Do We Really Need To Replace Tech Giants?

Privacy Alternatives Need To Be More User-Friendly To Replace Tech Giants

We’ve seen a surge in privacy concerns in the last decade. It’s always been a topic of interest, but more so in recent years, after multiple global scandals. We can observe, for instance, that the privacy subreddit had around 63k members back in 2016, before that number exploded the next year, and the sub now has over 1.3 million members today. And in between 2020 and 2021, the messaging app Signal saw a massive user increase, even though the app had been around since 2014.

In parallel to that newfound interest, guides proposing alternatives and privacy solutions have began popping up en masse. The second thing a user will encounter, after arguments in favour of privacy, are guides detailing steps to take to be more private. Among those steps are proposed apps and services a user can switch to.

Problem is, these guides all have the same flaw. They showed what was at the time the only available alternatives that existed in the market. And because the online privacy world was in need of a good dusting, the apps available back then were few and far between, hadn’t been updated in a long time, and weren’t exhaustive. It’s far easier nowadays to find services that come with a no-knowledge policy than it used to be even just two to three years ago. People got busy.

So guides threw in everything and anything that could Make The Internet Private Again, regardless of whether these steps could always be applied in practice by the average user. The average user being someone who wants their right to privacy upheld as a normal standard they don’t have to fight extra hard for.

When faced with a problem, people want to find a solution. And cramming in anything that might even remotely resemble that solution, is preferable to admitting there is none yet.

In their quest to defend more private alternatives, people have a tendency to dismiss quality complaints, and rationalise anything, because it’s easier to do that than to admit something is missing. I’ve heard of people immediately brushing aside the fact that alternate search engines have less complete indexes, for instance, or dismissing complaints regarding Linux not being accessible enough to a wider audience than the niche one it serves.

People tend to brush aside complaints because it shows that something is missing. People still believe it’s impossible to actually change things, and the omnipresence of elements that are inherent parts of our life structures, like tech giants, makes it feel like these elements are difficult, or impossible to challenge or remove.

In the end, a complaint against a private option is taken and seen as a complain and challenge against privacy itself, it’s automatically seen as a threat, instead of being received as a challenge for change and progress.

We’re currently at this stage where, we know what the problem is, but we haven’t developed all the tools to fix it. There’s no real Google contender out there so far. Google still has a massive monopole because of how complete a service it is, and yet people bash it lavishly in privacy circles for its frequent role in ethical violations.

This in-between period means the average user is likelier to remain unprotected for the time being. It’s a whole other debate, but no one will sacrifice their hard-earned comfort to compensate for someone else doing the wrong thing. Because of that, any meaningful transition from non-private to open-source services is halted. We all collectively wanted to take a leap towards privacy, and ended up in front of a wall that says: “we need way more options if we’re going to actually make it.”

But regardless of community responses, to this day, privacy-focused alternatives are nowhere near as exhaustive, or as efficient, as their default counterparts.

Do We Really Need To Replace Tech Giants?

Lack of ethical practices has forced the hands of many users with the slightest, most remote concern with their privacy and anonymity.

Since the subject of privacy has been around long since before certain massive scandals made it into a mainstream concern, there’s been chunk of citizens who have tried in vain to fight for rights to privacy to be upheld. If you’d have looked at the community back in those days, just before the avent of this privacy “renaissance” we’re seeing, you’d have seen a climate of disappointment and feeling fed up with the powers that be.

And hell, some of those concerns began to grow with the avent of credit cards and concerns over the heightened access banks had to your daily spending, so that’s definitely not an issue from yesterday. Lack of resolution for those concerns have only gotten worse since.

Everything became a choice between convenience and privacy, accessibility vs privacy, choosing the default option, or privacy. Because the puny complaints of users and citizens weren’t enough to make the powers that be budge. In the face of that, many people chose to quit on tech giants as much as possible. And by now, simply start over from scratch.

