If you look at how much information you put out, even just on your phone, on Facebook, on Google, whatever, you essentially create a clone of yourself online. And that's at the disposal of these large American tech companies.
I am the most concerned that we end up in a situation where your - everything is known about you and so therefore, not only Google, but Google, Facebook, Twitter - the whole set of companies - essentially knows all your weaknesses and therefore how to manipulate you in subtle ways in order to have you do things you might not otherwise do.
Whether it's Facebook or Google or the other companies, that basic principle that users should be able to see and control information about them that they themselves have revealed to the companies is not baked into how the companies work. But it's bigger than privacy. Privacy is about what you're willing to reveal about yourself.
I'd love if Google ran my cable or phone company. Instead of making their businesses out of telling us what we can't do, GT&T would recognize the benefit of helping us do what we want to do: use the internet more and create more of our own stuff. Google might even figure out how to make connectivity ad-supported and free. Sadly, though, I think Google knows what it is and won't expand into other industries, even if it would be good at running a cable or energy or phone company.
Google+ will never have a user base to rival Facebook's. It just won't. Not even if you include the 'users' who create accounts so that they can use other Google services.
Do you want to get rid of the rules of the road? Do you want to let everybody just do whatever they want to do? Or do you want to really look out for the consumer, look out for the American people, and figure out ways to create and foster an environment where companies want to double down on America?
Journalism continues to go south, thanks to big media and its strangulation of news, and there's not much left in the way of community or local media. Add to that an internet that has not even started thinking seriously about how it supports journalism. You have these big companies like Google and Facebook who run the news and sell all the ads next to it, but what do they put back into journalism? It isn't much.
Data is powerful and if it's put in the wrong hands, it becomes a weapon. And we have to understand that companies like Facebook, and platforms like Facebook or Twitter, are not just social networking sites. They're opportunities for information warfare.
Facebook's position with rival tech companies boils down to this: if you want access to all the information we've collected, strike a deal with us.
It isn't citizens, or Congress, who decide how our information network regulates itself. We don't get to decide how information companies collect data, and we don't get to decide how transparent they should be. The tech companies do that all by themselves.
Online advertising works, although it lands especially on search engines like Google and Yahoo. They achieve much higher revenues online than the websites of publishing companies.
Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data.
For the future, be true to yourself. If you're gonna be influenced by someone be influenced by them. Don't cop them so much that you're a clone. No one wants to deal with a clone. There's not that much more substance in being a clone, but definitely be influenced by people...take what you can from that and sculpt it into your own situation. In doing so, you'll be happy and I think your people will be happy listening to what you do.
It's funny now how much we look at - whatever you want to call it: art, design, culture stuff, film - online, and how in the online world, you're instantly global.
Facebook and Google are essentially an advertising duopoly, and we have almost no idea how their algorithms work.
I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges... If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.
Browbeating the tech industry for a problem that does not exist also draws attention away from the real problems with Google and other tech companies.