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With companies, there's an incentive structure that usually makes it pretty obvious whether they have an interest to do really shady stuff on your PC. For "prop

With companies, there's an incentive structure that usually makes it pretty obvious whether they have an interest to do really shady stuff on your PC. For "proper" companies that have established customer bases and a legit revenue model, they have an incentive to not screw everyone over and lose their trust. That's just good management. Of course, management often screws this up and then we get (justifiably) outraged HN posts. For pirated software the incentive structures are also clear, and usually point towards "yeah if given the chance they'll take everything from my HDD and make a run for it." I'm all for FOSS everything, but running a company-distributed binaries is very different from pirated ones, and I agree with GP that it baffles me someone would do the latter.

lovelyviking 6y ago
>For "proper" companies that have established customer bases and a legit revenue model, they have an incentive to not screw everyone over and lose their trust. It also depends on what company means by "not screw everyone over" Right now many companies consider practices as 'OK' while I am coming from the times when most of those modern activities considered to be virus or malware. So for me it doesn't really matter whether you have malware installed by a virus or it's hidden deeply in EULA which you can't reject partially anyway.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  Oh I'm not trying to defend these practices in the least. But at least there is some mechanism (public outrage) there to make them think about it. That these mechanisms seem to fail and we need proper regulation is a different matter. Also in a lot of cases it's not really clear which tangible monetary benefit companies get from spying on their customers. Many cases seem to be managerial paranoia (Just in case the customers pirate!) or "because we can." Pirating and re-packaging software for torrent is also a non-negligible amount of work, and with no revenue stream besides bundling the apps with malware. So it's quite a different incentive structure still.

lovelyviking 6y ago

>For "proper" companies that have established customer bases and a legit revenue model, they have an incentive to not screw everyone over and lose their trust. It also depends on what company means by "not screw everyone over" Right now many companies consider practices as 'OK' while I am coming from the times when most of those modern activities considered to be virus or malware. So for me it doesn't really matter whether you have malware installed by a virus or it's hidden deeply in EULA which you can't reject partially anyway.

black_puppydog 6y ago
Oh I'm not trying to defend these practices in the least. But at least there is some mechanism (public outrage) there to make them think about it. That these mechanisms seem to fail and we need proper regulation is a different matter. Also in a lot of cases it's not really clear which tangible monetary benefit companies get from spying on their customers. Many cases seem to be managerial paranoia (Just in case the customers pirate!) or "because we can." Pirating and re-packaging software for torrent is also a non-negligible amount of work, and with no revenue stream besides bundling the apps with malware. So it's quite a different incentive structure still.