Poisoning big data
Tech giants don't care about your well-being: sabotage them
The idea: big tech companies do not have your best interests in mind. This is obvious to anyone looking at the behavior of companies like Facebook and Google. Karen Hao writes:
Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.
Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, then a reporter for Gizmodo, famously tried to cut five major tech giants out of her life. She spent six weeks being miserable, struggling to perform basic digital functions. The tech giants, meanwhile, didn’t even feel an itch.
The fundamental temptation of using tech is that it makes life easier. People will bring you the thin…
