Simple answers
I don’t know what its like in your country at the moment, but here in Australia there is not a day that goes by without some data privacy relevant mainstream news items - whether data leaks, misuse of data, tracking, the power of the tech giants etc. You can’t say the issues aren’t being brought to public attention.
But, (almost like climate change action), the problem is presented as terrible, too big to respond to and too difficult to solve. ‘Its bad, and there are no simple answers’.
Here’s some recent mainstream examples. I don’t expect you to read each one. My notes after each is looking carefully at what the article says the answer is to the problem:
[article’s point: these companies are essentially too complex to do anything about. “legislative and regulatory intervention can only be effective if industry, governments and civil society combine to build, by design, a digital information age worthy of the name, which doesn’t leave us all open to exploitation” - …yeah so that won’t happen. ]
[the article’s only solution: wait for the laws to change …don’t know about your country but here tech is changing faster than law ]
[article admits…but law change is hard because most of the companies are American, and we’re in Australia…]
[article: no solution presented]
How come none of these articles say ‘so stop using them’? or, choose No? or, So look out an alternative?
If the toxicity implied by the descriptions in these articles was a food product, it would be off the shelves and there would be recall announcements on the radio. The inconvenience is less important than safety.
But the writers can’t allow themselves to write What Must Not Be Said - that is, that we can live without them.
So, what about some more simple answers?
All these companies have become powerful because we have fed then, and we continue to feed them. So stop feeding them.
Google used to say that their competition was only one click away. That is, their one vulnerability is ‘we the people’ choosing something else. For each of their products there are alternatives, which we can use instead. We just need the insight to recognise that they will not change, and the determination to choose a different way for ourselves and our families.
