Notices tagged with bigtech, page 8

@m

"If you wish to prevent this you have to ensure that none of the people that follow you also doesn't follow someone on a service you don't like."

I would not even know how to go about this. In fact, I am not opposed to my content going to any real #Fediverse platform, i.e. that are not-for-profit/corporate.
My issue are #BigTech platforms because of the agenda they have (see earlier #intro for a brief summary.)

@jamie @shiri @snarfed @PCOWandre @oliphant @luca @chronohart

‘Democracy or capitalism? Pick one.’

Wrote this four year ago. If anything, it’s even more timely today.

https://ar.al/2020/01/01/in-2020-and-beyond-the-battle-to-save-personhood-and-democracy-requires-a-radical-overhaul-of-mainstream-technology/

#democracy #capitalism #BigTech #SmallTech #BigWeb #SmallWeb #personhood

@cloudguy @aniltj

(3/3)

...a way that threatens them. Why?

We argue that the 👉#TechGiants have learned how to coopt disruption👈. "

#TESCREAL #billionaire #PeterThiel agrees: "#competition is for losers."

https://mastodon.online/@blair_fix/111461435244611427

In other world's, #BigTech has been killing any potential competitor of their #oligopoly for decades!

Given the stakes in the advertising shift regarding browsers, this is most likely the case with #Mozilla as well.

//

Silicon Valley: Introducing Fuck You and The Planet as a Service™ 2024 Edition!

Mozilla: Introducing Fuck You and The Planet as a Service™ 2024 Trustworthy Edition!

#Mozilla #SiliconValley #BigTech

The correct answer to “but I can’t make what I’m making without having it violate your consent” is always “that’s ok, don’t make it then.”

#consent #tech #SiliconValley #BigTech #colonialistMindset

⟨ " Our economy is dominated by five aging tech giants – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In the last twenty years, no company has commercialized a new technology in a way that threatens them. Why?

We argue that the tech giants have learned how to coopt disruption.

They identify potentially disruptive technologies, use their money to influence the startups developing them, strategically dole out access to the resources the startups need to grow, and seek regulation that makes it harder for the startups to compete. When a threat emerges, they buy it off. And after they acquire a startup, they redirect its people and assets to their own innovation needs.

These seemingly unrelated behaviors work together to enable the tech giants to maintain their dominance in the face of disruptive innovations. " ⟩

In addition to the tactics noted in the paper, the manner in which incumbents use standards development organizations and industry consortia to slow-roll anything that disrupts their existing product lines, and try to re-direct anything disruptive to something that they can (barely) incrementally implement is something that is not appreciated enough!

H/T to @pluralistic for his essay which provided the pointer to this paper. Link to essay @ https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

#Competition #startup #bigtech

... In many cases, these domains require very specialised, *accurate* mental models of their users, because the domain is just complex. They can be only a simple as possible... but no simpler. Many #BigTech apps make things 'too simple', glossing over technical complexities & user conceptual competence, which is why we have computer viruses & malware among other issues plaguing modern computer users. It's also why many fear computers: their mental models are invalid, offering no guidance. 3/n

Every now and then someone will ask me what VC stands for but I feel it’s easier to list what VC doesn’t stand for:

- Human rights
- Democracy
- Sustainability

#vc #VentureCapital #BigTech #SiliconValley

#DigitalColonialism #AlgorithmicBias #BigTech -

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry

"Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning—both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies and regulatory concerns about artificial intelligence underscore the sweeping nature of Big Tech’s surveillance and the influence such companies hold over the people who use their apps and platforms.

As trusted tech experts Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry show in this eye-opening and convincing book, this vast accumulation of data is not the accidental stockpile of a fast-growing industry. Just as nations stole territories for ill-gotten minerals and crops, wealth, and dominance, tech companies steal personal data important to our lives. It’s only within the framework of colonialism, Mejias and Couldry argue, that we can comprehend the full scope of this heist.

Like the land grabs of the past, today’s data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests. Like historical colonialism, today’s tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds a new social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. These methods deepen global inequality, consolidating corporate wealth in the Global North and engineering discriminatory algorithms. Promising convenience, connection, and scientific progress, tech companies enrich themselves by encouraging us to relinquish details about our personal interactions, our taste in movies or music, and even our health and medical records. Do we have any other choice?"

