So Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal has you freaked.
The social media giant’s appetite for your personal data combined with its ability to exploit it for profit regardless of societal cost has soured many on the company. But as we collectively reckon with the havoc Facebook has wrought, it’s important to take stock of the other 800-pound gorillas in the digital room: Google and Amazon.
The two companies, to varying degrees, both collect massive amounts of data on the people who use their services, and yet they’ve largely avoided the public scrutiny falling on Facebook in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It’s time that changes.
To be clear, Google and Amazon are not Facebook. The data they collect is not unavoidably another Cambridge Analytica in the making. But just as Russian trolls’ use of Facebook to influence the election was simply an application of the company’s stated business model, so too are Google and Amazon’s massive repositories of information on Americans at risk for exploitation by someone just taking advantage of what’s being offered.
In other words, some skepticism is long past being in order.
