Technology

It can’t get any worse can it?

User tracking

I’m depressed. 

Google controls all the search data on the planet, essentially making the Internet their private network.  They own 1.5 billion people’s email with Gmail  and 1 billion people’s documents and pictures are stored on Google Drive. 

I no longer even have a telephone line connecting me to the Internet I am just pulling data from a wireless pipe. I feel like I am in the Matrix.  

Surely it can’t get any worse?

One gap in Google’s business model is that it involves collecting incoming data from email, search and storage in the Cloud and reselling it to advertisers to help them make more intelligent decisions. One thing Google is missing is the ability to influence what people search email or store before they do it.  

Fortunately there is always someone willing to take the worst, most manipulative business plan one step further. A business based upon collecting data and storing it in the Cloud has been done to death by Google. Offering to use that data to manipulate people to do things for a price is reserved for the lowest of the low, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Web 2.0 is called the Social Internet because of the rapid rise of Social Media. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg while he was at Harvard University, (tough life), as a personal online scrapbook, like a rip off of MySpace. The Cloud allowed anyone, even a putz like Zuckerberg to host a website and collect data from his users as long as they clicked an “I agree” button.

Google got everyone used to the idea of “Free” applications in return for agreeing to allowing them to use your data. Most people assume that means targeting advertising based upon their preferences established through analysis of search history.  What people did not expect was Zuckerberg’s Sociopathic business model based on using that data to exploit and influence people.  

Facebook will gladly allow any government, corporation or political party to use Facebook’s algorithm to influence their own users to buy, shop, think and vote any way they want, for a price. The despicable nature of the exploitation Facebook has been subjecting their 2.3 billion users to would put the Devil to shame.  

Google owns all our search data, our emails and our files.  Facebook has removed the need for us to decide our own interests or meet people because they deliver our social lives in a 24/7×365 stream of junk that is bound to have something in it to catch our attention 

We don’t use modems or portals anymore so we have no way to control how we access the internet. We have essentially ceased to exist as separate identities online. The Cloud and Social Media have made the Internet into a bunch of private networks owned by a bunch of privileged Silicon Valley rich people who are selling everything to make themselves even richer.

When did we all lose control and how do we get it back? Sounds like a time machine would come in handy right about now. Bring the DeLorean around Marty and set the clock for 1995!

Michael Cholod

Peer Social will change the world!

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