🤔 What is Big Tech doing with your data?

7 Oct 2024 · 1 min

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In this brief monologue, the speaker—who has spent over two decades in communications security and signals intelligence—reflects on a recurring pattern: technologies initially created for counterterrorism are eventually turned against citizens. He observes extensive data collection and surveillance, which he characterizes as increasingly abusive. The speaker highlights a turning point after the 2020 U.S. election, when major technology platforms began exerting hegemonic control over public discourse—shaping search results, curating app‑store offerings, and deplatforming users. Concluding with a call to action, he argues that merely complaining about Big Tech’s power will not bring change; instead, society must develop competitive alternatives to challenge the status quo.

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I've been around the communications security signals intelligence space for 20-some years. And as I saw, what's the— what is first the indispensable counterterrorism tool ultimately always seems to point— any new gadget ultimately gets used by the government against its own people. And so I saw the amount of data collection and surveillance And I would even say, start to say abuse of a lot of those tools. And then especially after the 2020 election in the United States, seeing how big tech, the hegemony they had in controlling and altering speech from, uh, what could be searched, what would be available in the app stores, uh, throwing people off the platforms. And I just said to a friend of mine, we're never going to change big tech by complaining about it. We have to compete.