These companies (Facebook, Google, etc) known as Internet Giants violate our privacy everyday and they have corrupted our minds and our economy worldwide. They have built a totalitarian dystopian future which is here already, where humans and business alike are enslaved by a digital mafia which aims at controlling and taxing the whole global economy through mass surveillance and stalker economy. Our consent is fake and forced, we actually click on 50 Yes I Agree pop-ups or security alerts daily without ever reading them. We buy a device and instead of owning it, it owns us. We let it do what it likes, like recording our private conversations 24/7, our emails, our clicks, etc, and in order to sell these “data” to other companies, and to use it against our will, against our values and against our laws. In the modern economy, companies spend increasingly large amounts of money in an effort to acquire a customer; and once they have him, captive, they treat him like a piece of shit. When we contribute to the digital economy we contribute for free through open source software and our YouTube videos and tutorials. We are not customers, we are not individuals, we are now rather slaves (or sheep, or pigs maybe).
The Internet Giants has transformed the human race into obedient apathetic animals which are easily manipulated and which work for the benefit of some clever yet abusive corporations (or totalitarian regimes). And there is only one guy worldwide – Max Schrems – who dares to fight Facebook and Google in courts for violating the laws. And another one who is trying to educate us about cybersecurity. And also few more. And that’s it.
An interesting historical insight about WHY we have all this, is the sort of original sin question, also more recently explained here: “When the internet was built, free and open, it meant that advertising was the only obvious way to make money and that turned into surveillance.”
Another question is, if Google and Facebook do all the mass surveillance at a global scale, what is now the job to do for the GCHQ,NSA etc? Many experts say that police forces are by far more helpful defending us against terrorists than modern cyberspace intelligence capabilities. Max Schrems is also defending us against some ‘particularly large terrorists’ :-). But again, if Google knows everything, now a country in order to get all the intelligence they will ever need, should just blackmail the Internet Giants for access to the data. The answer is probably that these agencies in modern time are NOT that much about intelligence gathering. They are about staying ahead of the game. They are here to develop even more sophisticated technology for, well, what? Either future cyber-crime to be committed. Or to improve defensive security engineering in order to defend us against future crimes. This ambiguity is here to stay.