Yeah you raise some good points. Its the misuse of data that is quite significant, because a pen can be used to write stuff or be used to stab someone, its how its used that mattars, but that doesn’t make the pen a bad thing. Equally giving data to a company isn’t bad, but the company can misuse that data to manipulate you in very suttle ways that you are not aware of.

Generally I think that this is the number 1 reason people want to be private because of ‘big tech’ etc. But I made this post because I felt like there were people following privacy and becoming as private as possible to what end?

However devils advocate here, tech companies like Microsoft and Google do bring an amazing service. To this day there is no other search engine as good as google period. Microsoft and Google both offer amazing email services that just work.

I feel that the long term solution is to decentralise a lot of this stuff out and have it so that we don’t need central services like Facebook and google, but have a decentralised internet as it was originally intended to be. That is the reason I enjoy Lemmy so much because its federated and decentralised and open source so we can verify if there are backdoors or if lemmy place hidden trackers in their website we would know, we can also see the bans that lemmy makes on the platform and see if we agree with them or not (i’m sure there are other good things about it, but I haven’t spent the time to research all of them). If we can have a decentralised internet with all the services and things like that we would be able to take away power from the elite that don’t have our best interests at heart and give power back to the people (democracy) which is also why I enjoy crypto so much because that really is decentralised (alhtough a lot of bitcoin miners are owned by microsoft in USA, so i was told).