But nowadays, we forget that the real issue with something tech giants, let’s pick Facebook for instance, isn’t that it’s a huge social media platform, it’s that it’s an absolute leakfest of user data and at this point, structured to be a literal spying tool. Likewise with Google, the real issue isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that it doesn’t work according to ethics.

All of these platforms used to be way more private at some point. YouTube wasn’t such a huge window into your opinions, interests, views, etc, or at least those data weren’t being actively harvested and used to build up a detailed profile about you, back in the days before it was acquired by Google. Facebook didn’t use to add your birth as an event in your timeline back in 2009. Those were the days before “smaller” tech organisations such as Yahoo, had been tied down by gag orders.

Around those days in-between the explosion of social media and the internet becoming an intrinsic part of our daily lives, something shifted in the back, and that’s when the problem became impossible to ignore.

But before this, and to this day and despite privacy issues, whether that’s the unholy trinity of Google, Microsoft, Facebook or other like Apple, all these services undeniably fulfill a need and fill a niche.

Our real problem is not the tools we use, or that they’re the default (to the argument “never put all your eggs in one basket): the issue is their lack of privacy.

But privacy is a singular element, amid decades of technological progress. Meaning that, it stands to reason that it would be far easier to make one element catch up to everything else, than it would be to start from scratch.

That is because, beyond the moment when the unholy quartet (I just like to call it that) found a vacant niche to sit on, these companies have also been sitting on their respective niche for years. The world has evolved alongside them, and the progress we’ve made technologically speaking can, in part, be traced back to these these tech giants’ breakthroughs.

They have a monopole on progress and technologies, and we can’t ditch that to make the internet more private. To make the internet more private, we must include that.

The Difficulty of Switching & Alternatives

Windows revolutionized the world of computing. It popped up exactly at the precise time the world needed it, at the turning point where newer technologies were emerging, and had advanced enough to see what Microsoft provided. Windows took because there was a vacant spot to be filled, that would enable the whole world to make drastic technological progress should that spot be filled. And that spot was filled.

Google revolutionised easy access to information, and just like Windows, showed up exactly when it was needed. As a 90s kid, I distinctively remember growing up being taught how to use a computer (running Windows), and being taught to use Google to look up information (that was also back in the days students had figured out the newly emerging Wikipedia was a good way to cheat at school).

While it was also in-your-face, omnipresent and obnoxious marketing that ensured a monopole in their field, it’s also just the simple fact that they were a reference tool in that field, and that for a long time, there was no need for another one because they did their job exactly the way it was needed.

And to this day, the issue remains that, they still do their job well service-wise, and because of it, it’s impossible to really get rid of them.

1. OS

Because of it, there’s no operating system alternatives beyond Windows and Mac OS, and Chrome OS hardly counts given the topic we’re on.

We can observe how true this is with the moderate success experienced by Chrome OS. By definition, Google being such a large brand, it ought to mean their OS would have been a commercial hit. But because the space Chrome OS wants to occupy is already perfectly filled up by both Microsoft and Apple, Chrome OS remains an uneventful contender that most users do not care about. Chrome OS brings nothing new to the table, and nothing comparable; there is no real need or demand or vacant spot to fill by it.

Conversely, Microsoft also failed to gain a monopole on smartphones, because the vacant space there was already filled by both Apple and Google. Google managed to get a monopole on that, simply because they filled another niche at the right time (and quite obnoxiously so, if I might add). The advents of smartphones and iPhone alternatives created an open spot that could and needed to be filled by something. That is why to this day, it’s a choice between Android and Apple.

The key was vacancy. Right now, the only vacancy a privacy tool can fill is to be more private than the competition. But if they don’t do everything as well as the competition, that filled a vacancy, they will not work.

Many people, knowing that, will defer to recommending tweaking Windows settings to make it overall more private, which is satisfying one’s self with mediocrity and not the solution we need.

It’s difficult to recreate a whole operating system that is meant to actively compete against Microsoft or Apple, because it would mean developing the exact same technology they both have, while also finding a fulfilling niche of their own so the product can truly take and prosper.

