The Monopoly of the Tech Giants
If you look at the world’s biggest industries in business, anything pertaining to technology will appear without a doubt. Technology is giant and so are the companies that provide the common services we use today like Google Search. These services that started as a personal project in a nerd’s mom’s garage have become giant corporations who monopolize our data with their services.
Tech “giants” are competing for a variety of things. One of the biggest is to have the world’s smartest artificial intelligence (A.I.). Common A.I.’s include Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Siri. A.I. is used in many different environments ranging from making your life easier with automation and algorithms to helping discover cures to life-threatening diseases like COVID-19.
There is a common saying, “If the product is free, you are the product.” It means if the product is free, your data is sold by the company to someone else. Is that always the case? Google Chrome will always “phone home” to Google. Phoning home is something that almost all big services do. When a service phones home, it will send data it collects back home to their company’s data centers for analysis and storage. The analyzed data will be tagged with the subject and sold to according advertisers. Ever noticed that you see an ad for shoes after talking about shoes? Yeah, that’s phoning home.
When Amazon Alexa was new, it was making news headlines about police able to get recordings of the audio of a woman who was murdered in her own home. This brought the fear that Alexa was always watching and recording everything (which is true). In a more recent note, Facebook was caught collecting and selling users’ data. Data has been collected for a while, but this showed exactly how much data was being collected.
Is your data not sold if you paid for the product? Yes, your data is still stolen and sold even if you paid for the product. The world’s most used operating system, Microsoft Windows, has data collection and telemetry features built into its core. Windows 10 is paid software. Even though it looks like you are just paying for a computer, part of the cost is to pay for a license for Windows.
Data collection is now one of the biggest fears of the entire world right now, especially when TikTok, a Chinese social media platform, had code in it that told it to collect some data among other obfuscated scripts.
It’s not just the Chinese government. It’s also the United States government who are infamous for their backdoor into Windows. In fact, their backdoor was discovered and exploited in 2017 by WannaCry, the biggest and most famous ransomware ever. The media at the time of the TikTok drama made it sound like China is bad and the United States is good. In reality, every developed government agency collects your data. Every single one.
Once you put something online, it stays online. Forever. Protecting yourself is not easy.
Of course, there are good alternatives to these services. Hell, you can even run your own version of these services. An alternative to Google Drive, iCloud, Outlook, and Dropbox is Nextcloud. Nextcloud is a self-hosted file storage program. Basically, you run your own cloud. Instead of Discord which collects massive amounts of data, you can use Matrix or, if you love the past, IRC which are how hyper nerds communicated before. Instead of Google, you can use the popular DuckDuckGo or the less popular Startpage. I think you get the idea: there are alternatives to the big services from the big tech monopolies.
But what about an alternative to Windows or macOS? Is there even one?
Of course there’s one. Linux is the massively popular operating system that is used by every big company in almost every industry.
If Linux is so popular, why haven’t I heard of it before?
Linux is extremely popular in the server space. Almost every website is running on a Linux server. Linux hasn’t been widely adopted by the average person on a desktop or laptop. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be used on the desktop. In fact, I and many others mainly use Linux as their desktop operating system. Linux is extremely flexible and can run even on a toaster. Not toaster as in a terrible computer. Linux can run on a literal toaster.
Linux is so great because it is 100% customizable. You can control exactly what is in your Linux operating system. Windows versions have been built on top of each other from the start. That means Windows is built to support so many types of hardware and software. But what if you don’t need support for hardware you don’t even have? Why let your computer boot slower in order to load drivers you don’t even need? Well, Linux has the answer to that.
Linux can have and be whatever you want. Linux is also open-source. That means the code is open for everyone (even you) to look at and edit. Linux also has no trackers and privacy-stealing algorithms built in. Linux is the most open and secure operating system ever.
It’s not like Linux is the only form of itself. Remember how I called Linux an operating system? I lied. Linux is actually a kernel, the core of an operating system. Linux has many different flavors of distros (distributions) like Ubuntu, Debian and Arch.
Every day, we are moving closer to the reality of George Orwell’s 1984. If we put our efforts together to using open-source alternatives to the services of the tech giants, we could put them in their place. Maybe they will even stop collecting data and open-source their own products (Spoiler: that’s not ever happening).
