@hattiehughs14 asked, "Should we be comfortable with giving all of our information to huge tech companies if it means we can use their products?"
This is something I have thought about every now and then for the last few years. I think the answer should be "no," but smart phones and laptops are so incredibly convenient and efficient to use that it would be almost unbearable to live in the United States without them. And so many businesses and companies in developed countries in the world rely on such technologies that it is disadvantageous for businesses not to use them. We find ourselves in a situation where we can either lose all privacy and utilize the ultra-convenient and necessary standards for technology, or we can have privacy but become incapable of making a viable living.
I think it is no accident that we are in this situation. Big tech companies are fully aware of what they are doing, and they have intentionally schemed ways to obtain as much data about their users as possible to outsell their competitors in the quality and compatibility of their services. When the technologies that these companies produce have the capability to record what their users are doing with them, what would possibly prevent these companies from recording all the video, audio, and text information that they can?
I do think it is theoretically possible for the government to create laws that would prevent big tech companies from using their products to obtain personal information about their users, but this would either take a very long time or will just never happen. There is already such a heavy reliance on the technology that has been produced that it would take an unbelievable amount of time and money to replace all of it with privacy-ensured technology, and big tech companies have absolute zero incentive to do such a thing. Additionally, the kind of information that is counted as too personal and that is not counted as such is hard to determine, and no matter where the line is drawn, big tech companies will obtain whatever they can.
A much better way to cause a change in current technologies to make them less invasive would be if all of the users of such technologies simply stopped using them together. The big tech companies would be forced to produce technologies that their users want to use. However, the reason this hasn't happened yet (or may never happen at all) has already been mentioned.
