Still amazed daily at how many people eagerly line up to work at Facebook and Google, two companies engaged in mass fuckery with long-term harm to the entire population.
... They think exactly the opposite. Google even has an estimate of how many lives their services save per year on average.
Privacy concerns become extremely secondary when you're stranded in the woods and all rescuers have on your location is the last time your GPS-equipped smartphone pinged. Googlers think of themselves as working on systems like that.
These companies do a lot and I do not think you should trivialize all that they have done by saying that they've done something bad in the past and not even say what they have done. Have you considered the people who want to work their want to actually improve people's lives working on these different projects. Have you considered that large compensation can make people ignore issues. Have you considered that people are just interested in working on the stuff that's available there.
I would argue none of these are free, because they use/sell your data. If it wasn't so google could not exist.
> Facebook allows you to connect with your friends, talk to people about your interests, a marketplace, entertainment from photos, videos, streams. Meta also offers Insta for sharing photos or stories and they are investing heavily
For facebook and instagram there are at least studies which have shown the harm they are doing to teenagers and children, so there is at least some established facts that show the bad influence (lets not even get into the political bits).
> These companies do a lot and I do not think you should trivialize all that they have done by saying that they've done something bad in the past and not even say what they have done.
That's a slippery slope though, at some point you can justify working for anyone because you don't want to consider their actions of the past to judge them. What about continued action though, e.g. meta burying their own studies on their affect on the mental health of teenage girls just to continue making their profits. At some point someone has to take responsibility to continue working for them (and some people are even actively involved in these decisions).
In a technical sense sure, but from the user's perspective it's equivalent to being free since the user doesn't have to do anything different compared to if it was a free service.
>meta burying their own studies on their affect on the mental health of teenage girls just to continue making their profits
Are you referring to the study that said that Instagram on average improved mental health in 12 out of 12 categories for teen boys and in 11 out of the 12 categories they were surveying for teen girls (the exception being that 32.40% of teenage girls with body image issues felt Instagram made it worse)? It was internal research which is why it was initially kept internal.
All those things you mentioned are great, sure. But to my mind, something can be useful, fun, loved, enjoyed while actively making your life worse. The obvious example being addictive drugs.
My smartphone, for example, has definitely made a lot if things more convenient. It use it all the time, for all sorts of useful things. Marvelously useful piece of technology, the smartphone. Has it improved my life? I'm honestly not sure, but my gut reaction is no, because it's ruined my already limited ability to focus(I have ADHD). It actually makes me far more productive having my phone turned off, despite how useful I seem to think it is.
My point is that something can be useful and do all sorts of things for you, but that can still be true while it's actively harmful to you. And you might not even be conscious of this about yourself, let alone most of the global population.
Google with Android and ChromeOS has put computing devices in the hands of people who could never afford the alternative and YouTube has allowed anyone to publish video.
I myself find Google’s products second rate and I prefer business models where I give the company money and they give me stuff. But I realize that a $1200 iPhone Pro Max is an indulgence that many walking around with a $35 unsubsidized phone can’t afford.
There were video sites besides YouTube. YouTube cornered the market. That doesn’t make them special. All the examples are one brand cornering a market without having done any exceptional innovation that would be incredibly missed without them. Cornering markets is almost never a net positive for people. I should probably say it never is.
WebOS was also much slower than Android at the time.
YouTube costs billions a year. Few other companies could operate at that scale.
> Facebook has allowed anyone to spread video capturing police misconduct that the mainstream press has ignored for decades.
Facebook didn't allow that, they enabled it, as well as many other places. In fact, if it's on Facebook, I can't see it. Smartphones in general created the glut of police misconduct videos, because everyone started carrying video cameras 24/7.
> Google with Android and ChromeOS has put computing devices in the hands of people who could never afford the alternative
I do not believe this is true. I don't think they put computing devices into anyone's hands, and that there are also cheap alternatives. Android and ChromeOS crowd out (real) FOSS alternatives, and iirc ChromeOS started by crowding out Linux on the trendy tiny laptops that were being marketed in the mid/early-oughts.
Having a monopoly on the low-end market isn't charity work.
As far as Android vs the alternatives, Linux was no more ready for the phone than it was ready for “the year of the Linux desktop” to happen.
The Linux desktops that it crowded out, didn’t offer the backend server components that make ChromeOS desirable to the target audience.
I think the example the guide gave was "bowlers in the upper midwest" .. it was made clear that we could make a job submisison and be sold data on those people. Someone asked if law enforcement was a customer and the answer way "yes we do business with all branches of law enforcement".
Choosing to work there today means choosing to hurt society for personal gain, full stop.
if they don't, then who does?
I would accept friends and acquaintances recognizing their participation, as well as my own as a user of some products, and observe plus work together to figure a way out of this mess (regulations, break up of big tech?)
One also must recognize the philanthropic arms of these companies. They may be some attempt to balance the shit they're doing.