APPENDIX:

reminding you that shitty tech companies are shitty

FACEBOOK

• Did nothing timely to remove inflammatory hate speech which fed the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar
• Routinely exposes content moderators to trauma-inducing content for poor pay and working conditions via its contractors
• Secretly scraped Android phone data for years
• Repeatedly overruled in-house fact-checkers in favor of right-wing news sources
• Terminated an employee who collected information on right-wing pages getting preferential treatment
• Pitched a tool allowing employers to suppress words like "unionize" in workplace chat product
• Allowed app developers access to storable information on app users and their friends (Cambridge Analytica scandal)

AMAZON

• Recently made a brazen attempt to hire union-busters
• Actively spies on employees to track complaints and pro-union sentiment
• Collects video and audio from Ring devices and coaches police in how to easily obtain it, even without a warrant
• Fired whistleblowers who reported on inadequate COVID-19 precautions in warehouses
• The Echo collects user audio data and sends it to Amazon's servers and is essentially always listening
• Used tax loopholes to get a federal tax rebate in 2019 despite $26.5 billion dollars in profits
• Deliberately obscured injury rates at warehouses, which are around twice the industry average

APPLE

• Persistently fights the Right to Repair
• Sent a software update that bricked iPhones repaired by third parties
• Routinely demands 30% of revenue from its approved apps and forces apps into creating in-app purchases
• Remotely slowed down older hardware via software updates to attempt to push users into buying new products
• Prevents users from running the software they want on Apple Operating Systems
• Routinely complies with the totalitarian Chinese government, including removing the Quartz news app from the App Store for its Hong Kong protest coverage and removing an app Hong Kong protesters were using to track oppressive police forces
• Siri sends recordings, intentional and otherwise, to Apple servers, where they are analyzed by contractors and can be traced to the user
• Benefits from forced Uighur labor courtesy of the Chinese government's concentration camp program
• Has no problem giving the FBI access to your iCloud if you are suspected of property damage at a protest
• Recent versions of macOS send Apple a hash of each program you run, when you run it

MICROSOFT

• Forced the Edge browser onto users
• Built local search on Windows 10 to be dependent on sending data to Microsoft, which was revealed by an update that destroyed functionality
• Windows 10 sends the user's Application History to Microsoft by default
• Windows 10 sent the key for your encrypted hard disk to Microsoft by default
• Has a long history of actively undermining the Free Software movement
• Provided users' SkyDrive (now OneDrive) data directly to the NSA

GOOGLE

• "Accidentally" pushed an update that made the Google Home speaker listen to everything
• Secretly acquired detailed, non-anonymized medical data on 50 million US residents
• Allows third-party companies to scan and share data from GMail accounts
• Tried to keep a credible sexual harassment claim against an executive private and gave him a $90m severance package
• Was secretly developing a censored search engine for the Chinese government before being outed

All of the above buy smaller companies routinely to reduce competition.

On top of all this, the tech giants are good old-fashioned functional monopolies, with all of the cutthroat business practices that implies. Do they deserve your money or your data?