4 ms·

And why should we? It should all be "allow" and not "block". Machine should be serving _us_ the buyers/users. I could never understand why my Windows Explorer

• thih9 2y ago
  > Machine should be serving _us_ the buyers/users. Yes. But every now and then consumers get a tempting offer and trade a bit of their freedom for lower price, more comfort, more prestige, or something else. I.e. in practice buyers don’t mind that much and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well.
  • dietr1ch 2y ago
    Consumers don't get told prices are down because of privacy going away. Prices going down on technology is the norm, so it's not even suspicious.
  • toofy 2y ago
    > … and likely also don’t understand the difference and the consequences that well. this could be a very good argument to explain why so many have become skeptical of companies. we have example after example where companies take advantage of people. hearing my grandfathers generation go on about “the days when you could trust a company to be fair” i used to think they were seeing with rose-tinted glasses, but more and more im convinced we’re dealing something much more nefarious than that generation.
    • FredPret 2y ago
      Companies used to hire Pinkerton detectives to put down strikes and make employees use company stores. Behaviour has improved for various reasons. All we’re seeing now is that people’s technological surface area is expanding from zero to infinity so there are lots of new little cracks and edge cases society still has to sort out.
    • kjellsbells 2y ago
      > the days when you could trust a company to be fair Those days never really existed. It was simply that their misbehavior affected groups of people who didnt have access to the media and power structures. For the US, e.g.: central Americans (banana company inspired coups), native tribes (water pollution, deforestation), poor whites (coal ash pollution), etc. I can see that companies treated their employees better, but that might also be correlated with strong unions, less regulatory capture, more competition, or some other factor, rather than intrinsic goodness.
  • account42 2y ago
    This is a false narrative. There is never any active consumer choice.
    • naikrovek 2y ago
      of course there is. it just takes a lot of people to make the good choices, and when money is tight, that is very hard for people to do en masse. this is part of the trend lately that has money flowing upwards and not back down again. if the end-user/customer is at the bottom, wages they're paid are what go into the economy and do the work that money does all the way up the chain of commerce until it reaches some rich guy shaped like a sphere who smokes cigars and laughs maniacally all the time. but because he's been tightening budgets on all the companies he's on the boards of, the employees of those companies get less money every year to spend on things. so more of the money stays in his hands. so customers have necessarily less choice on things they can buy and choices they can make in the marketplace. eventually people get laid off or fired and now they have no money to do anything with and in the end take any job they can, if they aren't found by some employer before then. so they have less and less agency while the people selling things have more and more and more. the end result of this is that we will become pets of the bourgeois which is exactly what they want. they not only have a need to win (which is fine by itself) but a need for all others to lose (which is not ok in any way) and they can never ever be happy with what they have. I truly wish I had not had children. Life is going to be hard for them.
• miki123211 2y ago
  This is not what the vast majority of people want. People want security issues patched, preferrably without them having to do any work or even know about it (because they won't do the work and get annoyed at popups they don't feel like they need). People want bugs fixed (and crash reports do actually help with that, despite what some say). People want companies to prioritize the features that they're using and fix places where users get "stuck", and that's much easier with telemetry. People will almost always choose free shit over products they have to pay for, and for many products, free only works if you know what ads the user should see.
  • Xelbair 2y ago
    there's thin line between 'autoupdates consisting of security patches and bugfixes' and 'we will extract every piece of data we can and possibly remove features with no way to rollback'. most apps fall into the latter, into the network blackhole they go. You give them an inch, they take everything. You cant even get away from this by paying (and i'm willing to to so!) because people who actually are willing to pay are the most valuable ones to advertisers - so the incentives are there to extract even more value in such case. In case of products from outside of software domain there's this consumer assumption that product does the thing and just the thing - food doesn't try to poison you, toys are just toys and so on. they are aware of tradeoffs - something's cheaper, it might be less safe, less featured or maybe made a bit worse. 99% of modern software is user hostile first - data extraction and maximizing value for adverts and then it might do a bad job of actually fulfilling its purpose, with updates usually making it worse over time, or jacking up prices in form of monthly subscription instead of license sale.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    Of course security issues are usually highly mitigated already by not having internet access on the device. And the vast majority of people hate ads like me.
    • dspillett 2y ago
      > And the vast majority of people hate ads like me. I don't mind respectful¹ ads, and refrain from using sponsorblock & similar. What I object to, and actively block, is the stalking that is endemic in the ad industry and is in no way respectful. ---- [1] i.e. not the pop-ups/-unders of yore, not those that autoplay video or, worse, audio, not those that otherwise interfere with the normal use of the page I'm trying to look at, stalking etc.