Big Tech’s Big Defector | The New Yorker

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...

Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... they thought it was a P.R. problem... published a series of op-eds... the social-media business model thrived on divisive rhetoric... scheduled meetings with policymakers, investors, and Silicon Valley executives... platforms were sowing discord among Americans...really ahead of the curve...published “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe”... book tour ... an ongoing public-shaming campaign... McNamee attributed his business success mainly to “dumb luck.”...

Androids ... collect and retain user information... even ... off-line... Google Assistant ... record conversations ... In “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”... tech behemoths surveil humans, and eventually control them... few of the current proposed policies would have any effect on whether a company can collect private data, only on how it can be used. Under McNamee’s plan, most of Google’s and Facebook’s revenues would disappear overnight... Tech companies that don’t depend on targeted-ad revenue would remain relatively unaffected...a radical reënvisioning of the playing field...

tech companies are tempting scapegoats. But the algorithms they use may not be as powerful as we think... fourteen data brokers ... correctly surmised the gender of targeted consumers only forty-two per cent of the time...

in Soros’s camp, using surveillance to crack down on dissent... is a graver concern than using data collection to determine whom to sell microwaves to...

As is the case with Microsoft, Apple’s business model doesn’t rely heavily on monetizing data... The fix for this is going to be a business opportunity way bigger than what we have now... if we do this right it’s spread over thousands and thousands of companies in hundreds of cities.”