Image: Wired

We often believe that we are in control of the technology that we own: after all, we are the ones who utilize the product in the end. We use the facade of privacy settings as well as the trust in large corporations to put large amounts of personal information online; we are forced to buy gadgets from large corporations for outrageous prices because they are the only ones who have the capital produce, or we buy lousy products because the conglomerate we purchase from has the user base to sell millions of items with no motivation to innovate.

Microsoft

Microsoft is the first company that comes to mind when considering the evilness of massive corporations. They have a huge, 91% market share with their Windows OS (heard of it?).  And yes, they’ve taken a lot of crap for this, but in the end they always settle. They can, too, because they have a ton of money (because they have a 91% market share… they sell quite a lot, actually). They’re massive, okay, and that makes it harder for them to earn our trust, but it doesn’t make them evil. Well, winning a law suit that says they aren’t an unlawful monopoly is a little on the supervillain side, but not terrible.

The thing is, when a company has a greater consumer base than any other tech company in the world, it sort of has a responsibility to do more than please its shareholders. It’s the third most profitable company in the world, so how is it using this power?

• Buying everything in site: it owns over 125 companies. These range from television to the video gaming. It’s acting just as an evil dictator should, and it’s working.
• Not really innovating: sure Windows 7 is fantastic, but it was innovating the market as much as trying to catch up to Apple, who we will get to later.
• It’s also known to force itself upon you, like when it required Internet Explorer to receive updates to your windows computer.

Scared yet? The fact is, no matter what you do, you will use a Microsoft product today. Will you be better off, maybe, but Microsoft is stifling innovation like a big bully more than it is generating competition. It’s ability to settle in a court isn’t really a valid excuse for tyranny.

With this said, Bill Gates may be an awesome person. His job is to make money and that’s one thing he’s really good at. Check out the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

Facebook

Whereas Microsoft is a behemoth that uses it’s power, fairly obtrusively, to affect your daily life, Facebook’s evil happens in the background. It’s nearly unnoticeable, unless you run into the wrong situation, like, say, you want to delete your account.

What is the only way to delete an account? Well, in the words of wikiHow:

To ensure Facebook has none of your vital information you should sign in delete all networks, photos, friends, inbox/outbox messages, contact info, and basically anything connecting you to the page.

I have thousands of wall posts, not including applications. I have hundreds of emails as well as hundreds more photos. This is completely unfeasible, and yet it’s what Facebook recommends! They update constantly in order to improve user experience and simplicity of use, but as soon as you want to leave it feels as though they turn on you. Sure you can deactivate your account, but you’d have to be a little naive to think that something that remains on the internet is gone forever. Oh, not to mention, their stats are crazy.

Google

Image Courtesy: MiracleGroup.com

Facebook is pretty clear about which information they keep: anything you post to their website. Google, on the other hand, has stores to more information than they make publicly available to you, it’s actually rather crazy. Let’s think about some google products that have your information that maybe you don’t want it to have.

• Google Search
• Google Buzz
• Google Ads
• Android OS (Nexus 1, MyTouch 3G, G1, Motorola Droid…)
• Google Latitude
• Google Mail
• Google Wave
• Google Chrome
• Google Chrome OS
• Google Maps
• Google Streetview

So… basically anything you write on your browser or on your phone (and your calendar, if you use GCal). If you want to, you can read Google’s privacy policy too, they don’t hide that they’re spying on you. There’s also that pesky little thing, working with the Chinese government to censor their China search page: dealing with a Socialist Republic is apparently not as glorious as ever right now, and the censorship is likely about to stop. For business reasons, not moral ones.

Apple

Scared of a lawsuit, I have removed this content.