Book review: Tom Kemp’s ‘Containing Big Tech’ provides a guide for consumers and businesses alike

Tom Kemp’s new book about the dangers of the five Big Tech companies is several books in one volume. Normally, this would not be a great recommendation.

But stick with me here and see if you agree that he has written a very useful, effective and interesting book. Think of it more as a new toolbox that can do double duty for both information technology managers and end users.

Kemp was the founder and chief executive of Centrify, now Delinea, a venture capitalist and a tech policy adviser behind many state-level privacy bills. His book, “Containing Big Tech,” due out Tuesday, is nominally a detailed history on how Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. have become the tech powerhouses and near-monopolists with their stranglehold on digital services — and at the same time threatening digital privacy.

The 264-page book is a reference work for consumers who are concerned about what private information is shared by these vendors, and how to take back control over their data. It is also an operating manual for business information technology managers and executives who are looking to comply with privacy regulations and also prevent their own sensitive data from leaking online. And it’s a legislative to-do list for how to fashion better data and privacy protection for our digital future.

Kemp focuses on eight areas of interest, one per chapter. For example, one describes some startling failures at reining in the data broker industry, and another goes into detail about how easily disinformation has prevailed and thrived in the past decade. The author mixes his own experience as a tech entrepreneur, investor and executive with very practical matters.

Each chapter has a section dealing with the issue, then the response of the various tech vendors, and finally a collection of various laws and proposals from both the EU and the U.S. in response. This last section is a sad tale about the lack of legislative forward motion in the U.S. and how the EU has forged ahead with its own laws in this area — only for them to be lightly enforced.

Speaking of legislation, I asked him what he thought about the lack of any progress in that department, especially at the U.S. federal level. “No one is going to do anything to modify Section 230 — all previous efforts have been roundly beaten,” he said. “Eventually, pressure is going to shift to EU, with its new laws that take effect in 2024.”

Those laws, he added, will require online businesses to monitor their platforms for objectionable speech. “These will also give end users the ability to flag content and make the tech vendors to be more transparent,” he said. “Tech platforms will then have to finally respond. I don’t see anything happening in the U.S., nor with any new federal privacy laws enacted.”

Kemp’s unique know-how and the combination of these different perspectives makes for a fascinating read. For example, to test Google’s claims that it has cleaned up its heavy-handed location monitoring, he did some role-playing and set up appointments at local abortion clinics, visited drug stores, and shopped online. His online activity and location data was monitored by Google about every six minutes.

“The real-time nature of this monitoring was impressive,” he said. “Google knows the ads that they served me, the pages I visited, my Android phone notifications and locations. And despite their promises, they were logging all these details about me.”

Even if you have been parsimonious about protecting your privacy, you probably don’t know that Meta’s tracking pixel is used by a third of the world’s most popular websites and is at the heart of numerous privacy lawsuits, especially in Europe. Or what are the exact sequence of steps to tamp down on what the five tech vendors allow consumers to make their activities more private.

Kemp doesn’t pull any punches: He lays blame at the keyboards of these Big Tech companies and our state and federal legislators. “Big Tech’s anticompetitive practices have also significantly contributed to them becoming these giants who act as gatekeepers to our digital economy,” he writes. They certainly have plenty of resources: “The five Big Tech firms have five of the seven largest cash balances of any S&P 500 company in 2022.”

He documents the missteps that the major tech vendors have taken, all in the service of their almighty algorithms and with the aim of increasing engagement, no matter the costs to society, or to its most at-risk members — namely children.

I asked him about the latest crop of studies that were paid for in part by Meta and appeared in various technical journals and the New York Times. “Meta was closely involved in shaping this research and in setting the agenda,” he said. “It wasn’t a neutral body – they framed the context and provided the data.”

Part of the problem, he added, is that the big tech platforms are “talking out of both sides of their mouths. They market their platforms specifically to influence people to buy products from their advertisers. But then their public policy staffs have another message that says they don’t really influence people when bad things happen to them. They certainly haven’t helped the situation via algorithmic amplification of using their services.”

I reminded him that many of the Big Tech trust and safety teams were among the first groups to be fired when the most recent downturn happened. That doesn’t help with things either.

Business managers should get a copy of this book now, especially if they want to stay abreast of the issues he mentions. Readers should also check out his website for post-publication updates, which could be helpful.

Even for those businesses that may have taken some of the privacy-enhancing steps he outlines in one of the book’s appendices, there is still plenty to learn and to explore in “Containing Big Tech.”

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