it's going to pretty expensive and impossible technically to protect oneself
Pretty much. Ultimately this is a problem of law, markets, and norms rather than code (to draw on Lessig's four laws) or individual choice.
Code itself may help with the backing of other factors, the more so if technical protections are legally required. A huge problem is in establishing both the harms and relationships.
It struck me a few weeks ago that the major ills of information technology most often discussed --- censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and manipulation --- have one common root: monopoly.
And I'm not willingly accepting the fact, though attempting to avoid tracking and surveillence is hard and carries real costs. As with security generally, you can simply raise the costs of tracking, which is effective against most casual or commercially-motivated actors, though not a determined political or personal antagonist.
Ultimately making exploitation sufficiently expensive or painful may be necessary. Friends, and lots of them, with capacity to act.
Doctorow also mentions the monopoly-surveillance link. We're both beat by Wu by years, and arguably Zuboff by decades, on that one element. Though Doctorow does spend a lot of time talking abbout AdTech (mostly dismissing its significance, incorrectly IMO), and while he's certainly discussed both censsorsship and propaganda in his work generally, he doesn't quite bring the monopoly aspect and combined interreationship into focus.
Some cursory searching through the literature also seems to find this connection missing, though I'd be happy to be shown wrong.
(The Wu piece was found after my initial postings, and is absolutely a piece of this.)
You might be also interested by Olivier Rey's book Une question de taille (not translated into English yet AFAIK), which shows that this 'huge issue' that is the 'matter of size' goes much farther than just the GAFAMs (though they are probably unprecedented in their growth speed ? Maybe only Alexander comes close ?)
Pretty much. Ultimately this is a problem of law, markets, and norms rather than code (to draw on Lessig's four laws) or individual choice.
Code itself may help with the backing of other factors, the more so if technical protections are legally required. A huge problem is in establishing both the harms and relationships.
It struck me a few weeks ago that the major ills of information technology most often discussed --- censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and manipulation --- have one common root: monopoly.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e...
Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470
(Not entirely original, though I'm unaware of anyone who's put all four together. Tim Wu nailed surveillance in 2013 https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-mono...)
And I'm not willingly accepting the fact, though attempting to avoid tracking and surveillence is hard and carries real costs. As with security generally, you can simply raise the costs of tracking, which is effective against most casual or commercially-motivated actors, though not a determined political or personal antagonist.
Ultimately making exploitation sufficiently expensive or painful may be necessary. Friends, and lots of them, with capacity to act.