Unfortunately yes, it's naive to expect honesty in most cases, certainly in any situation where one party has a big financial potential gain.
Well, it seems You got my point quite precisely!
This one here, yes, it may be naive to expect honesty - but giving up on that expectation seems even more wrong. That is what did happen in the more recent past: people came up with really great (naive) ideals, like love and peace. And then they got "realistic" (where in fact "corrupt" would be the more appropriate term).
But to stay somewhat on topic il limit it to big IT, you wrote it quite good, the big companies treat us like cattle. Another nice recent example is for example twitter learning grok on all of twitters data via an opt out, not opt in. We are 'content creating cattle' for them mainly.
Even
the register does state:
You are the product
Wait, didn't I hear that earlier?
"We have a product on the loose" In that case, when the "products" would start to think for themselves, they had to gas them like the Jews...
And the only way this changes, is if enough people complaint about it at their governments, or even better when people simply stop using their services.
The governments don't help, instead they actually force the people into the arms of the big corps.
From a honesty viewpoint, I would expect a government to make sure in the first place that people have no need to use IT as long as they are not comfortable with it. And then to not allow pseudo advantages for needless use of IT (like you get affordable prices at the grocery only if you allow them to sniff you out).
But in fact the ambitions of governments and big corps are coherent: they both want the people under control (see also my tagline at the bottom
) And IT is the perfect enabler for that.
Let me tell a bit about my background: I didn't learn IT at a college. I learned it at the
CCC. When I found out about the Internet, around 1987, it immediately became clear that this would change our entire society in most severe ways. And the only group even thinking that far and considering these implications, at that time, was the CCC. It was a great place for all kinds of futurology, at that time.
At about 1995 the CCC had begun being assimilated by the leftists, and was now rather contemplating about correct gender suffixes and similar SJW concerns. It was no longer a place for futurology, instead they picked themes in the way the government wanted them to do - e.g. "privacy" issues (see above). Like most NGOs they had become lapdogs of the establishment, helping to manipulate the masses in the desired direction.
You are absolutely right: the proper approach would be people complaining to their government, and reminding the officials that they have an obligation to serve the people, not the corps.
And to setup and use independent infrastructure.
But I don't see how that might happen.
What we could probably do, is, build an alliance of independent e-mail operators. As an NGO. And as such an organization, we then could complain about censorship, and maybe even get heard.
Data is the new gold.
And if you setup a new mail server, you'll be marked just because you dont have a history of sending email to gmail. They'll make you read and apply what they consider best practices, but then still you have issues getting your mail in the inbox of a user at gmail. Yet they have tons of spammers creating gmail accounts and sending out spam.
Yepp.
