Don’t trust tech!
We all know how Facebook contributed, unknowingly or otherwise, to elect Trump and support BREXIT. If not intentionally, then their business model needs serious fixing; if intentionally, someone needs to go to jail! Other social media sites, email services, and web browsers are also guilty of sharing our personal information with anyone who will pay them money.
How does this affect authors? Why should we be concerned? Because nowadays social media and email are valuable tools in many ways, we would like to know that it can be trusted to keep our readers’ information safe. It’s now obvious we can’t do that.
Verizon owns both AOL and Yahoo now. Google’s Gmail is required by many cellphone providers. All three, like Facebook and Twitter, have privacy policies that allow them to steal information from those emails and sell it. The big boys are up to their necks in data mining. It’s not just the data-mining firms anymore.
Microsoft hasn’t done anything particularly wrong (I don’t know about Bing if it still exists, or their mail packages), but they are terribly annoying. It used to be that I could pick and choose what updates I wanted in Win 8.1 or Win 10. Now I can’t. Even worse, Microsoft now takes over my computer, downloads, and installs crap that I never use. My choices are “Update and Shutdown” or “Update and Restart”—when that takes valuable time away from my writing, you can imagine how I curse Bill Gates and his band of thieves. I should also mention that they’ve decided not to support certain versions of Office so they can charge me for a new one. That’s not just abuse—it’s highway robbery!
Add to all that the Dark Web where I’ve seen pirated versions of ebooks, including my own, offered for free, and one has to wonder if the internet is an author’s friend. But it doesn’t stop there. Net neutrality is dead. Congress killed it. Authors’ businesses are small potatoes compared to mega-corporations. Don’t you think that internet service providers will coddle the users who will pay more? I already experience daily several periods of slowdowns or drop-outs as Comcast panders to their big money clients. They’d rather have gamers and streaming video watchers hogging the bandwidth than tend to an author’s needs. Nobody reads anymore, right? Literacy and reading be damned.
The only thing an author can do is to speak out against this abuse from tech companies. They’ll probably try to make sure the word won’t get out, of course, but the word is already out. And we can always attack them in our fiction. In libris libertas…and let’s have a saner and safer internet!
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Did you miss The Secret Lab? This sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo etc) and in a print version on Amazon. And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery The Secret of the Urns—coming soon!
In libris libertas!
