this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Comments like this just make me depressed (well this is all depressing really) because it feels like a lot of people don't quite understand how utterly insignificant we are to these businesses. They will lose so few customers it won't even wiggle the dial. People will simply download Chrome to do whatever this is, they will get the data they want, user goes back to using Firefox until the next shitty company makes them use Chrome for something.
The problem is simply the consumers. We are all suffering, increasingly, because of the complacency, tech illiteracy, laziness, and short-sightedness of the average consumer. It's not really their fault, in that these businesses are the ones making the decision to do this, but realistically, if there's no market pressure, a business is going to do exactly what every business does, which is maximize all potential avenues for profit.
The average consumer is the reason why we can't have nice things anymore. And it is getting very hard not to feel a certain degree of resentment toward them as everything seems to just get progressively worse and worse with no hope in sight for any type of correction. They don't think that this is something they need to care about, and it legit makes me want to scream thinking about 6-7 years from now when these same exact people will complain about how unusable the internet has gotten.
@deweydecibel @Yoz don't blame the consumers people have busy lives and don't have the time or interest to spend their limited free time learning privacy or avoiding a certain company because of an obscure privacy reason they don't understand.
this is why market pressure is essentially bullshit. If more aggressive action is taken towards these companies instead of just blindly believing in the free market we might actually make an impact.
we have the free time let's use it to hurt them
You're both kinda right. Things wouldn't be nearly as bad if the average consumer actually gave a shit, but the things these companies are doing should be illegal in the first place.
People do give a shit. There is just an overload of shitty corporate behavior and people only have so much bandwidth. Each person fights on the fronts most important to them - which vary person to person (and over time). In the end you’re right, the answer is to regulate and make things illegal so people aren’t fighting thousands of battles at once.
Most people don't even understand it. Those that do, you're right, are fighting too many battles at once.
Exactly. I used to run a corporate banlist, where if a company screwed me over, or I though what they sold simply insn't good enough I wouldn't buy their shit. If I stuck to it completely, I would have 0 options for computer mice, 0 options for phones, 0 options pretty much for laptops, literally 0 option for any home appliance, the list goes on and on and on.