2. Social Media

Another aspect of internet lives that is impossible to genuinely replace, is social media. It is by far the oddest part of our lives to try to replace.

A lot of guides recommend alternatives to social media. And that’s no wonder, considering how insidious advertisement can be on social media especially when browsing on phone apps — while ads can be blocked for free on desktop, it’s a little harder to achieve on a phone.

But ever since the concept popped up, social media has been an intrinsic part of our social lives. People rely on social media to find each other, communicate, keep in touch, share who they are, grow their business, make a living, etc.

While technical tools have filled physical and fundamental needs, social media fulfills our emotional needs. And each of the giants in the field fit a very specific slot.

I’ve also seen plenty of Facebook alternatives come and go; they pop-up as privacy-focused alternatives, since we’ve all been fed up with Facebook since around 2011, then the inevitable happens: the minuscule user-base is not enough to sustain the platform. Users don’t find it engaging enough because of the lack of other users, they become inactive, and on it goes until the platform is dead. The lack of people there means these platforms are not as attractive.

Alternatives like MeWe or Diaspora or Minds only imitate other social media. They don’t bring anything new to the table: ironic, when considering social media is the field with the most diversification possible.

They accomplish nothing new or special, they simply bring a bit of privacy back into our lives, without being even remotely comparable to the default options, or revolutionary. Because of it, they are not engaging or compelling enough.

Obstacles Faced

It’s also a circle; because privacy options are less accessible, they attract smaller crowds, making it so that less resources go into developing these services, in turn making them less accessible, thus driving less people in… The same rule applies to everything, once you’ve made it, you continue to gain momentum, and now that the machine is on, and has been on for years, more users are attracted to it, thus creating resources to perfect and push the service further, thus attracting more users, so on and so forth.

At the end of the day, all these alternatives are still seen as just that: alternatives. We don’t think of it in terms of options between Windows, MacOS, and Linux. We think of it in terms of Apple vs every other computer brand that ships with Windows. In that world, Linux is the niche OS reminiscent of Windows 7 that’s tailored to people with extremely specific needs. We think of it in terms “Instagram, Facebook and Twitter”, and those unknown options seemingly nobody else uses.

This is especially true for the average user, who are the most at risk and the most exposed. Once you step away from privacy circles where taking precautions is the norm, the world of “normies” operates on completely different priorities. An average users sees most alternatives as not worth considering, because of most of them aren’t up to par with what’s already there, and don’t have enough people who have joined.

1. Brand awareness

A lot of privacy tools don’t have the shine that tech giants have. They have an unpolished, amateurish touch, that says lack of experience and resources.

One of the effects of brand awareness is trust, then blind trust, as much as that might upset the most die-hard privacy buffs. When we see a brand polished and backed up by a ton of budget, that’s taking the brand in a specific, solid direction, it inspires trust. We see the luster of brand awareness and we know we can trust that brand to do what it does well, because we know it has the appropriate resources to do it. In turns, that trust becomes blind trust, as long as the brand’s veneer isn’t removed, because that veneer is a guarantee of service — and since it’s routinely polished and updated with newer marketing campaigns, it never wears off.

2. Guarantee of Service

Brand awareness conveys an automatic guarantee of service. A small private tool run by a small team out of their basement may work well for small tasks, but to entrust bigger aspects of your online life to a service takes a little more than that.

That Windows still manages to keep its existing user base and buffer it yearly, despite privacy concerns, speaks volume as to their guarantee of service. There is certain rigour going on behind the scene of a large company, that is maintained, not even from a desire to serve customers well, but from a desire to ensure the brand continues to do well. That rigour makes the brand trustworthy, because we know they must be compliant enough to function, enough at least to keep up a façade of usability and reliability.

Many people nowadays still use Google not because it’s safe, but because it’s reputable. Because despite their bad practices, they are still omnipresent enough to be a reference in the field, a name you can most definitely trust to do their job well. I don’t trust Microsoft to safeguard my personal info, but I trust them enough to know their services will very rarely glitch and fail, if ever. In comparison, most privacy alternatives are still too budding to have that veneer, the indefinable, biased factor that leads us to trust a brand.

