There are two point I would dispute. First, I do give large tech companies (and the NSA!) credit for being internally heterogeneous, and doing good things along with bad.
Second, it would be ridiculous to give Facebook or Google credit for making anti-surveillance tools. That would be like praising tobacco companies for inventing a better cigarette filter.
My beef is that you sort of place the finger of blame on big companies for the concentration of data in the cloud, even though that appears to be a natural evolution and what users want. It's not like Google or Facebook engaged in an evil master plan to force users to give them lots of data. Users willingly did this because they didn't want to manage that data themselves, and if Google/Facebook hadn't offered them that service they'd simply have gone to another company that did.
Given that this is the way technology has evolved independent of any one firm, is it really fair to compare them to tobacco companies?
There are two point I would dispute. First, I do give large tech companies (and the NSA!) credit for being internally heterogeneous, and doing good things along with bad.
Second, it would be ridiculous to give Facebook or Google credit for making anti-surveillance tools. That would be like praising tobacco companies for inventing a better cigarette filter.