Dashboard of suspicious corporations
By Matthieu on Monday, January 30 2017, 20:03 - Permalink
In our world of increasingly virtual interactions, companies mastering the information technologies and networks are quickly gaining power at several levels. Here is a table to keep an eye on those folks. I use colors to show the now traditional groups: GAFAM in blue, their Chinese twin rivals BATX in red, their US good-guys rivals NATU (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber) in green, big media in orange.
A healthy rule is to split our personal information and dependencies across different firms, or none of them if you can afford!
Influence |
Monitoring |
Hardware, physical world |
|||
News |
Inspiration |
Messenger |
Activity |
||
Google-Alphabet |
Google News, Analytics |
Search, Ads, Youtube |
Gmail, hangout |
Android, Apps, Calendar, Map, Translate, Drive, ChromeOS, Now IPA |
ChromeBook, Car, CheckOut pay (till 2013), Calico (bio-engineering) |
Apple |
News |
iTune, Apple TV |
iPhone |
iOS, Safari, iLife, Logic, Final Cut, iCloud, Shazam, Siri IPA |
Apple store, Apple Energy, ApplePay |
Facebook-Meta |
Ads |
WhatsApp, Messenger |
Facebook, Instagram |
(headset for Metaverse, soon) | |
Amazon |
Alexa |
Amazon.com, Amazon studios |
Cloud computing, Echo, Alexa IPA, Evi IPA |
Physical sales, Pay, GoPago payment, AmazonGo (store) |
|
Microsoft |
Xbox games, Bing seach |
Skype, MSN, Outlook, ex-hotmail |
Windows, MSOffice, O365, Teams, Sharepoint, Linkedin, Cortana IPA |
Nokia, Windows phone |
|
Baidu |
Tongji web analytics, Hexun finance |
Baidu search, Knows, Encyclopedia, Music, Image |
NetDisk, Map, Browser, Yi OS, Space |
外卖 Waimai food, Qunar travel |
|
Alibaba |
Alibaba movies |
Alibaba, Sesame credit |
Alibaba.com, Taobao.com, Tmall.com, AliPay, Meituan, cloud |
||
Tencent |
QQ, WeChat |
CRF credit, WeiYun, WeiBo |
TenPay |
||
Xiao Mi |
MiCloud |
Phone, laptops, TV, connected objects |
|||
Hua Wei |
EMUI OS |
Phones, data centers, network |
|||
Netflix |
VoD, TV and film production |
||||
AirBnB |
AirBnB |
House rental |
|||
Tesla |
(PayPal sold to Ebay) Elec cars, solar PV panel, SpaceX |
||||
Uber |
Uber app |
Taxi service |
|||
Comcast |
NBC, 26 US TV stations |
Universal pictures, Focus |
Movies and goodies |
||
News Corp. |
Fox News, National geographic, WallStreet journal |
20th Century Fox, Blue Sky, Searchlight |
Movies and goodies |
||
Disney |
Disney, Marvel, LucasFilm, Pixar, Touchstone |
Movies and goodies, theme parks |
|||
Time Warner |
CNN |
HBO, Cinemax, Warner bros, Cartoon Network, DC Comics |
AIM, ICQ |
Movies and goodies |
|
Samsung 三星 |
Everland theme park | S Voice, Gear VR, Viv IPA | Phones, electronic, Heavy industry (ships), construction, Life insurance | ||
Twitter networks | |||||
eBay |
Corrigon visual search |
First Look media, The Intercept, Field of Vision |
(Skype sold to Microsoft) |
eBay |
eBay, PayPal |
Rakuten |
Kobo, Wuaki.tv, Pinterest, FC Barcelona |
Viber |
Rakuten, Play.com, Buy.com, PriceMinister |
||
Yahoo-Verizon | News, Finance, Geoplanet, Answers | Yahoo search, Music, Movies | Yahoo mails | Flickr, Tumblr, Delicious | PayDirect (till 2004), Yahoo Travel |
For more details about media conglomerates, Korean Chaebol 財閥 , Japanese Keiretsu 系列, and the (short) French Wikipedia article on GAFAM, BATX, and NATU.
Meanwhile in China, the wondrous Social Credit System looms quietly. Here is the full text outline document in English and Chinese. The keyword to justify it is 诚信 ("honesty", translated here as "sincerity"), a word that Alibaba's champion Jack Ma has been emphasizing a lot in his speeches. I introduced further about this system in this earlier post.
