For a leftist, it is hard to understand what this means without doing an empathy trick: Imagine it was all reversed. Imagine leftist news were surpressed on Facebook. Imagine that pro-trump news were helped in google search. Would you not feel unfaired ? Would you not be pretty mad about not getting a fair chance ? Would the election results be different if you had such unjust advantages working the other way around ?
Facebook has got to have an incredible power for a private corporation to hold. Being private, they are not responsible for what they do. You can’t ask to have a 50-50% trending news curator department cause they are private and can do whatever they want. Google was also found to promote it’s own products through their algorithm.
The monopoly of facebook and google is threathening internet neutrality, but there is little we can do about it.
A thing to do is to use FB as little as possible or delete your account. Is that little? Or big? Or neither little or big?
It’s a little thing for me because I made the decision years ago to keep a minimal presence on FB so friends can find me. But I go to my page only a few times a year and spend very little time there.
I spend more time talking about FB and other services and their problems than I do connected to my account!
I think the best way to bring about any change is to find decent alternatives, as needed, and migrate to them, deleting the older accounts (once one can reasonably manage to). Yes, it’s work! Exiting from “the path of least resistance” will always feel inconvenient. Them’s the breaks. (BTW: the life of a monastic is filled with many such inconvenient departures from various “paths of least resisteance”).
If you’re not a technical person, the following might be a little too much (warning), however if you’d like a few recent examples, then read on…
For example, on my recent family visit, I managed to:
deactivate my mother’s Facebook account (with her permission, of course). My older sister also agreed to deactivate hers.
get my nuclear family onto Wire Instant Messenger. I hope to leave the likes of WhatsApp, Skype, and Facetime behind in this way (at least with my family). This is also meant as an alternative to Facebook Messenger.
get my Mother off of dependance on gmail. We opened free email accounts at protonmail.com (for her family/friends/acquaintances, is it could easily import all her email contacts from her iOS contacts), and tutanota.com (used for giving out to businesses/online services, not actual people). Then we announced her new protonmail address to family and friends (first from gmail, warning to watch that a subsequent email from her new protonmail address shouldn’t go unnoticed into their spam folders. Then right after, we emailed them all again from protonmail). She plans to delete the Gmail account soon. Also, for all online services she supplied her gmail address to (like about 15 of them) the email address had to be changed to the tutanota address.
delete an unused gmail account I opened, which was sheerly for the sake of getting into the Google Play store in Android (needed to install a few needed apps not found in F-Droid). It turns out you can associate a non-gmail, non-Google email address to your so-called Google Account, then delete the gmail address (and still be able to get into the Google Play Store).
PS: Tips about Wire (which are current, but subject to anicca):
if your first visit to Wire.com is from a smartphone, and you sign up, they know you are on a smartphone, and will link your new account to the smartphone’s cell number (and you can’t simply use your email address as your User ID). So that first visit to wire.com should ideally be from a non-smartphone/tablet web browser (preferably Chrome/Chromium, see below). Then and only then can the new account be linked to your email address. This tip is a good one for monastics who have internet access, but no smartphone with a SIM card.
When signing up, look for “Free for personal use”, as opposed to the Free trial for business use.
Wire does really excellent, efficient (on the bandwidth) video chats IF they are done in Chrome (or their desktop software) on a laptop/desktop (and not done from the Wire app in Android). The Wire app in Android can do video chats, but they will probably be way more bandwidth hungry, and you’ll probably need better-than-average bandwidth (or just be OK with perhaps only doing voice chat, no video, when you’re on your smartphone, and bandwidth is a bit tight).
From my little understanding, ‘internet neutrality’ has little or nothing to do with the quasi-monopolies of Facebook and Google, but it has to do with broadband providers for example.
I’m not saying that the power and dominance of Facebook and Google is not a problem right now, due to their behavior, but this and net neutrality are two different issues.
It seems an impossible task… but it has been done in the past for such behemoth as Standard Oil (not shut down but split in 34 companies that became the present-day Exxon, Mobil, Chevron etc, all daughters of Rockefeller’s company!)… so it seems anything can be achieved! We need a new Ida Tarbell.
But I prefer to think that Facebook will be destroyed by its own reckless behaviour and that society will just moved to better companies and (decentralized) protocols. Google has been on the good side for a long time (‘don’t be evil’ motto etc), I wish they just go back to their original ethical behaviour… I think we have been lucky to have them dominating their field until now, it could have been much worse.
