Solving a problem is different from dominating a problem
Imagine a single brand taking care of all your digital requirements. Your search results to spreadsheets and further ahead including your photos management, business management, and even payments. You might have guessed already, Google is the answer. The tech giant has dominated everything that could potentially take you to a digital world.
What if every company wants to do that? That’s not a problem-solution game, it becomes a domination game.
Anti-Trust
When a company like Google has access to all kinds of data points in your life including your personal information, daily health information, financial data points, and even your professional life, you become more vulnerable. After all, these companies are run by humans, the chances of mishandling exist (though they might have their own policies in place).
The United States is behind Google and similar companies with the Anti-Trust probe fearing that there is a chance that these companies could potentially manipulate people’s decisions based on the data they have.
Let’s just assume that Google is a trusted company and exhale. But the fact that they could do this is interesting.
Dominations
All these companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and even WeWork started small to solve a particular problem. When Google was struggling to get market share, they never thought the world’s information will be one day in their hands. Apple-designed a beautiful eco-system that is said to be in privacy, Facebook has the complete social profile of every human being online. Interestingly they own Instagram and Whatsapp making it even more vulnerable.
WeWork launched as a co-working space, and they’ve always wanted to introduce schools, apartments, gyms to dominate the lifestyle of people offline. These efforts are made because there is a problem in place and people are open to digital solutions nowadays.
Deep down, there are advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, there aren’t any proper regulations to control the world’s most valuable resource called “data”. Providing solutions is always a practical option, but dominating should be regulated with proper government involvement.
Control
Millions of educated Americans were manipulated easily in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and they didn’t have a lot of data like the Google giant. The power of unbelievable technologies like machine learning and deep learning can never be explained when it comes to these scenarios
The only objective is to make sure we get the problem solved and don’t fall into domination where social engineering “could” happen. Technology and innovation are important, but civilization with control and privacy is more important.
