But can you explain how having another choice is dangerous? It seems like it'd be a gasp of air in the face of facebook's suffocating presence.
Don't forget that Google also tracks online behaviour on an industrial scale. It doesn't matter if that information is only collated in aggregated form or "anonymised" (a meaningless term), we don't know how that information could be mined with AI or machine learning either now or in the future.
In fact, I suspect that even Google hasn't figure all the possible uses of the enormous quantity of user behaviour it has captured and continues to capture. And that ubiquitous data capture starts right from school, where millions of students use a cloud-based OS called ChromeOS that records everything they do.
The tech community's response to Google's online tracking and data capture is not scrutiny or questioning, but silence (or a rush to defend them).
2. Muddy the waters over who's user it is (FB instant articles / AMP, FB news feed / AMP carousel)
3. Start taking higher percentages of the ad revenue
4. Laugh when the publishers try to negotiate some back with no leverage
5. Do a big song and dance about how sad it is that publishing has lost all of it's revenue
6. Rinse and repeat (instagram / google news initiative)
Especially one that's shown a willingness to try to silence narratives that are against its corporate interests:
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-america-fires-antitrust-r...:
> Barry Lynn, formerly the director of the antitrust-focused Open Markets program at New America, charged Wednesday that Google pressured the think tank to fire him and drop his program after he wrote a statement in June praising European regulators for fining the search giant $2.7 billion for abusing its market power. In that statement, Lynn said Google's "market power is one of the most most critical challenges for competition policymakers in the world today."
> After Lynn published the statement, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent company, contacted New America, and "communicated his displeasure," Lynn told the New York Times on Wednesday.
> "Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings," Lynn told the Times. "People are so afraid of Google now."