For privacy and control? Definitely not. A huge chunk of my family uses Facebook as the means of communication which means private correspondence is being mediated and read by Facebook's platform. At any whim they can ban a user, delete a message, etc. The same applies to Gmail but at least there is an escape hatch to a different email provider if you are using a custom domain.
The centralization of stuff into Amazon, Google, and Facebook's offerings has been extremely destructive to the status quo for control and privacy.
At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook and use any of literally hundreds of other excellent options for communication.
That's control. And privacy is much better now than it was in the "glorious early days of the internet" when your two choices were SMTP and IRC and both were subject to monitoring by local sysadmins and pretty much any node your packets passed through.
Just because the present is not perfect does not mean the past was better. I much prefer the privacy and control of today's internet over yesterday's internet.
>At a whim, you and your family/friends can stop using Facebook
Said nobody who truly understands network effects or knows someone who depends on Facebook for day-to-day communication with 5-10 people.
Quitting Facebook by yourself is easy but it's pointless if your friends don't do the same. Forcing your social circle to switch at the same time (particularly if they aren't technologically inclined) is folly.
This is only true with our modern bar. And yes, we should continue to get better. I am not calling for a halt of progress.
However, women, children, and minorities have far more freedom and privacy than they ever have historically. There are some ways you can look at this so that it seems that corporations have more ability to see into your life. In large, it is really just a rise in their accuracy. Their attempts and actions are actually lessened.
Because a lot of it is pretty simply rooted in economics.
If you want your kids to go to school, there needs to be resources for that to happen (and you personally have to have enough resources that you aren't using them for labor).
This is a bit of goal post shifting. I am claiming we are getting better. Not that we have solved all problems.
None of those things are good. But you needn't dig hard to find our culture actively doing these things almost with glee not long ago. Our bar is rightfully higher than it was, and we have legitimate criticisms to overcome. But don't let that detract from the fact that the bar is higher.
The centralization of stuff into Amazon, Google, and Facebook's offerings has been extremely destructive to the status quo for control and privacy.