A bit of practical information – an article from Al Jazeera reporting info from one Dylan Curran on what Google and Facebook track, and how to query what info they have stored on you. There’s a link to the Google feature that creates a ZIP-file, named “Google Takeout”, containing a local HTML structure with different pages for your usages:
Bookmarks
Calendar
Chrome
Google My Business
Google Pay Send
Google Pay_rewards,…
Gsuite Marketplace
Hangouts
Location History
My Activity
YouTube
Curran reports his Google Takeout was 5.5 GB. I tried it and it was just about 9 MB, and mostly YouTube usage (including that for my living partner!).
To avert what the dystopian authors have predicted, and to pursue a more humane approach to each other, we must once again encounter what is lacking on Facebook. The irony of Facebook is that it is totally devoid of faces.
Great article by Bruce Schneier on “Surveillance Capitalism” (which the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal is just one example of):
“Facebook and Cambridge Analytica”
for every article about Facebook’s creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it’s Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.
That phone is probably the most intimate surveillance device ever invented. It tracks our location continuously, so it knows where we live, where we work, and where we spend our time. It’s the first and last thing we check in a day, so it knows when we wake up and when we go to sleep. We all have one, so it knows who we sleep with. Uber used just some of that information to detect one-night stands; your smartphone provider and any app you allow to collect location data knows a lot more.
Surveillance capitalism drives much of the internet. It’s behind most of the “free” services, and many of the paid ones as well. Its goal is psychological manipulation, in the form of personalized advertising to persuade you to buy something or do something, like vote for a candidate. And while the individualized profile-driven manipulation exposed by Cambridge Analytica feels abhorrent, it’s really no different from what every company wants in the end. This is why all your personal information is collected, and this is why it is so valuable. Companies that can understand it can use it against you.
None of this is new. The media has been reporting on surveillance capitalism for years. In 2015, I wrote a book about it.
I’d only take issue with this sentence. In fact, the smart watch is far more intimate, and far more creepy in its implications than a phone. A “smart” watch, or any internet device that sits on your body, can measure all the things a phone does, and in addition, your heartbeat.
What does that reveal about you? It reveals when you wake up and when you go to bed; when you go for a run; when you have a coffee; when you have sex; when you smoke a joint; and anything else that affects your heartrate. By itself, it can’t deduce these things with certainty, but wire it up with some simple data of other forms and it’s all laid out. But that’s just the start. A smart phone can tell when you come into physical proximity of someone else in the office, how long for, and how many times during the day. But smart watches can tell you that when you meet someone, your heartbeat goes up and his doesn’t. So the data brokers can know when you’ve got a crush on someone, even before you’ve realized it yourself.
I do not have a Facebook account. Never have; never will.
However, the local wat I have started attending has a Facebook page as its main online public presence. One of the monks enjoys taking photos of events at the wat (a lot!) and posts pictures daily to the wat’s Facebook page. Since I have been attending quite a few events lately my picture has been featured in numerous photos posted to the page by the camera-loving monk.
On the one hand, as only a handful of Westerners who regularly attends the wat (which otherwise mainly serves the local Southeast Asian immigrant community) I do feel a bit gratified that I am doing the wat a service by showing potential newcomers that Westerners are gladly welcomed at the wat. On the other hand, as someone who has strenuously avoided having a Facebook presence I am a little uneasy that photos of me are now stored in perpetuity at the Facebook headquarters.
I suppose the price to pay for appearing in public in the United States is that by doing so one gives tacit permission to be photographed (which is why it is perfectly legal to take a picture of someone in a public place in the U.S. where they have “no expectation of privacy”). Still, as much as I don’t mind helping the wat show that everyone is welcome at its events, I wish the wat used an online portal other than Facebook as its main internet presence.
I call that a really insightful comment (at least in a worldly sense). I think a different way to phrase that, which is surprisingly true and accurate these days, would go like this:
“If it costed $1 a month to secure your privacy, would you spend it?”
I say this because as I look into pricing out a Nextcloud server, and I think of sizing it to how many users it can realistically serve, it ends up working out to about $1 per user per month, given a roughly half-utilized server. (Maybe $0.50 or $0.75 per month per user, if it’s used really efficiently, which is not all that realistic to expect).
We need a new 
