Re: Not all giants are bad

My friend Himanshu Mishra wrote about Internet Privacy and Big Data at http://blog.himanshumishra.in/going-round-in-the-internet-life-cycle/

The flaw is it only tells us that the personalized search is useful and no one argued that it isn’t.

This is pretty much like the question of choosing to live under a benevolent dictatorship or a not so efficient democracy? Data harvesting by giant cooperates puts too much power in their hands which can potentially exploited against individuals and communities. Plus personalized search makes it easier for them to rig the search results the get away undetected. Google can filter a posts, say by a competitor or a political party, and researcher won’t be able to prove it because the search result look different for every user.

This time I’m not arguing for you to quit Google, even right now I’m guilty of using Medium, a centralized blogging platform to write my response. I’m not saying it is okay to do so, I might as well move to something else soon. What I wanted to emphasize is the question “What is the cost of convenience and the associated cost of freedom?”