You’ve gotten some good answers for your first question. VPNs have their pros and cons, but there’s plenty of threads on that topic for you to do your research.
To address your second point, and let me tell you I am beating myself for losing my original response, regulatory bodies would need to step in. In the US I am not optimistic about this as legislation is written by “special interest groups” and that special interest is money and selling our data. Thankfully for Europe the EU is a bit better, and hopefully some of that will trickle down to the US.
If the EU granted rights of ownership over your data and the rest of the world saw how much money Europeans were making selling their own data themselves rather than having it siphoned off of them then there’s a chance the apathy could be breached, but that hasn’t proven true with any other facet of a civilized society that the rest of the world gets to enjoy.
Personally I’m a big fan of federation. As it stands now the Internet is smaller than ever. There’s a small handful of platforms owned by an even smaller handful of billionaires. You don’t own the media you upload to this platform or best case the platform only has unlimited licensing rights.
The ideal platform in my opinion is one of many, where a user can upload their content and then distribute it across other platforms concurrently with limited use licenses. The user retains all rights and ownership and content doesn’t get locked onto a specific platform. It’s not a simple issue and it’s not a simple solution, and I’m certainly not the one who is going to solve it, but I certainly notice it.
You’ve gotten some good answers for your first question. VPNs have their pros and cons, but there’s plenty of threads on that topic for you to do your research.
To address your second point, and let me tell you I am beating myself for losing my original response, regulatory bodies would need to step in. In the US I am not optimistic about this as legislation is written by “special interest groups” and that special interest is money and selling our data. Thankfully for Europe the EU is a bit better, and hopefully some of that will trickle down to the US. If the EU granted rights of ownership over your data and the rest of the world saw how much money Europeans were making selling their own data themselves rather than having it siphoned off of them then there’s a chance the apathy could be breached, but that hasn’t proven true with any other facet of a civilized society that the rest of the world gets to enjoy.
Personally I’m a big fan of federation. As it stands now the Internet is smaller than ever. There’s a small handful of platforms owned by an even smaller handful of billionaires. You don’t own the media you upload to this platform or best case the platform only has unlimited licensing rights. The ideal platform in my opinion is one of many, where a user can upload their content and then distribute it across other platforms concurrently with limited use licenses. The user retains all rights and ownership and content doesn’t get locked onto a specific platform. It’s not a simple issue and it’s not a simple solution, and I’m certainly not the one who is going to solve it, but I certainly notice it.