why consider it when you can do it? Behavior can only change when there's a massive drop in MAU and revenue, then the product team will consider backtracking
Because it would be a major inconvenience for me, that's why.
Update:
I'm getting a lot of criticism here.
If your aim is to try to get me to actually make the switch, then the approach you are taking is counter-productive. Instead, I guess you are doing what most people do when faced with something they disapprove of: they do the thing that is easiest and most satisfying, which is to criticize or punish the other person, and to pat themselves on the back for being better.
But criticizing people just isn't an effective way to change people's minds or behavior.
What would work in this case? Showing them a path forward.
In this case, I presented a real problem, that it would be a major inconvenience to switch. That is the truth. I don't live in some idealized fantasy world, where I can take actions for free.
Bang on. I think one of the best things we can do as engineers is help build alternatives to these authoritarian companies' tools, and to strive to make the on ramp as easy as possible. As it stands right now, it is a lot of effort to use Libre tools when compared to the poison pill corporate ones.
The second best things we can do is support projects and be vigilant against the creep of corporate interests into FOSS.
I dropped Google Drive late last year and it wasn't too bad. Setup another service, made a directory junction from GoogleDrive folder to new folder, profit.
ah, so you're just talking the talk, without preparing to walk the walk... things don't improve because you just wrote a comment on HN, it has to materially impact the business for them to notice the disagreement with the policy.
Most people are like you though, too lazy to do anything and they'll subject themselves to whatever big G says is good for them.
Beware of extremist/polarizing arguments like this one, they're mostly manipulative.
You can voice your disagreement, and still use the platform as long as they don't cross the line. That doesn't mean you haven't prepared a plan for degoogling your life and accept the inconveniences.
I was exposed to this while talking to an Amazon recruiter recently, while I also hear stories about how they seem to work people to a breaking point.
The median tenure at AMZN is also 1.5yrs, per linkedin. Their strategy seems to be to work their people extremely hard to earn their RSUs and pay them like plebs with hard caps on earning potential (base comp).
Windows 10, which was forced on users machines (often without consent nor approval) meets the threshold for spyware.
Could the entire OS be considered spyware? Should Win 11, which is expected to have mandatory MSFT account, be considered something worse than spyware?
Amazon's Ad business is a monster that is growing faster and faster [1] so they'll want to track and absorb as much data as possible. FireTV is one of the noisiest devices in my home, second only to Roku, constantly phoning home.
Selling access to a mesh network to other providers will become an additional source of recurring revenue from what would have otherwise been one time revenue source (hardware sale).
It will be no different than Amazon competing w/ FedEx and UPS using it's delivery engine
reddit also injects unique tracking into every outbound URL click, allowing them to monitor individual user behavior and engagement (similar to Google Search results)
there's nothing stopping from Alexa recording content locally and transmitting it with a traditional request once activated.
Also, there's no reason for Amazon to want a constant stream of Alexa data hitting their cloud services. The goal is to mine and extract valuable data about users to build profiles, ideally you'd want to do that on-device and send up the most valuable bits.
These are also capabilities they can silently introduce at anytime for any device.
You can store around 1000 hours of recorded speech in a gigabyte of flash memory that costs $0.25. For most people, that could hold their entire conversational activity for a year. Storage and off-line upload (perhaps during a software update when packets are flying around anyway) isn't difficult.
They can not silently introduce new hardware to these devices. You should look into what kind of hardware these devices actually contain. Try to set up an intelligent, personalized data miner with those constraints.
This is one of those massive privacy violations that I cannot believe has been allowed to exist as long as it has without people making a concerted effort against it. I remember way back in the early days of Android when it was excused for reasons of allowing Google's live traffic mapping feature to work.
That excuse made sense in a time where public trust in these companies was justifiably high but it's turned into a situation where the major tech giants have the power to become a modern day Stasi on steroids (and increasingly show their willingness to play that role). We had to place enormous trust in these company's ethics (mostly on a subconscious level as they all used to go to great lengths to afford us the ability to implicitly trust them) in order for the smartphone/mobile revolution to occur. Now that these devices are a necessity in modern society, they've all dropped the pretenses that allowed us to trust anything to do with the information they're collecting.
We're living in a cyberpunk dystopia and I don't see an easy way out.
advertising is the biggest thing 'educating' voters, and usually it's usually something along the lines of here's why <party> <candidate> is bad, vote for me instead. News media is trash and unreliable as they too pander to advertisers or are just spewing nationally distributed talking points.
Bernie who was the most vocal about changes was taken out by Hillary, but no one batted an eye. No one really wants change to the healthcare and pharma industry as it will hurt the entire ecosystem (especially advertising $).
you can start with getting NetGuard - a no-root firewall that can be used to prevent apps from connecting to unnecessary domains. It's from the same developer who made xPrivacy.
If you can achieve root, you will have much greater controls over privacy. Unfortunately, it seems cellphone manufacturers are moving away from giving users control over their devices.
