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Experts say it’ll take more than just breaking up Facebook to rein in Big Tech and protect your data
Lawmakers could force Facebook to share data with other platforms, but experts say that would be a “disaster” if there aren’t other safeguards.
A potential forced break up of Facebook has been discussed for years, and that conversation has only been re-ignited as Congress mulls five new bills designed to rein in Big Tech.
But what would that implosion mean for the mountain of personal data Facebook has already collected on its hundreds of millions of users? According to experts, not much.
Two of the five bills introduced last month would force Facebook to share that data with competing apps and platforms, a feature known as interoperability.
Experts told Insider this can be a good thing. It’s how tech companies work together to make services useful for you — like how you’re able to sign in to apps using your Facebook or Google credentials or send an email from Gmail to a Yahoo address. The practice encourages people to use multiple platforms, instead of getting siloed into one specific ecosystem.
The idea is to foster healthy online competition since tech giants would relinquish their dominant grip on hordes of data and would instead…
