People still see Tech as benign, but it has been twisted from the early starry-eyed technologists who wanted to change the world for the better, and it has become just another big industry power block that looks after only it's own profits to the exclusion of everything else.
Especially when they’re in competition with bricks and mortar stores that can’t use “double Dutch” and “double Irish” tax dodges.
The tax evasion is a very important, but more general and unfortunately pervasive problem of our society. I believe we'll do it a disservice if we try to target it narrowly like that. It will get drowned out by whataboutism and the bigger but specific issues. None of that can derail it when looking at the bigger picture.
Politicians have more to say about chicken sandwiches, library story time, and and NFL pregames when their actual job is exactly this sort of problem, not being professional culture pundits.
We allow people to enter into all sorts of arrangements where they compromise their rights, such as by giving up their right to sue in court or not seeking employment in the same industry.
We allow people to enter into onerous credit card agreements, and we all agree that it is voluntary. And we say that when an 18 year old youth purchases cigarettes, that again, they are exercising their intellect in an act of agency.
And then we come to the issue of software licenses, which also begs the question as people trade privacy for services, "Yes, you are an individual of formidable agency, are you not?"
We have to face it: we’re not helping the world.
There are maybe 2 or 3 major companies (Mozilla, Apple?) that have shown any interest in protecting their users privacy and not abusing and mining all the data they collect from their users, who have unsurprisingly not understood the implications of the massive amount of data that can be collected over the past decade or so.