92 lines
5.6 KiB
HTML
92 lines
5.6 KiB
HTML
<p>Recently we've begun to question the amount of power that large tech
|
|
companies have over our lives through our data, especially as these
|
|
companies begin to monopolize the market. Because of this, the solution
|
|
that is provided by our legal system is to split these companies. The
|
|
problem is, these companies are often multi-purposed and sell many
|
|
extremely different products, and many of these products, even if the
|
|
company were to split, would still hold a monopoly over the market. This
|
|
is the case of the Skype video conferencing tool or the Google search
|
|
engine. Even if you were to split a company such as Google based on its
|
|
products, you would still have market monopolies. Even worse, how do you
|
|
split something like Facebook which functions precisely because all your
|
|
friends, family, and acquaintances use it? If you were to split
|
|
Facebook, people would simply concentrate on the platform that had most
|
|
of their contacts on it, which would recreate the initial problem.
|
|
Simply splitting a company may have worked back when they just sold a
|
|
specific non-social product or service, like repairs, retail, etc.
|
|
However, with tech companies, especially those that rely on social
|
|
networks, need a special kind of split that allows consumers to continue
|
|
to interact with one another independently of which of the new companies
|
|
they have their account with.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Think about this: imagine that by contracting a given internet
|
|
service provider (ISP) you could only communicate with people (or
|
|
rather, computers) that were also connected to that ISP's network. That
|
|
is the equivalent of what social networks like Facebook and Skype do.
|
|
They make sure that if you want to communicate with someone in their
|
|
network, you must use their product and have an account with them,
|
|
therefore surrendering your personal data to that company. So how could
|
|
we allow for users to communicate with one another from separate
|
|
platforms? Well, there's already a technology that exists that shows us
|
|
how this is done: e-mail. With e-mail, it doesn't matter what server
|
|
hosts your mail, what client you use, what protocol you use to access
|
|
the e-mail server itself. How can this be? Even though e-mail is so
|
|
versatile and flexible, it uses a single protocol to send e-mails: SMTP.
|
|
It doesn't matter what service you use, where you host your mail, it all
|
|
uses SMTP to send e-mails. You could even host your own e-mail server if
|
|
you wanted to avoid relying on someone else's services!</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>So, how would this be applied to something like a social network such
|
|
as Facebook? For this we have many examples, but the one I'm most
|
|
familiar with is <a href="https://diasporafoundation.org/"
|
|
target="_blank" >Diaspora*</a> (the asterisk is actually part of the
|
|
name). When you setup an account on the Diaspora* network, you don't
|
|
register your account on any central server like you would on Facebook,
|
|
but instead you register your account on a <i>node</i>, like if you were
|
|
to register an e-mail at GMail, Yahoo!, ProtonMail, or even your own
|
|
server. Then, all your data is hosted on that node, and that node only,
|
|
but it can be shared with the friends you have on other nodes; similar
|
|
to how all your e-mails are only on the server you're registered on, but
|
|
you can send and receive e-mails from any other server. All that's
|
|
needed is for there to be a common protocol between the servers (which
|
|
Diaspora* has).</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>What about video conferencing tools, like Skype? Exact same
|
|
principle, and there's even an example: <a href="https://tox.chat/"
|
|
target="_blank" >Tox</a>. Tox isn't a program you install on your
|
|
computer, it's a network that can be accessed by <a
|
|
href="https://tox.chat/clients.html" target="_blank" >a variety of
|
|
programs</a>. Don't like how one of them works? Use a different one!
|
|
You'll still have access to all your friends because no matter the
|
|
program you choose to use, it's all connecting to the same network.</p
|
|
|
|
<p>Now you may be asking, "if this is such a wonderful idea, why haven't
|
|
companies been doing this from the start?". Put quite simply, they have
|
|
an incentive to lock users to their products, and their products alone.
|
|
Competition is great for consumers, but bad for companies since it means
|
|
they actually have to make an effort to provide a better
|
|
product/service, rather than being the only viable option around. If
|
|
there is no comparable product/service to the one provided by a single
|
|
company, then there is nowhere else for the consumer to turn, and the
|
|
company doesn't need to put any effort into swaying the consumer's
|
|
opinion with good business practices. In this sense, tech companies have
|
|
taken advantage of how social networks work (i.e. people will tend
|
|
towards the network where they know the most people) and absorbed you
|
|
into it.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>Now, is it likely that such a solution will be implemented? No. The
|
|
most likely scenario is that these companies will not even be split, but
|
|
instead pay a (relatively very small) fine, and then continue on their
|
|
merry way abusing people's data. But there's still something you can do
|
|
about this. If you are truly worried about how your data is being used
|
|
by these massive companies, look into decentralized alternatives. I have
|
|
mentioned a few on the <a
|
|
href="https://themusicinnoise.net/decentralized.html"
|
|
>Decentralized page</a> of my website, but you can find a much more
|
|
complete list on <a href="https://prism-break.org/en/" target="_blank"
|
|
>Prism-Break</a> (although not all are decentralized... but most are).
|
|
Then, convince your friends and family to use these technologies and put
|
|
the social network effect into practice. The more people you convince to
|
|
use these technologies, the more will join, and the less power large
|
|
corporations will have over your data.</p>
|