Just Say No...

I know, I know, it's difficult to do sometimes with peer pressure or FOMO being such relentless forces in our lives today... but that in itself is part of the problem and manifests itself in some truly fringe thinking being accepted as mainstream... Food for thought comes in the form of two articles, one about the US DoJ AntiTrust case against Google and the other an opinion piece in The Register about preventing the abuses the web giants of today partake in.

I'm not convinced that the US DoJ will be successful for the sole reason that US AntiTrust laws only apply to an abuse by a monopoly... and while Google is a dominant player in the market place, no-one forces anyone to use them... same as Facebook or Amazon or even my favourite love-to-hate company, Uber.

Do I think 'something needs to be done' about it? Absolutely, but it will be done by enforcing privacy laws and limiting what can be done with data aggregation and cross matching. We scream blue murder every time a Government tries to expand their oversight into our private lives for a very good reason and that reason is just as applicable, if not more so, for a private organisation that we can't vote out of office! The only way to vote for a change in Google policies is to become a shareholder... in essence paying a poll tax, and the people with the money to do that are usually not that interested in anything that will reduce the value of their holdings.

Anyhoo, there are lots of alternatives out there for you to start reducing your reliance on the dominant players... Start with an alternative to Facebook and see where that takes you!

There is a safer alternative for pretty much everything out there and if in doubt, trust your own integrity and just say no...