But we still have work to do regarding Google. They are even worse IMO. For those two, you are the product.
Amazon and Microsoft don't have business selling your data (or at least it is not central), you are not the product.
Amazon: https://advertising.amazon.ca/
... You are the product.
In other words, the company is not rotten to it's core.
Microsoft has been giving away their operating system for free in exchange for mining your personal data. Everyone who uses Windows 10 can expect to have everything on screen scraped, all their keystrokes logged, and all their files transferred to Microsoft for analysis.
What do you suppose their reason is for taking all this data?
Who is? Amazon? Not likely. Though I haven't worked there for several years now, I would be flabbergasted to discover that Bezos would approve an initiative that involved selling user data to advertisers.
I can't speak to Microsoft. I am not a user of Microsoft's products, nor any of its subsidiaries' products, and they are not mining any data from me.
No, I was talking about Microsoft only. Sorry if that was unclear.
Amazon explicitly states that the ads provided are targeted based upon user action. So if you go to Amazon searching for music, they may show an ad on the side of the page that provides a discount offer for a specific band or artist.
As far as I know, Amazon doesn't sell user data to anyone, even for advertising.
After all, this is a company that tracks not only what books you read, but how far you've read it, how much time you spent reading every page and how many times you went back to previous pages.
This is also the company who has microphones placed in people's houses, happily installed by the users themselves.
Given the fact that so many people people trust them with so many things, and their desire to be a provider of every single service, they certainly are a much bigger privacy invader than even Google or Facebook.
Not a fan of any of the two companies but I believe you're being unfair.
At least Microsoft[0] does not sell your personal information or build it's business around renting access to your personal information. There is a big difference between sharing data with advertisers and sharing data with company-controlled subsidiaries and vendors.
Amazon is a little more permissive [1] but again, it does not sell your data.
Both of them ask for your consent before sharing the data. So for example, if your friend/contact shares his data, the third party does not see your data (as opposed to what Facebook did).
Posts such as yours reek of whataboutism (same as the Obama campaign narrative) and do more harm than good. The two companies have not built their business around personal data. The personal data in this case is a side-effect of selling an actual product/service which brings in the cash.
If you mentioned Google, then that's a different thing. I find it interesting nobody is bringing up this book: https://www.amazon.com/When-Google-Wikileaks-Julian-Assange/...
[0] https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/privacystatement [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
"We tell you about things we think you’ll like. For example, we may send you email to remind you about items left in your online shopping cart. We also display advertising in some services, and we’d prefer to show you ads you find interesting."
https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/windows10privacy
Microsoft mines your behavioural patterns and activities on Windows, Bing etc and sells this information to advertisers.
Slay one beast at a time, otherwise your thin your army and are defeated.
Google doesn't have a social graph of 2.2 billion people, with all their posts and likes.
And if you don't trust Google, then Bing and DuckDuckGo are a click away. If you don't trust Facebook, there are no real alternatives.
Yes, there are issues with Google. But they're not in the same universe as Facebook.
To suggest otherwise is false equivalence.
https://marketingland.com/google-publishers-user-data-insigh...
>Among the announcements was the launch of a new effort to share user data with publishers and introduce more machine learning into Google’s publisher products.
https://doubleclick-publishers.googleblog.com/2017/10/buildi...
It was turned on by default without user notification.
https://www.privacytrust.com/guidance/facebook_instant_perso...
http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-instant-personalizatio...
But you're right to point out they used to have 'share by default' on some data.
The search is pretty good and the UI is nice. Maybe you'll prefer Gmail, but it's worth a try at least.
You don't have to use Gmail.
You don't have to store work documents in Drive.
You don't have to log in to watch YouTube.
You don't have to use Google Photos.
But for social networking, what choice do people have when no other service has even 5% of Facebook's social graph?
I do have to store my email and work documents on Google as it's the platform my employer uses.
Google on the other hand is everywhere, both on your side and on the servers you visit. They probably track less proportionally, but you give them far more data than facebook, no doubt.
With Facebook there simply isn't a replacement that has all my family and friends. There's no way I'll convince them to use something else.
I really really really really want to like DuckDuckGo, but it simply doesn't work compared with Big G.
I switched my default search engine to DDG once again last week, and after a frustrating week of rarely finding what i want, had to switch back go Google.
Last night was the final straw. I was trying to find out the delivery area for a particular newspaper. All DDG gave me was irrelevant ads, links to the newspaper's home page, outdated links to newspaper pages that are 404 now, and links to Wikipedia and other articles about the city.
Same search query on Google gave me as the first result a link to a page at the newspaper where I could put in a ZIP code to see if delivery was available.
I'll try DDG again in six months to see if its improved, as I have three or four times now. Fingers crossed.
I've been doing this for years as well, and I'm much too lazy to do the !g trick. If you rely on google search daily to help get complex tasks done, DDG just doesn't cut it as far as I'm concerned.
For searches for the latest movie trailer or whatever? Sure it works great, but for me simple queries like this make up a tiny percentage of what I use Google Search for. It's easy to take for-granted now that we are so used to it how incredibly good Google's search results are.
I'd love to move to DDG, I really would, everything else about them appeals greatly to me, but every time I read an article by someone saying the made the jump I can't help but wonder what they actually use it for that makes it work for them.
Quick reminder that if you're using Chrome, Bing and DuckDuckGo do not protect your search history. If you're using Chrome and have web history turned on (you probably do), Google parses your browser history to get your search queries from sites like Amazon, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
It's not as simple as just choosing to move to a different product. Google makes every effort to cross-contaminate their products with each other, precisely so they don't lose any of that information. It's very difficult to give up just part of Google's ecosystem.