Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Random opinion here: I don't think privacy safeguards will have material impact on big tech and on the whole. They own the platforms we engage on and can thus channel engagement with or without privacy guards in place.

I think the only solution to this, and I personally don't care to implement it so just discussing this intellectually, is to disallow M&A. These firms have reached such scale that they can overpay significantly for every next generation platform (that could eventually compete against them) and protect the moat. Otherwise we we will only see shakeups when paradigm shifts occur, only to see the companies leading the shake ups get acquired... OpenAi comes to mind as the only credible threat to Google in recent years, only to see it get swallowed by MSFT.

Its difficult for any company to be at the bleeding edge of innovation forever, so they must be prevented from acquiring all innovation forever.

Google doesn't sell private data to others. They sell ads and targeting ads. I can believe that Meta sells data but it is likely they have the same model. I don't think data privacy would affect their business since sales would be small part of revenue.

Data ownership wouldn't help with Google or Meta because they would put assignment in the user agreements. The same as they do for copyrighted content. The difference is that they might have to specify if the data gets sold.

The companies that would be affected are data brokers. Honestly, I think the focus on Google and Meta hides all the companies that are actually selling data, really private data like location.

The article is suggesting the solution is to shift the conversation to data ownership from privacy controls. Are you bucketing data ownership in with privacy controls and dissenting, or just making a tangential comment?

Sorry I typed this on my commute so I didnt flush it out. What I believe (and didnt say) is that data ownership and privacy controls are important issues to individuals, but are not meaningful drivers of ongoing performance and market control of big tech. I don't believe their power lies in their access to my data, it lies in their control over the infrastructure I used to earn my living, engage with the world, etc.

Thus, to mitigate their control (assuming you want to), I believe we need to look to solutions that garner competition. MSFT collects rent on the corporate enterprise via Azure, they own corporate documentation via Office, they own the corporate code repository via Github, and they own the corporate identity via LinkedIn.

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