I have problems with the state of tech these days. 99% of tech companies are evil. Google and Apple stand out though.

Google is evil, but Apple is too. They are very different reasons though.

Let met start with Apple. Apple is the defacto example of some kind of hedonistic narcissism. Its products are made to please the eye, but they are not very good once you look under the bonnet. As the EPEAT scandal has shown, Apple only cares about profit. Making a profit in and of itself isn’t something bad as long as one does make sure that the world isn’t worse off. In the case of Apple this isn’t the case as far as I’m concerned. Both the environment and their employees (or rather, those workers at Foxconn) are not being treated with the respect they deserve. The policies on their mobile devices are really stifling in terms of personal freedoms. Basically you don’t really own your phone and it’s impossible to manage the applications installed on it without Apple’s involvement unless you jailbreak the device. In order to publish on their platform you have to pass Apple’s ludicrous censorship rules which kiddieproof the user experience at a huge cost to the users’ and developers’ freedom. At the same time their dominant position is determining the course of the market at the moment. With others following Apple in its footsteps in terms of how platforms are run, the world is getting less and less free by the day. Freedom of choice is under pressure for the average consumer. Not because of a lack of different phones, but because they all do the same. Apple has a (very) influence on your and my freedom and takes a good penny off of you while you’re using their products. This is why I’ll never use Apple products voluntarily.

Google’s breathtaking lust for profit at the expense of the user is almost the same, but it’s different in both scope and execution. While they do offer open access to their platform, their platform is evil in its every bone. This is because Google tracks your every move by pushing their services. You have to use a Google account when you use an Android device allowing them to press you into their empire’s service. In addition to that Google’s dominant position on the search and ad markets leaves you with little choice than to run into them almost every day, if not almost every web page you visit. this is a very bad thing. You see, the Google user agreement is very permissive when it comes to stripping you of your rights in favour of Google. In theory they are entitled to store your every move, and they’re cornering their users more and more. Recently they’ve started a mandatory search filter based on your location. Basically Google is now trying to funnel what gets served to whom by filtering the internet for you without any choice of opting out, except of using much inferior search technology.

What happened to the freedom we had on our platforms and the internet that we had in the early 2000’s? Microsoft used to be evil because it did everything it could to shape the market, but nowadays they seem rather benign in comparison to what these monsters are doing to the world. (Although they seem to be following Apple in how they operate, and I hope future versions of Windows will remain as free in terms of user controllability as they were in the past) Our digital freedom seems to be completely vanished in the turmoil that is called corporate interest. A loathsome devolution indeed.

So I hope that Google will drag Apple down on the smartphone market, and then will lose their own dominant position to a free system. It probably will remain a dream though.