Trace: • w17 • travel • gafam

This is an old revision of the document!

GAFAM

Note: this page is a work in progress.

GAFAM stands for Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft. Another acronym often used is FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). These several tech companies are well known for their sins, yet they still dominate and profit.

This page is meant to be an overview of what each of them did to make our lives worse and how we can liberate ourselves.

Companies mentioned in the acronyms above are of course by no means the only bad actors out there. There’s Twitter, Reddit and many others. They’re just not as huge as GAFAM.

Corporate abuse

The key problem with these giant companies is that there are only a few of them, yet they control substantial part of the internet. If you doubt that could be true, read following articles by Kashmir Hill:

Privacy International (a British NGO), has created a timeline of corporate abuse, a relatively small collection of evidence that these companies are up to no good.

Facebook

Cambridge Analytica scandal was particularly well covered by the mainstream media. But it wasn’t the only one — there’s even a page called days since last Facebook scandal that records evidence of Facebook’s wrongdoings.

At the time of writing (2021-04-11), most recent Facebook scandal was data of 530 million Facebook users had been made publicly available. A company that encourages people to share this information should process it responsibly, right? Well, Facebook doesn’t think so. According to their statement, everything is fine because the data wasn’t stolen by hackers — it was merely collected by scraping.

Blaming the users for not being aware that all their data was available, instead of providing reasonable defaults or not collecting the data, is just toxic corporate propaganda.

Further reading:

Alternatives

If you enjoy being in touch with your friends online or want to be up–to–date with interesting events nearby, there are always other tools you can try.

But first and foremost, don’t let FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) that Facebook, Twitter and others induced in all of us, harm your wellbeing. If you don’t know immediately about an interesting event — that doesn’t mean you’d never learn about it. Eventually you will and that’s the beauty of natural, human–centric social networks. And even if you don’t — that’s OK too! When something important happens, somebody will let you know.

When all you want is staying in touch with friends, it’s quite simple:

  • use email — everyone has it and you can exchange messages in smaller groups, which is the natural way for people to stay in touch. Email can be used from your phone or computer and is quite capable. You can also join mailing lists, which are groups of people interested in a common topic.
  • join Fediverse — if email is not how you prefer communicating with your friends, you can consider creating an account on the federated social network called Fediverse. It is similar to email, because it’s built of a large number of servers, each server being like a community. Such communities can freely exchange messages and cooperate, so if a person has an account on server A and the other person has an account on server B, they can still be in touch and get notified whenever the other person publishes something interesting. Of course Fediverse is designed with privacy in mind, so you can always post things only for your friends or directly to selected persons. See more on fediverse.party.
  • use an open chat platform — like XMPP (used to be known as Jabber), Element (used to be known as Riot.im) or even Delta.Chat (a secure, email–based chat that you don’t have to create any accounts for).
  • use RSS/Atom feeds — if you’re interested in receiving updates from a selected range of topics, you can subscribe to RSS or Atom feeds. Some websites still make them available and this is an incredibly useful source of information, as you get a list of most recent articles published by a website and decide for yourself if you’re interested.
  • monitor interesting websites — sometimes, there won’t be an RSS feed or any other way to find out about interesting events happening nearby. But that doesn’t have to be a problem. Your friends or news portals may be writing about them, so you can open up local news websites and search for interesting stuff.

Google

Google started as one of several search engines. It grew over the years, finally becoming the giant it is now.

Further reading:

Amazon

This large company is well known for: