first. I'm a big fan of the proposals to treat all used data as radioactive waste that if mishandled, even accidentally, can destroy entire companies. It is absurd that we're even having these conversations. We're one dictator away from another genocide on the soil of a world leader. China notwithstanding. These vast databases can be misused to quickly indentured entire minority populations in countries. We've gotten a taste of this under trump with the "illegals". If we're unfortunate to find ourselves under an actual dictator trump will pale in comparison. By excising all customer data from companies we prevent countless attacks, and make many other attacks far harder.
I agree with you on the "radioactive waste" aspect, but I put "big tech" in quotes to suggest the sense in which lay people tend to interpret the phrase. I'm fine if there is an angry public response to all of it, but if we've going to be selective (only angry at the sexy companies with consumer-facing products) then IMO our selection to date has been suboptimal wrt. effective protection of consumers.
Unfortunately, I think it's going to take wholesale misuse of the data of large swathes of the population that dwarfs the reach of Equifax and the sensitivity of ashley Madison while effecting at least a couple ultra wealthy public names, to get sane consumer data protection laws with teeth and enforcement.
As Apple has prioritized privacy, I have migrated my stuff towards them. If they are pathetically far from being privacy first, I would like to know how so.
Prioritizing user convenience over user privacy is driven by a profit motive, sure. But that’s different than Google’s ecosystem which prioritizes monetization of user data over user privacy.
So, can anyone expand on where Apple sacrifices user privacy (other than for user convenience)?
Try searching on google for nyt retractions sometime. For that matter, twitter and facebook manipulation also can have some very direct influences... After it's all said and done, they're all a huge cesspool of deceit.
An mobile, I'm using Brave (FF just didn't work right with ublock for me), and using uBlock and Privacy badger on desktop.
I really wish browsers were far more restricted on IFrames more than 1-layer deep... cross-origin on 2+ layers of IFrames is all ads.. if the networks really cared, they'd work around it if they were cutoff from cookies/session/localstorage etc... As it is, layer of huge JS and tracking, nope, no ad, pass to another layer, etc. 85% of overhead is often in layers of ad iframes, cut them off at the knees technically... no cookies or data access 2+ layers deep.
It's two minor mistakes, transparently corrected. I can't think of a better process except "let's agree never to make any mistakes".
And the self-certified "Brave" browser is a for-profit scam. It's an answer only if the question was "Why isn't there another middleman between me and content creators, skimming 30% of ad revenue?".
Yes. If there had to be a group of people to have access to so much data, I trust Googlers more than I trust my own government both in terms of ethics and definitely competence.
That said, I don't really trust them much either.
Google has existential power from their information and search. If they wanted to be a hedge fund, my god, they'd be very successful. Most elections these days are narrow, if they wanted to tilt the board in one direction, they absolutely could - which is a shocking thing to consider.
Imagine if you're French, and some massive foreign company could adjust their algorithm so that most of the news about Candidate A was good and Candidate B was bad.
Sometimes it's hard for Americans, in particular, to get the concept of such foreign control because nobody is 'big and powerful' enough to control the US.
But consider the analogy: everyone in the US uses Baidu. Everyone buys a lot from Alibaba. Most people read China Daily and watch films made and produced in China. Chinese stars are beloved and often more influential than local stars.
It's almost incomprehensible, but that's what it's like being in most countries in the world.
So you can argue about Verizon/AOL etc - but to people outside the US, it's a more existential concern.
