My Thoughts on Online Privacy and Big Tech Monopolies

None of us — not you, I, nor anyone in Congress — will ever know for sure whether or not big tech companies are acting as stewards for their customers’ well-being. We all have our own opinions, biases, interpretations, and takeaways from the painful congressional questioning sessions that have happened recently.

My thought is… it doesn’t matter whether they are acting nefariously or not. I mean, it does in the short term, but grilling them on the current state of their operations is a moot issue over the long term. What does matter is this:

Are we comfortable in an environment where we are giving them the option to act nefariously with our data, and ultimately our lives?

No. I’m not, and you aren’t either.

Mark Zuckerberg may be the most noble, upstanding, virtuous citizen in the history of the world. But if I can avoid it, I’m still not comfortable handing him, or any other human being the keys to store, use and monetize my behavioral, demographic, and psychographic data.

If we create a system that regulates how much of our online (or offline) data is even available to be mis-used, it literally won’t matter whether Google is run by Sandar Pichai, Mahatma Gandhi or Rudy Giuliani.

We need to create the system that, just like our physical personal property, our personal data is ours and ours alone. We are so far beyond the efficacy of the self-regulating ‘honor system’ of the big tech companies. As human beings and consumers of technology, we need to start refusing to simply shrug off the idea that Facebook, or Google, or Amazon, or whomever may be doing ANYTHING with our data that is not 100% known, visible, and controllable by us.