If it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably collecting your data and selling them to all the drug dealers of the world.

Once again, we have backed ourselves into a corner. Centralization seems to be one of the core aspects of humanity. As someone who was born just on the right side of the Velvet Revolution, I am very sensitive to being dependent on one or a small number of uncontrollable and opaque entities. In the western world, we are enjoying unprecedented levels of freedom1. So much freedom, in fact, that we decided to give some away in exchange for what was—and in some cases still is—remarkably good service with no obvious cost at all. I am, of course, talking about Big Tech.

I do not intend to preach about Big Tech being evil; that has been done by many already, to no significant avail2. What worries me is that Big Tech is not good for you even when it is not actively evil. The services Big Tech provides are comfortable and convenient, which, in an age obsessed with comfort and convenience, leads us straight into their golden cage. All is good and nice until you realize you’re locked in, at which point it is too late to do anything about it.

Your data in the hands of dictators

I had a friend who rented a room in an apartment where the landlord was a very nice old British lady. The room was great, the location was optimal, and the rent was reasonable. But whenever my friend left for work, the owner entered her apartment and looked through her belongings. The owner did not do anything with her things. She neither stole anything nor caused any damage. When my friend came home, she simply sensed that someone had messed with her stuff3. On one hand, it is difficult to describe exactly what was wrong with the actions of the old lady. After all, she did not cause any actual, measurable problems. In the grand scheme of things, she created value by enjoying herself while not causing any objective harm to my friend4. But, on the other hand: Ew! It’s a clear violation of privacy. The landlord was getting to know my friend without her consent. Even if I don't have anything to hide, I still don't want everyone to know whether I'm ironing my underwear.

And here comes Big Tech—a small number of institutions that know everything about us. And I mean EVERYTHING. All your communications, everywhere you’ve been, who you’ve met, everything you have searched, read, and watched, and all the websites you visited. What photos you take, and who is in them. With smart home devices, this now extends to everything you say at the dinner table and how you bribe your two-year-old to eat his vegetables. All this information is continuously and willingly given up by people when they opt in (or rather do not opt out) to services seemingly necessary to live in a modern society. It is no longer necessary to inspect someone’s personal belongings to learn about their secrets, as they willingly upload them to a cloud.

All you need is a smartphone and barely average internet usage, and you can be sure that at least Google and Meta know everything about you. They may not know the deepest secrets you never share with anyone but yourself, but they know everything else, and that is enough. Load all this information into one of many excellent AI models, and it spits out your perfect virtual twin. That is how it is always going to be. Once you give up your data, it is gone for good. You may do all the opt-outs in the world, but your data is at minimum distilled into some AI learning model, even if it is not yet distributed to all interested third parties.

You may argue this is not in the interest of companies like Google and Meta: they use your data solely to keep you hooked and ensure you don’t stop using their services. But that is the case today, with their current business model. Are you so sure that, when the ship goes down, Mark Zuckerberg won’t be more than happy to sell the remains of his empire to whichever dictator offers the biggest bag of cash? Would you trust Vladimir Putin with your data? It’s too late for you to decide. Not long from now, your virtual twin could be sending texts to your grandma, convincing her that Ukraine deserved to be punished and asking her to vote for whichever candidate will “make things right” in your country5.

Even if you’re not cloned, you’re vulnerable

But let’s look into more short-term and mundane issues. Let’s assume Big Tech will keep playing (relatively) nice or some sort of visionary legislation protects us all. Is it anyway a good idea to rely on an opaque entity with any important data of yours, regardless of the privacy concerns? Is it really a sensible idea to entrust all your photos to cloud storage if you never know when or why the provider may simply terminate your account and delete your data? On the technical level, it is certainly safer to entrust your photos to Google than to store them on one old barely functioning external hard drive. You can be pretty certain that Google is doing a much better job at data backup. But on the political level, you are simply vulnerable. What if Google changes policy and cuts you out? What if some of your data is flagged as illegal by an automated system and you have no one to call for help? It may not be something that happens frequently, but once it does, you’ll have no way of protecting against it or preparing for it.

But it’s not only the data itself; it’s also access. When Meta decides you are not worthy of an account, it will cut you off from your friends—friends with whom you may have no other contact methods. What if your government bans whichever social network you chose to make acquaintances? This goes beyond social networks, though. Even with an email address on a domain you do not own, you are too vulnerable to the whims of the giants, with limited to no defenses.

In the worst case, your livelihood can be at risk. It is certainly easier to start a YouTube channel than it is to start an independent media website. YouTube provides you with access to an audience and a simple monetization system. But in exchange for this, YouTube takes more than just a cut of your profits—it puts a knife to your throat, ready to slit it the moment your relationship becomes less than symbiotic.

The well-fed turkey

We are like a well-fed turkey. We are seemingly living a perfect life, with our food handed to us with minimal effort, with everything as easy and comfortable as it ever was. Until, of course, Thanksgiving comes, at which point it is too late to regret that we did not live our lives out in the wild. I do not think it is necessary to take huge steps back or reverse the last twenty years of technological innovation6. But we should contemplate taking our freedom back, at least in small, painless steps: making local backups of our data, exchanging multiple contact methods with our friends, and using services where we pay with our money, not with our data. We should take back our production means7, owning the traffic that buys our food.

Or at the very least, have a plan B in case things go south and Zuck decides to squeeze us one last time.

Footnotes

  1. One would argue hunter-gatherers were freer, but remember they had to follow the habits of their tribe if they didn’t want to die alone. Let’s not idealize the past. ↩

  2. Big Tech is not evil by design. Like every other corporation, Big Tech is designed to maximize profit regardless of externalities. It just happens to be that they have come to a (probably correct) conclusion that doing evil things is the right strategy to achieve their profit goals. ↩

  3. Which she later confirmed with a hidden webcam. ↩

  4. Curiously, this analogy works perfectly for the old defense of internet piracy: if you’d never buy the album/movie/game, are you actually harming anyone by pirating it? If the old lady is not causing any value degradation of my friend’s possessions, is she harming anyone? ↩

  5. Lying has been one of the basic tools of scoundrels since the dawn of speech, yet people still have not learned to distrust by default. You can convince many people just by cleverly distorting the facts in a seemingly serious-looking article. Visual manipulation has been another tool widely used for centuries, yet doctored photos or videos can still convince masses waiting for simple truths. Thanks to our data frivolity, all of this can now be done not by some distant news outlet or an internet stranger, but by a convincingly authentic “you.” “You” can be sharing with your friend all the facts about how Ukraine is suppressing Russian minorities and hence needs to be stopped. Good luck convincing your friends which “you” is real. ↩

  6. At least not all of them! ↩

  7. In a pro-individualistic way, not to pool them together in malfunctioning “publicly controlled” cooperatives. Been there, done that. ↩