A Vortex of Problems with Big Tech

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In the last Weekly Digest, I presented a retrospective of a major policy story from 2018: The democratic harms of “Big Tech.” This week, a polar vortex accompanied a vortex of more privacy abuses from Big Tech, and further concerns about the very bigness of Big Tech. The major news: Facebook has been secretly paying users -- some as young as 13 years old -- $20 each month to install a “research app” that collected intimate information about online behavior and communications. Some lawmakers are not happy. And the calls to break up Facebook are mounting. All signs point to lots of policy debates over the privacy violations of Big Tech in 2019. Whether those debates turn into meaningful privacy legislation will be one of the main telecommunications policy stories in 2019. 


A Vortex of Problems with Big Tech