We know that if an error occurs with a tech giant’s services, there will be a solution on the other end. We know and expect the service to run well and smoothly 99.99% of the time, and it does. No one has to panic daily because their filles may not accessible, or they may not receive an email from a co-worker.

The luster of brand awareness is helps maintain a monopole on their field, what draws customers in, and what makes them stay.

Ironically, private options also have their own avenue to do just that, as the labels “open-source” and “no-knowledge” are known to be the tenets of privacy. These two key words immediately embue a brand that uses them with a bit of that shine, provided they do everything else just as well, and it gives the public the trust stamp we need.

Make no mistake that this, too, in time, turns into blind trust, because the average user will likely not personally go verify the source-code to check if the brand is doing what they say they do: it is enough to know that they’re doing it, and that it has been confirmed as true. And as much as the default options may be regularly betraying our trust, it’s still trust the model runs on.

Privacy Giants?

To take a more positive turn in this debate, this is also a chance for privacy to become the new black. The opportunity for privacy to become a mainstream standard. A given feature, without which a service would be scoffed at and dismissed.

Something like that would seriously shake the solidity of default options. Because if something just as good is available, and has privacy as a default, then why settle for less?

For this reason, I particularly like Proton AG. At the time I’m writing this article, they’ve expanded their service, which initially started off as just a private and efficient email client, now to include a password manager, and recently developing their own Captcha, which may or may not become a public feature.

A service like Proton nails the concept of efficiency + privacy as a service. They’re a solid brand that stands out from the crowd and holds its own next to big names on the market. That gives them exactly the luster they need to be trustworthy, and compete with everybody else.

With their array of privacy focused apps, you could trade either Microsoft or Google’s main services: mail, storage and calendar, + their VPN, the bulk of everything you need from one of the big names is available at Proton, with privacy as the core principle.

Just like Microsoft, or Google, or Facebook, Proton is a company that managed to find a vacant spot to sit on and grow from there. It does things just as efficiently as the big names in the game, and is even more trustworthy, not only in terms of security and guarantee of service, but also in regards to privacy.

The one downside, is time related; at the time of writing, Proton is still nascent, and is missing certain key features that are considered essentials. Moreover, due to how young they are, they don’t have the benefit of having being present at the turn of the century; big techs are as big, because they were defining pillars in the advent of the online world. As good as they, Proton does not have that.

I brought up the idea of privacy giants, as opposed to tech giants, so we could have something that can challenge the supremacy of tools that don’t care about ethics, but that are still chosen despite that, because of that supremacy.

Just like Google, who wishes to cover every possible existing tools and has a monopoly over it, Proton covers an array of popular tools considered essential in the world of online privacy, and is a promising company.

While Proton hasn’t announced wanting to go in that direction, they are reliable and performant enough that their services could, in the future, become a strong reference in the world of online privacy, and as much of a go-to as Google.

Proton is an example of a genuine alternative the average user can use right out of the box, that meets privacy standards, without sacrificing accessibility and ease of use. And that should be the standard to meet for most privacy tools that look to replace the defaults.

Conclusion

In the end, we have two options:

• start from scratch, and recreate the same energy that made tech giants work the first time around, while centering it around privacy.
• fix tech giants and make them private again

I believe it’s impossible to uproot tech giants, and looking to replace them won’t necessarily work. But creating contenders that are just as efficient, and tap into our unmet need for privacy, could well and truly sit in that vacant spot, and thrive.

As we’ve seen, option 1 does work. It satisfies both die-hard privacy fans who like decentralisation and the adage “don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” as well as more traditional people who just want their privacy upheld, and nothing beyond.

Option 2, will be a discussion for another day (don’t forget to subscribe for that!).

If you enjoyed this article, perhaps you’d like to join the discussion on social systems, on cancel culture and on privacy.

If you’d like to contribute to my work, I would be thankful for your donation~