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The blog does a great job describing the overall arc of corporate capture of government regulatory agencies and trade policies. As other people here have said,
by mark_l_watson 3y ago
The blog does a great job describing the overall arc of corporate capture of government regulatory agencies and trade policies. As other people here have said, it could have included more concrete examples - doubling the size of the article with more examples would be good. Still, well written.
I have been totally captured by the Apple ecosystem and I am not always happy about that. I am more mellow about Google because I pay for the Google services that I use and love (YouTube with no advertisements and YouTube Music, GCP, Colab). I feel that my relationship with Google is transactional under terms I like well enough. I don’t use Google Search.
Off topic, but this blog is on ProtonMail’s domain and I personally think ProtonMail+Calendar+Cloud Storage should get some sort of “most improved product” award. I have been a paying Proton customer for a very long time, but for the last 6 years I have mostly used either Gmail, Apple mail, or FastMail as my primary email with my personal domain. In the last 3 or 4 months I have gone back to using ProtonMail as my primary email provider, and for me it is now 100% “good enough.” Enough small improvements to satisfy me.
I would like to talk more about digital independence and freedom, so I am going to go try to find a Reddit community for this.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoSearch Reddit manually didn’t much help, but Bing+ChatGPT suggested: /r/privacy, /r/degoogle, /r/deapple/, /r/free software, /r/privacytoolsIO, /r/LinageOS
- hansvm 3y agoEven when paying, Google scares me a bit for anything important. Just last night I switched ISPs, and Google seems to have re-enabled 2FA via God-knows-what Android device and doesn't have a way to disable it (even after logging back in through a network where they trust me more). It's the kick in the pants I needed to finally de-Google.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoYou make a good point. Even being careful to always have a printout Google's onetime login codes, we hear enough stories of people being locked out of their accounts. I do a few things to mitigate this possibility: 1. about 3 times a year I do a Google Takeout data dump. 2. I forward my Gmail (which I don't use much) to my main email. 3. I love YouTube Music, especially music with videos, but I have purchased the MP3s for my 200 favorite songs and I will always have those. 4. If YouTube 'went away' both my wife and I would be very unhappy, but we would get back a lot of free time.
- whitemary 3y agoSuggesting that so-called "corporate capture" is a new or recent phenomenon is incredibly ahistorical. This sort of nonsense could only persist in a nation that knows absolutely nothing of its own history.