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo216184200.html

EU lawmakers to Amazon lobbyists: ‘We want you out of Parliament’

Lobbyists from US tech giant Amazon should have their access badges to the European Parliament revoked “until the company’s management is willing to engage in genuine dialogue with the Parliament,” members of the Parliament’s employment committee have written in a letter to the institution’s president, Roberta Metsola.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/eu-institutions/news/eu-lawmakers-to-amazon-lobbyists-we-want-you-out-of-parliament/

#News #EuropeanNews #Europe #EU #EuropeanUnion #US #UnitedStates #Amazon #BigTech

My unscientific, high level, impression from (virtual) attendance of #fosdem2024 is that we are entering a third period of the "movement".

The lone hacker #foss years are fading away, the #bigtech #opensource embrace is currently very dominant but we are slowly getting into yet another era where the public sector is involved.

We might call it the #publiccode or #digitalpublicgood era.

In the end code, being a form of cultural expression, will reflect more or less the structure of society

As we speak, #Google probably has twenty departments all trying to invent yet another confusing chat/videoconferencing system that nobody wants, to pit the newest contender in a battle royale against the undead corpses of their dozens of other conflicting #bigtech products/brands, a triennal deathmatch where the only prize is ranking on https://killedbygoogle.com

Upcoming changes by large email providers will potentially make getting to people’s inboxes trickier for small businesses - we discuss options in this article
https://byintention.co/email-deliverability-update-feb-2024/
#email #bigTech #smallBusiness

@adrianhon the fanboy consumerism so prevalent currently in the US would be charmingly parochial if it wasn't so dangerously contagious.

When large pools of people in a leading (wealthy, educated) country adopt certain ways and lifestyles this has profound implications elsewhere (it defines what "good" looks like).

E.g., long before #bigtech and the US love affair with #surveillancecapitalism people copied urban development and mobility patterns, with disastrous and still unpaid bills.

@ethanz @antisomniac
Genius: McGrady's team applied a technique used for telephone opinion surveys (random digit dialing) to collect a presumably representative sample of all videos stored in the opaque and bottomless #YouTube database. They uncovered what they call a largely invisible deep-youtube. They recommend we no longer call YouTube a platform, bur rathen an infrastructure.
🎁 GIFT LINK:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-many-videos-youtube-research/677250/?gift=m7A4xd1YdUQAlZ44BfAFppncZVFOornqTF25b3ApgIY&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
@communicationscholars #bigtech

#DataPrivacyWeek Day 5

Since #privacy online became a broader concern, #BigTech companies now attempt to appear privacy-oriented while just changing the way they spy on their users.

Such is the case with #Google disabling third-party cookies in #Chrome and developing technologies such as #FLoC or #Topics, both of which we've opposed from the very beginning.

Yes, our browser is based on #Chromium, but we do a lot of modifications to the code and take special measures to always protect our users and their privacy.

Read more: https://vivaldi.com/blog/news/alert-no-google-topics-in-vivaldi/

@emacsen I suspect react was developed because facebook (meta) did not own any hardware devices so didn't have full control of distribution of apps and associated user data. They did the second best: ship an entire interactive app over the web.

Its a tribute to the power and flexibility of the web paradigm that you can do this. But like so many other aspects of digital tech, these decades of #bigtech dominance have solved their problems, not ours.

“The subtlety of it is pretty insidious. Like some kind of distributed long con, played out over and over, in the midst of so many millions of other simultaneous ones.”

– @amatecha on VC (Venture Capital)

#VC #VentureCapital #SiliconValley #BigTech #BugWeb #startups #exponentialGrowth #failFast #exits #surveillanceCapitalism #peopleFarming

“Venture capital is private subsidy that keeps the startup alive long enough until enough people have joined their platform. At this point, it’s too late. By being part of the platform we have created its value. This is the value that is sold in an exit. The only way to resist this system is to not build that value in the first place.”

https://ar.al/notes/ello-goodbye/

#vc #ventureCapital #startups #BigTech #ello

Are you a privacy professional? Would you like to work with companies like Google and Facebook to help them continue to violate our privacy? The W3C has a job for you.

Pays well, by the way (violating human rights always does).

https://www.w3.org/careers/2024-privacy-lead-job-posting/

#W3C #hiring #webPrivacy #web #privacy #humanRights #privacyWashing #surveillanceCapitalism #peopleFarming #BigTech #BigWeb #google #facebook