And to attack another weak spot, Alibaba's Ant Finance is starting a cooperation with the UN Environmental Program UNEP to build a platform for individual monitoring of greenhouse gas. A green pretext to monitor the people!
Comments
Let's not forget that "if it is free, then you are the product". Most of these giants provide free or cheap services for their online parts but make billions. That means they have some clever way to monetize the data you expose via your usage of their service. AdWords tracking your history, GMail reading your messages... it all seems normal nowadays, and after all, we validated (without reading them) the terms and conditions!
We've seen recently, for instance with the US attempting to enforce the use of backdoors in various commercial products, that this information is still compartmented for most services, so your advice to rely on a mix of them rather than on a single one seems sensible.
I am just wondering how long this can last. First, some giants like Google quietly track more and more of our behavior, both online and in real life (just look at Google Now and you will get frightened). Second, States are entering this market: as big corporation have the data, why not gather it directly from them and cross-reference the sources? This leads us to the new laws in China forcing companies to include backdoors.
The Social Credit System looks like the next step in that evil plan, and reminds me a lot of what occurred in the past, where "deviant" individuals just carried a tag making their life and career impossible... but at a modern scale, with a systematic ranking of all individuals, available at any time, such as when you go to the bank, buy something to eat, even if you move to another location hoping to avoid the woes in a place nobody knows you. While you can always find benefits to such systems (each time such privacy-threatening projects are setup these arguments are pushed forwards), it is a safe bet that in the end it will result in people losing fundamental (and sometimes constitutional) rights for privacy or liberties.
Sharp and sad points you're making, yes we are the contributors, providing the raw material for these companies to create value and grow more powerful.
What do you mean by Backdoors? Is it something that allows third parties to access the data, like governments?
Yes, this is exactly what I mean.
Some countries have passed laws (or are in the process to pass them) so that for instance if your data is encrypted, the company that hosts it must provide the government with a way to decrypt it.
If you consider that the government will not abuse it (which sometimes is far from certain), it may sound OK, but the simple existence of this backdoor is a threat, as it corresponds to a weak point that may one day be exploited by a hacker.
In other words, this defeats the purpose of encryption as a way to protect your data.
Sadly, the past few weeks have shown that even States claiming that freedom is a constitutional right put their citizen's privacy at risk: in the US, it will soon be legal for ISPs to make use of and even sell your browsing data without asking for your consent, and even without *telling* you...
Damn...
Ok I think I should balance out this GuyFawkes keyword by a new one: "Demain", a keyword about optimistic yet practical solutions for civil society, local economy, independent decentralized organic agriculture, ecological tips, and other futuristic workable utopias
Recently i've come across few newsletters and initiatives in that sense:
www.wedemain.f
www.franceinter.fr/emissions/social-lab/social-lab-29-janvier-2017
Good idea
It is not because there are threats that we should not have faith in our ways to adapt and build an alternative future. After all, we have come so far, we should be able to go further with a bit of imagination and utopia: very nice initiatives (I am thinking of the CC licenses, FOSS, etc.) have emerged in reaction to such threats.
Edit: i've removed Yahoo from the GAFAMY since it has been recently bought up by Verizon after years of troubles. I was under the impression they had all it takes to be part of the dark team, but the struggle is mercyless.
By the way, I don't want to play the fear monger about any conspiracy theory, but I've just realized that a CTRL+F search on the long long wikipedia articles of Google, Apple Inc, Facebook, Amazon.com, and Microsoft gives no occurence whatsoever of the keyword "GAFAM", "GAFA", or even "gaf". This is abnormal. Unbelievable.
It clearly indicates that these big players are going over Wikipedia articles with a fine-tooth comb, and the suppression of this concept of GAFAM is on their agenda.
Actually, there is simply no wikipedia article about GAFA, and even the disambiguation page mentions nothing about it. (only the French one gives a qucke narrative.)
Cet article recent de Numerama en francais est interessant.
www.numerama.com/tech/227930-si-vous-souhaitez-etre-credibles-arretez-de-dire-les-gafa.html
Il conteste la pertinence de l'acronyme GAFAM, arguant le fait que ces 5 societes sont differentes dans leur activites, problematiques, politiques, et independantes dans leur administration. Ca n'aurait pas de sens des les regrouper en une sorte d'entite globale.
Update for Shazam, which was just bought by Apple Inc on 23 Sep 2018. Another app which uses the infamous AlfonsoAutomated, a software that continuously listen to your surrounding to identify keywords and what you do, in order to taylor make adds, and more creepy things.