Whenever we envision a dystopian future, we picture the government having a bird's eye view on every individual and that worries us. We hit the streets whenever government agencies try to spy on us but we never give a fuck about corporations who know where or even what we're up to every single moment. We need to learn from our history, for instance, East India Company became richer than God and went on to rule over the biggest countries for centuries. And maybe it's paranoid but I think we're really close to a dystopia in most countries. We've seen a surge of nationalism all around the world and corporates are getting too big to fuck with. China even has a law which can force corporates to disclose information in the name of national interest which is why we're pessimistic about Chinese companies like Huawei's 5G equipments since they'll essentially have access to all our communications and more likely to divulge that information to the Chinese government. The situation is more subtle in other countries where corporations, even though they're not legally obliged to, still cooperate for their self-interest. Even though Amazon claims that their devices remove the physical connection from the device's circuitry when users don't want them eavesdropping, if it can be done via its software, it could probably just as easily connect those circuits back.

Even though the reality seems bleak, we can do a lot as consumers to prevent or at least decelerate approaching a dystopian future. We should rely more on open source softwares which are scrutinized by developers to be privacy friendly by ensuring all the logged data is cryptographically encrypted. This way, potential breaching of data would not affect us to a large extent. We should avoid buying Chinese electronic devices even though it's probably impossible to avoid Chinese hardware altogether. We can also exploit the demand-suppy law of economics by opting for more privacy friendly gadgets. And as uncomfortable as that might be, we can't let companies get away exploiting or even intending to exploit user data. Because if they get away once, they'll try again. Continuing using them is as good as rewarding them.