To me, we shouldn’t push people to make a distinction between “Big Tech” and I guess “Small Tech.” What matters is the technical details: is the service E2EE, is it open source, is it audited, does it hide your IP address, etc. Encouraging people to think like this will push them to use inferior services and operating systems just because they aren’t made by a major tech company.
For example, there’s a lot of exciting new Privacy-Enhancing Technologies being spearheaded by big tech companies. It’s a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because it’s big tech.
Lately we’ve been seeing a big push in “big tech” toward improvements to their services, like Apple’s Advanced Data Protection. We should highlight where these improvements are being made and advocate for improvements in places where it’s still lacking, for example making their services fully open source. I just think this way of conceptualizing things is reductionist and could push people toward worse options.
I would say this is more to do with capturing people who come to us already saying “I want to avoid big tech” and redirecting them to our existing guides which are pretty well rounded and take into account the issues with this categorization you bring up, than it is making a statement on big tech itself.
It’s definitely trying to convince you to avoid big tech, the intended audience includes people who don’t even know what big tech is since it defines the term.
It’s putting the focus on how big the company is instead of the actual technical merits of the products and services.
I presume the section I have added satisfies your last needs here?
I must admit as I said, this needs polishing and I’ll get it as soon as possible but I encourage the community to improve upon it, and then remove my notes, thanks.
No not really, I just don’t think the entire distinction of Big Tech makes sense as a concept. When does a company become Big Tech? As you pointed out with the Valve example, a company can be Big Tech or not depending on personal opinion. I don’t even really agree that the Steam Deck is a good example of a private alternative, Steam is just DRM with lots of tracking in their client. They track all the games you buy, your playtime, your friends, your messages are not E2EE, Steam just isn’t a private platform.
It’s just not helpful for the reasons I pointed out. I think we just shouldn’t have this article on the wiki, it’s promoting a way of conceptualizing things that’s popular in the privacy community but that I think is harmful overall and not productive.
I see, in that case it seems Jonah has removed the section I created that could have improved upon as a baseline.
This was a way I could think of to counteract this but if this is not enough then, yeah…
The intro to this article was already rewritten to address the problems here, so this whole thing should be fine now. This isn’t an article about what big tech is or isn’t in the first place, so talking about what big tech is doing is out of scope. This is just an article to direct people to our existing guides like I said previously.