They're creepy all right, but it's not a line for regulation. Laws are supposed to protect the rights of the individual, not regulate. We don't speak in terms of "regulating" crime, we prohibit it. Regulation means controlling what is or should be legal choices and actions.

The rampant hacking and intrusion into personal computers to facilitate surveillance, stealing personal information, selling it, and assembling it into dossiers with no accountability, violation of privacy, misrepresenting their own actions, and collaborating with government for illegal search and seizure of documents are violations of the rights of the individual which should be codified in law as such. Those who seek to regulate it want to control the crime while allowing it to persist.

Conservatives like the author of this Hillsdale article show no concern with the rights of the individual and therefore no concept of the difference between outlawing crime and regulating it. They are Pragmatist statists talking in terms of breaking up companies, their own opinions on economic "efficiency", and what degree of regulation to impose on innocent individuals and businesses while refusing to stop the abuse. They are the ones who are crossing the creepy line into statism.

Do you really wish for government hold your hand as you use the Internet? If you don't like site search elsewhere. Stop looking out for the non-thinkers.

They did not come out of nowhere.
They were created by the CIA.

Virtual Private Networks provide a way to make remote connections without revealing your IP address, attempting to sever an identifying connection between you and what you are looking at for those who don't otherwise have access to your id or local IP address. You can use the tor network for the same purpose.

VPN companies do not "all have signed agreements with with law enforcement that requires them to provide a path to enable searches subject to a warrant". Any government has the authority to seize records with a warrant, depending on the jurisdiction, and NSA often has the means to circumvent that restriction internationally.

VPN providers are located in different countries that limit jurisdiction. Some of them keep what you do encrypted in a way that even the VPN owner cannot get into it, including the connection logs, so warrants and other circumventions cannot get to it. The security of VPN companies varies dramatically, despite the hype from many of them. https://thatoneprivacysite.net/

You can use https://www.startpage.com/ to do google searches without google collecting your search history. startpage serves as a kind of VPN for searches that anyone can routinely connect to. The resulting security depends on how you use the search results.

VPN protects the identify of where you are coming from. You can also use an encrypted channel to a protected dns name server to translate website names to IP addresses you are going to, including a VPN connection, keeping your destination hidden from monitoring that is local to you, including by your own ISP.

If you use the same VPN IP address to connect to everything you do, inc ing logins, and/or your own PC is vulnerable to leaks and hacking such as through identifiable or otherwise unsecure browser plugins, then in principle everywhere you go will eventually be linked back to you anyway.

You need a javascript blocker and secure cookie settings to keep para sites such as google and facebook from tracking you even though did not connect to them directly. They are everywhere. If you use a VPN that allows parasites itself when you connect to it despite their sales pitch of privacy, watch out.

But you can't stop all of it, just like you can't prevent hacking of your financial information stored elsewhere. Insecurity is built into the internet. Microsoft and other big data companies have for years been developing means of tracking without IP addresses or cookies by identifying unique electrical "signatures" within your pc.

It never ends and they do what they can get away with. We have been repeatedly told that surveillance is the price we pay for 'free services' on the internet. It isn't true. They do it because they can, whether or not you are paying money. Buy something on the web and chances are the company you bought from is also selling your information.

No, he's not a 'fine thinker" and his religious conservatism is a very long way from Ayn Rand. Almost everyone now knows about at least some of the abuse from Google and Facebook; conservatives follow along and say maybe we should "consider regulation" -- "me too but slower". Better thinking than parroting the Hillsdale writer calling for a "degree of regulation" asks what rights are being violated and how to protect them, not entrenching the abuse through "regulation". https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

As written in the article, and gives me pause to go against your assertion (which was mine),

"Another aspect of the Big Tech revolution that sets it apart is the quantity and precision of amassed data it makes possible. Businesses have always accumulated data on their clients, but the amount and detail of data concentrated in the hands of Big Tech companies are beyond anything previously imagined. And its value increases rather than decreases with quantity: consumption patterns of individuals are more valuable if linked to their location, more valuable still if linked to their health information, and so on. Not only does this data concentration represent an insurmountable barrier for new entrants into the market, it also represents a threat to individual privacy and can even be a threat—as recent data mining and censorship scandals suggest—to the functioning of our democracy."

By waiting for damage and allowing data to amass we are building an insurmountable foe when they choose to flex their power. As exceller wrote about, its may have already gone to far thwart. Think of the politicians and how much data could already be in big tech hands. How much influence can big tech wield with text, pictures, video, audio, and phone conversations on any person let alone a controlling block of congressmen?

Good luck with that.

If you don't like what they are don't use them. If you don't want them to have intimate information don't give it to them. Any regulation comes with the permission to use violence to control someone else to achieve what is considered a 'moral end'. The only place for regulation would be to prevent fraud. If the supplier offers a specific product but does not deliver then the consumer has a valid complaint.

“I think Big Tech went so far that any regulation would be ineffective, other than wiping them off the Earth...”
Sounds like the new post modernist way their activists “solve” their many targeted “systematic problems.”

You could be right. Even breaking them up like Bell telephone was forced to divide there is not a single guarantee with the way we can store and manipulate data that anything will be truly isolated to one offshoot or another. This is why Soros and other can manipulate things to the degree they do. Society rushed into the tech straight jacket and not those who fastened the belts can do essentially whatever they wish.