Since 2010, a handful of tech giants, represented here by consumer facing members Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have gone on a buying spree, purchasing any company or service they think is either A) monetizable or B) threatening to their current income:

Empires like these were built using small blocks of our data combined with larger blocks made of other companies that also had our data. And now they're the only game in town.

Along the way, many useful programs and services were gobbled up only to be abandoned, turned into something different, or simply harvested for user accounts, email addresses, and training data. And these days they are not the least bit shy about invading your privacy, profiling you relentlessly, and selling anything about you to the highest bidder, often shady third-parties who can do with your information as they please. Behavior like this from major internet companies would have been scandalous fifteen years ago but is common practice today, a sad degradation of affairs brought about by a deliberate process of monopolization in on-line services. Competition, markets, and variety have nearly been eliminated (and we'll set aside the corruption inherent in that, don't want to be here all day).

Most of these companies have long cooperated with authoritarian governments abroad; now they have eagerly partnered in grossly illegal actions by American governments at all levels: knocking on doors for First Amendment speech, rounding up innocents with error prone facial recognition, and treating people like cattle and worse. Add to that the emergence of reckless "AI" tools, let loose to flood useful systems and social media with slop while widely exposing any user data they touch or generate, and we have a very dire situation for personal privacy and security.

Time was, business customers could at least expect some respect in these matters. Paying your cloud bill insulated you from the gradual enshittification of free or lower tier services. These days though, AI/LLM/ML systems of dubious utility are crammed into every application and any data stored on those servers should be assumed to have been used to train some kind of model without your consent. Privacy statements and end user agreements grow longer and more restrictive by the week. Oh, would you like to switch to another system? Here's your business's vital data in an unlabeled SQL file with nested tables seventeen layers deep. Enjoy.

From the huge and famous to the merely large and industry specific, cloud service companies have made it clear, with starkly few exceptions, that they have no respect for consumer privacy and that security is nice for them but somewhat optional and a little patchy for you. They exist in the realm of billions, where a business, a family, and even a person are all equally irrelevant.

Your rights, your privacy, and your interests are not their priority and never will be, which raises a final question: How do find and use systems you can trust?