Week 4: Should we trust Facebook and Google?

This week I read two articles on Facebook and Google, and the privacy that we give up as consumers who use these websites.

Let's start with Google. The article I read from CBS provided information on 48 states and their Attorney General's decisions to commence investigations into Google and it's practices in ad generation on their search engine as well as well as all of their domination over the internet, including Google Photos, Google Chrome, and Youtube. The argument is that the site's dominance over the whole internet and the lack of competition provides an unfair advantage to larger companies buying ads, and the Google programs that are promoted above all others when someone uses the Google search engine.
I can see where these governments are coming from, saying that Google may be breaking antitrust laws, however I would argue that we as citizens are giving Google this power, in the same way that someone would rather order multiple different types of things off of Amazon VS making 5 orders off of different websites for the small brands. We chose to trust Google a long time ago, to be a large provider of our information, just like how many US citizens choose to only watch one news network because they only want to hear news they agree with.

The Facebook article on CNet caught my eye because I recently watched The Social Network on Netflix, and in the article about Google, the expert Roger Chang (who is FROM CNet news, by the way) refers to Facebook and Google as originally being seen as "darlings, and success stories in America", and have now done a "180" as far as public trust, and I think that's so on the nose. Partially because of the way that Facebook was founded, just by some guy in his college dorm room (hard to believe that one of my classmates could be doing something of equal merit right now), we want to root for the underdog, but then out comes this movie highlighting him as a greedy businessman with lack of social grace.

Here is Mark Zuckerberg, as a sophomore at Harvard

Suddenly the narrative has changed. This site that was originally built for a college campus now holds the information from millions of users all around the world (where they work, how many kids they have, the things they care about, and how they are influenced).

The article on CNet said there were two separate databases published to the internet, full of thousands of Facebook users' phone numbers, and Facebook refused to make a statement.

The question stands: will it ever really be possible for one website to house that many people's information safely and ethically? And how stupid are we as consumers for feeding into it?

Sources:
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-user-phone-numbers-still-online/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-antitrust-probe-48-u-s-states-launch-antitrust-investigation-of-google-dominance-in-search-ads-and-data/