Generating a smart summary for this post.

Introduction

Free has never really been free. Always a catch, a commitment, a small print. This has always been a fact, but now more than ever, it seems to be the new norm. In a world full of free services from the planet's biggest conglomerates: Google, Microsoft, Meta, some must wonder, how, and why they are free. What do they gain from us using their services?

And that's that catch… data. Data has value and we are being farmed for it. People either don't know or don't care, and this mini-essay aims to show why you should. The points I make throughout this essay are not fiction, conspiracy theories or extracts from George Orwell's 1984, they are real, realer than ever in fact, and it is happening right now, without you even seeing.

The Data Hive Mind

This common trend of selling user data is just getting more prominent and more blatant every week. Do you ever search for an unusual, but somewhat interesting product on a search engine, and later your favourite shopping site bombards you with oddly specific adverts about the same product, from the same place? In the space of a few milliseconds, that search engine had sent your data to your favourite e-commerce site, had it processed and linked to your forever unique advertisement ID, and to repeat, without any user interaction, both parties getting paid while doing so, but not you?

This hive mind of data is the problem. These big tech companies know absolutely everything about you, what you like, what bothers you and this data has been proven to be catastrophic in the wrong hands. In this example, I'm referring to the two Yahoo data breaches, which in June 2016, were reported that account names and passwords for about 200 million Yahoo accounts were presented for sale on the darknet market site “TheRealDeal”. This cost them (Yahoo) in excess of $519+ million US dollars, $118 million of which was distributed to the victims of such breach, but still costing them their privacy, and some their dignity.

Your data, your private, personal information is just out there on the internet for anyone to buy, resell and view on demand, where and whenever they want. Do you enjoy knowing that this is the new modern day standard? Fair enough, data like name, age, email address is not so damaging alone, but when this same data is paired and cross referenced with different sources, information like your address, card details, phone number can be uncovered in just a few seconds, one database query away, forever.

You may be sitting there thinking, why is this a bad thing, hasn't this always been the case with governments, educational bodies and law enforcement? Yes, but the key difference being these institutions have absolutely no financial incentive to possess this information. So if these organizations have a legitimate reason, what is Google's, or Meta's, or any big tech corporation? Why do they need to know your favourite colour or favourite breed of dog?

Legitimate Interest

A common phrase is chucked around the privacy world, "Legitimate Interest”. You may have read this on a cookie banner, or a privacy policy (if you have ever even read one): “991 Vendors would like to enable the use of cookies during your sessions on this site, for legitimate interest”. Their legitimate interest is a passive profit, built on information and data they do not own, nor should possess.

Your data is your own, clearly stated in the name, so why should you be okay with it existing in essentially every data centre on the planet? Quick answer - you shouldn't. But these companies know how valuable your time is, they even have whole teams dedicated to analysing how you spend it. The extent these corporations stoop to make the opt out button as hard to find as possible is dystopian to say the least.

An article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that Meta holds the ability to track your activity even outside of its products and services. Data provided by Cloudflare Radar shows that Meta's services rank second to Google for aggregated, unique network requests. Although the exact number of internet requests is not provided, we can make the obvious assumption Meta processes hundreds of gigabytes of data a second.

Putting that into perspective, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), the onboard guidance system which heavily assisted in the successful outcome of the Apollo moon missions, had 4 KB (kilobytes) of onboard storage which equates to 0.000078 GB (gigabytes) - 39/50000000 as a fraction. Who let Meta gain the control to do this, to "play god without permission"?

What Can I Do?

We must therefore rethink the way we interact with these data hungry services. Is your personal information really worth it, for posting a 5 second boomerang (snippet) of your gatekept pizza spot to your Instagram account, with 15 followers? No, it shouldn't be normal to have to proactively keep your data your own and away from these conglomerates. No, you shouldn't have to sacrifice your information to have a “modern social life”. No, no and no.

Everywhere you look, you're being pressured into this hyper connected data collection hive mind, just to stay connected with friends, family, and meme pages. These platforms make staying connected so easy, but not for the love of the game, for the sole purpose of mining the population's personal information for a few extra (b/m)illion on top of their already mind blowing annual profit, which is rather often larger than the GDPs of some third world countries.

Combating this greed isn't always possible, but the most effective methods tried and tested by me and privacy professionals around the world are often the simplest. These broadly cover the use of privacy focused alternatives, the use of endpoint and network wide ad & tracker filtering systems, using email aliases and the most obvious, but not the easiest - due diligence.

Stop giving your email address to get 10% off your coffee, delete accounts for services you no longer use, and the biggest - don't use data hungry platforms. A simple five second search “Privacy alternative to Twitter (X)”, will provide you with hundreds of open-source, privacy based alternatives which put users over profit. I hope the points I have made haven't entirely ruined your weekend, stay safe.

References

• https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/mad-meta-dont-let-them-collect-and-monetize-your-personal-data
• https://www.paulweiss.com/insights/client-memos/yahoo-agrees-to-35-million-sec-penalty-for-failure-to-disclose-cyber-incident
• https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018-71
• https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains
• https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#internet-services-ranking
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer
• https://ublockorigin.com
• https://adguard.com/en/adguard-home/overview.html
• https://proton.me/support/creating-aliases