Recent hassle with the terms & conditions, privacy issues and general evilness of big Internet companies has now materialized into this post.

There are ways to battle for your privacy and digital rights of course, but the simplest thing to do is to share less. This is the great controversy. All the social media evangelists are hailing the coming of the all-sharing-era, but the relevant business players are soiling themselves regularly. To worsen the situation these companies are also trying to develop really cool stuff, like social buying and digital wallets. But ask yourself, would you give Google or Facebook access to your credit card data? Well for all we know they already have it, but let’s pretend they don’t. I wouldn’t.

Despite the somewhat questionable business move they just made, at the moment the one social media I kind of trust is Twitter. Facebook and Google simply know too much, and they have made weird choices regarding user privacy. Twitter has huge amounts of data too, but the sharing logic is different. Protecting 140 characters of witty remarks is not my main digital privacy concern.

So my point is that we need to keep in mind that these are companies in the business of making money. We are the products they sell (4$/user on Facebook, ad revenue divided by user count). From a user perspective this sucks. In a perfect world we would be customers and not products. In a perfect world we would have companies with integrity and slogans like “Don’t be evil” or something. Oh what’s that Google? Yes, I’ll bend right over.