And a secretive organization at that. That's one of the big issues, the same as with the NSA - not just privacy, but the privacy differential. When an organization is able to learn everything about you, but you are able to learn little about them.

This is huge. I can't even count how many times I've argued about privacy with Googlers and run into "trust me, we take this very seriously, but I can't say anything about it". We're asked to share everything with them, but these tech companies are incredibly, incredibly secretive, all under the guise of protecting their interests from competition.

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.

If you don't trust Google to broker your data, you can definitely build your own system to do it. You are then merely faced with two challenges:

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).

As you just pointed out, the latter thing is, in fact, exactly what prevents you from simply building your own system: The network effect. It's why it's very unlikely anything but large governments like the US and the EU are capable of restraining Google's behavior. (Smaller governments are not able to, as Google would simply refuse to operate in those localities until the government caved to public pressure to stop "banning Google".)

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.

Enumerate the cost and I can reduce it to dollar-equivalents based upon my experience and preferences.

I suspect it's pretty close to free for me.

Exactly because I like tech I don't like how the persons it's shaped by and the reasons they shape it for. (particular things I dislike are symptoms of that). Consider the thoughts of Konrad Zuse or Joseph Weizenbaum with just about anyone who ever worked at Microsoft, Apple, Google or Facebook in any sort of leading role.

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".

I think the topics of privacy and tech monopoly should be separated out a bit more in discussions. Different people object to different issues.

Referring to "the history" is just wrong, there are always conflicting perspectives and facts. See http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/01/in-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173396; there have been plenty of (presumably sane) people who depended on a single corporation. It's not clear whether they're better off for it, and there is a slippery-slope argument, but monopolies and lock-in are not intrinsically evil.

> It's not clear whether they're better off for it, and there is a slippery-slope argument, but monopolies and lock-in are not intrinsically evil.

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).

> fucked if it doesn't work for you anymore.

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)