Big tech privacy controls are dust in the eyes of users

In the wake of Amazon’s and Google’s fiascos with their “smart” devices making permanent recordings of everything around them ignoring activation keywords and sending all that to their servers, people need to realize another thing…

You know how Google or Facebook give you all the settings to “control” your privacy? Well, what if I told you all those controls are literally buttons that don’t really lead anywhere or control anything?

When you delete all your searches from Google Search, do you think that data is really gone? Well, I think it’s not and it really only goes away from your view, not from Google’s view. As far as I know, no one audits Google’s operations, so you basically just have to trust them. There is no way proving that’s not the case if they lie about deletion of data either, since there is no auditing. And ultimately, everything that they collect, by the time you sort of actually delete it, they’ve already profiled you using that data. It doesn’t really matter if you delete it afterwards, for example Google has already used that data to create your personal fingerprint or a snapshot if you will.

Imagine the process of it as reading a book. You can burn the book afterwards, but you still know the exact content of it and you have a visualized image of its content. That’s how these companies profile you and then they “burn the book” when you request data deletion. It’s why they so willingly offer “privacy controls”, because they literally do nothing.

Another issue with all this are contractors these companies use. The moment they hand over data for processing out of their HQ, they are free of any responsibility because contractors aren’t them anymore. You can’t stop data that’s out of their direct control. Which further shows what a massive issue we have with privacy and how poorly it’s regulated. And how little people are aware of what’s happening with all their private data…