I am in no ways anti-tech, but the history has shown that putting your life in the hands of a single corporation is not a sane decision.
People in support of these companies running people's lives are all in favor of transparency and sharing on the Internet... until it gets turned around on them. For all it's other faults, The Circle movie captured this perfectly with one line from Tom Hanks: "We are so f###ed."
Maybe I wouldn't be so bothered by Google knowing where I am every five minutes if I could track Larry Page and Eric Schmidt in near realtime too.
1) You'll be recapitulating years of work by dedicated, paid teams to do the sort of data-brokering Google will give you for free. 2) If you want your work to be useful (because as we know, the real value of shared data is in the sharing), you'll need to convince your friends (and friends-of-friends) that your data-sharing solution---your "tracks you every five minutes, but you can see where everyone else being tracked is"---is safer and more trustworthy than Google's.
But nothing's stopping you from trying to solve (1) and (2).
I'd also caution you from describing Google's services as "free". The cost is huge, it's just not a cost you pay in dollars.
I suspect it's pretty close to free for me.
Technology can empower, it can give people room, and it can "capture the imagination" and "change the way we think about trivial thing X or Y". Or take the constant "we want to help people do X"... I'm really tired of the sleaze, the pretend-awedness and how we accepted filler language and filler personalities, more than I have a problem with the size of success of any single corporation per se. Maybe these things go hand in hand, maybe mass societies can't be human societies, but I'm not convinced, IMHO we're not even really trying so far, we just pretend being kind of dorks is "the future" and "modern".
They are only not intrinsically evil if you make the assumption that they will never harm you (act in a way you didn't bargain for) or disappear. A company which does either has given you no way out of a service you now depend on and are fucked if it doesn't work for you anymore.
Given the churn on technology companies, acquisitions and a general lack of ethics, I would not put a lot of trust in claiming that companies are going to uphold either of those requirements. Thus, I would argue that effectively all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil.
Not to mention that companies are psychopaths by structure. They definitely don't care about you (hell, they don't care about their employees on the whole).
There are plenty of responses: sue them under antitrust statutes, break in and steal their tech, go the politics route and seize it via eminent domain, etc.
It's true though, a lot of those are impractical. But in the end you're pretty much back where you started before you began a relationship with the company; fucked is a relative term, when you should be thinking on an absolute scale of reference.
> all companies will do evil inevitably and thus are intrinsically evil
I guess it depends on your philosophy of evil. Sure, corporations are like hungry tigers, in that if you're in the same room as them without protection you're likely to get killed and eaten eventually. But does that make tigers (or corporations) evil? Consensus seems to be "no" or "mu": https://www.quora.com/Are-tigers-lions-and-hyenas-evil-creat...
(mu being defined as in http://webpages.charter.net/sn9/literature/mu.html)
1. The Filter Bubble. The idea that you can be shut in your own bubble, not being exposed to new ideas or ideas that contradict your own, is pretty bad
2. The idea that a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth ( with noble intentions of fighting 'fake news' etc ) is also pretty bad. It can be used for political or economic gain
3. The company has a largely hostage users that they can abuse through predatory pricing etc
The opposition is not towards technology, but towards one company controlling most, if not all, of modern technology
This is a psychological and social question, not a technological problem. Most people are used to being surrounded by broad agreement; continual confrontation over basic values is highly stressful.
That just means you've got to proactively seek out new ideas you're uncomfortable with, and be mindful that not everything can be found on Google. It's not a reason to use a crappy search like Yahoo or Bing (which only indexes 1/10 of the pages Google does: http://www.worldwidewebsize.com/).
> a for profit company becoming the arbiter of truth
Wikipedia is more of an arbiter of truth than Google; so far Google has limited itself to indexing information rather than summarizing or categorizing it.
> predatory pricing etc
Free is predatory? I guess they should be paying users to search, like Bing? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/get-paid-search-bing-rewards-pr...
Apart from Google's Instant Answers. Which have, in the past, captured misleading or flat-out wrong information.
> predatory pricing etc
See Firebase's recent price hike. [0]
Not all Google products are free, Google is not just a search engine. Some start off reasonable, you get invested, and then they suddenly become ridiculously more expensive.
How exactly is what I think is best summarized as "we had a bug in our pricing system that was undercharging a miniscule number of users by an order of magnitude, and when we fixed the bug, they were informed of the price increase and we even gave them ways to mitigate, but their app architecture was terrible which made it difficult or impossible, and then after they raised a stink about it we reduced the cost/credited them enough to be mutually agreeable" as predatory?
1. they have grown this mentality where they gather any data they can get their hands on - apologize only when/if caught red handed. (remember google street car password gathering?).
2. the more you use their services the more dependent you become. but google have shown zero care for individual consumers. (who do you call if gmail craps out on you?)
What? Wasn't that "SSID gathering", as in "the name you give your WiFi network, which is then visible to anyone that passes by"? How could a streetview car gather passwords?
From Alan Eustace himself, too: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/creating-stronger-pr...
When was the last time gmail crapped out on you?
It's not really any worse an invasion of privacy than Snowden or Wikileaks. At least Google apologizes instead of going on about how information should be free.
> more dependent
Google actively reduces dependence, e.g. by their data takeout option. Obviously there's always going to be some switching cost but it's not like Google is a prison.
> Who do you call if gmail craps out
Well, if you have a SLA, you just call them on their 99.9% uptime guarantee: https://www.cnet.com/news/can-you-trust-your-business-to-goo... I guess if you're a consumer you don't get the same level of support, but it uses the same infrastructure so any problems will show up on the dashboard: https://www.google.com/appsstatus The reparations in all cases are limited to service credits, so you'd just be getting more free use of an already free service.