This is status quo for every large corporation. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM, Roku.... They all, ALL, push boundaries to see what they can get away with to not only sell you something, but also make you the thing they sell. Sometimes they're bold enough to make it public what they're doing, sometimes, it's a leak that happens when people find out how little the company actually cares about it's users (Apple, so many user data leaks).
My bigger concern is that almost every company now has it in their contracts/terms of services, that all users are not allowed to participate in a lawsuit, be it class action, or court case against them Most of them even have a maximum sue limit too! There's a lot that have a rule that initial arbitration cannot have a lawyer, but that won't be enforced.
I love it when Apple pushes advertising that touts their focus on privacy... when in reality, they're breaching user privacy in all the ways that every other company does.
A big reason Apple focuses on privacy and apps not being able to track the user is because they want to keep all that data for themselves. None of the restrictions they've introduced apply to first-party apps. It gives them ad targeting data that no other company can collect. They do have their own ad network (for things like ads in the App Store), and last I heard, they wanted to expand it.
Apple ensures its operating systems are clean, polished, and without bloat.
Except for all the uninstallable Apple bloat such as Apple Music, Apple TV, etc. And the numerous bugs and issues, such as still not being able to have the touch pad and mouse scroll wheel have different settings.
I remember when everyone was complaining about how terrible Safari is. The lead developer started having a go and ranting on Twitter, saying that raising bug reports is not constructive feedback.
Safari is still a pain for frontend developers to deal with. At least IE6 was a static target and we were well aware of all the bugs. Some of the bugs and workarounds even had names, like the "peekaboo bug" and the Holly Hack".
Safari is a moving target that has so many bugs and issues that none of the other major browsers have.
The main takeaway of this article about Microsoft's horrible decisions is "Apple bad"? OS flame wars really haven't gotten less ridiculous in the past decades...
Apple is not blameless but they are a shit-ton better than Microsoft. I have to have M$ for a few work apps but I’m primarily MacOS for desktop and Linux for everything server-side. I avoid M$ as much as possible.
Don't forget the fact they're locked onto luxury hardware, and you can't build your own flavor for it. Even worse is, notebook manufacturers copied them so much there's less variations among them. I was looking for some "subnotebook" as a potential portable PC, but I had like a few options (many of which would have included AliExpress junk), but there's an endless supply of same-looking 14-16" ones, that are thin ("real" portability according to techbros), lightweight, "desktop replacements", and run at a constant 95°C.
This raises an excellent point not considered. This goes for all texts as well if the other person uses the "your phone" app. Discord, matrix, signal, telegram etc are all compromised by this existing on a system.
Will my browser's "private mode" be respected or it is going to store every inappropriate thing I search?
Are password managers safe? How about bank security questions? How often are those actaully obfuscated. The last 4 digits of social security numbers are usually unobfuscated, which is also what a lot of intuitions (stupidly) use to verify your ID over the phone. What if I want to look at the PDF of my tax documents?
What if my HR manager has this enabled and starts viewing PDFs containing private information about employees, payroll data, finances and whatever else is sellable on the dark web.
How about govermnet data? Sure maybe the pentagon IT staff will completely block it, but what about local gov committee ABC that's collecting voter information?
That type of data is valuable enough that it will be targeted regardless of what protection MS attempts. Based on the fact they didnt bother encytping the data from the start, my faith is low.
The worst part is that Windows can do that, but Microsoft insists on enshittifying it. Like Windows 11 isn't that terrible if it wasn't for all of the data collection and advertisements and other shit.
I miss the Windows 7 days where you could download a stripped down ISO that was just the OS. It launched your programs of choice and didn't suck up your battery running unnecessary junk.
Last week, I went to a friend's house and asked to use her computer, which is still a core 2 duo with 2gb of ram and an hdd, running win7. I was a bit surprised to see her family having it as their only computer, but more surprised to see how fast it was. I expected to have the most laggish experience of my life, but it was.. smooth. I've used machines with much modern low end cpus, more ram and ssds that performed much worse than that on win10. The enshittification is real.
Yup. I can say for sure that SSDs were certainly a game changer, but now we have systems with like 10x the processing power that operate at the same speeds because the power has been spent on poorly optimized code and bloatware.
Sigh... I'm going to have to start fucking around with Linux, aren't I?
As a reminder this was the go-to play for Facebook when they were caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Default it off until nobody's looking and change it slightly so it was named 'differently' and on it went again.
MacOS is a highly mature, stable, and user-friendly OS that, at least for now, Apple does not meddle with in the same ways that MS has been doing with Windows. It has its problems, yes, but to say "any circumstance" is extreme. I don't like or agree with everything that Apple has done to MacOS but at least Apple isn't actively trashing it into the ground with forced bloat, ads, malware, etc like MS is doing.
They are definitely are starting to trash it with ads for their own services, user hostile behavior/dark patterns (try turning off Bluetooth and applying a software update, it will be magically back on), and have ruined the UI slowly turning it in to iOS.
I have used a Mac since 2007 (almost exclusively for work) and many of Apple's services during that time. I have not experienced any ads as you describe. As for Bluetooth magically turning back on after a software update, of course I do not know for certain, but that screams incompetence more than it screams intent. Apple most definitely has problems (where they build their hardware, policies they tried to enact and then backtracked, etc). And I'm not advocating for them like I am for Linux and other open source solutions. But if a normal user doesn't want to deal with some of the lingering complexities that Linux still has (which is a dwindling number), then a Mac is a relatively viable alternative and it does not come anywhere near as close to the privacy nightmare that Microsoft has become.
I am not tribal at all with respect to any of these entities. I have used all three OSes for the better part of 25 years. I have watched the ebbs and flows of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Canonical, Red Hat, and various FOSS solutions such as Linux, for a very long time. And I have had a front row seat seeing Apple's mistakes, Microsoft's mistakes, Canonical's mistakes, and so forth. And I feel I can judge with some semblance of realism and objectivity -- Microsoft has failed so hard with Recall and they are so out of touch with what users want, they deserve every bit of ire they are getting, and they deserve to have their market share diminish because of it. Aside from perhaps Google, and now Adobe, I haven't seen a technology company be so blatantly and willfully aggressive (and one could say, stupid) when it comes to these actions and topics.
The Bluetooth issue also happens on iOS, so I think it is an explicit choice, as Apple wants as many devices contributing to their Find My Network. It’s also the reason they changed control center on iOS to no longer turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, but to disconnect the current connections.
MS's frequent missteps - win11, total recall, ai inescapable etc., - may just finally catch up with them. While they continue to devour game studios and shut them down for irrational reasons, who knows?
Stop being so negative and open your mind. Hell, MS did, you can use bash on the command line now. Times do change.
Gradual shifts can snowball into huge shifts. a few years ago Linux gaming only existed for the dedicated crowd, that somehow managed to make it work. Now for many it is no different from their Windows experience for most games, sometimes even better.
Think of it like bubbles pressing against each other. It matters not only how much pressure your own bubble has, but also how much pressure the other bubbles have in finding the equilibrium. The Windows bubble isn't only weakening itself, the Linux bubble is getting stronger and stronger
I do think that the concept of recall is very interesting, I want to explore a FOSS version where you have complete ownership of your data in a secure manner
Yeah the concept is pretty damn cool. It's just horrifying to have a company own and control that data. I suspect this is like Xbox One launch disaster in 2013, in which Microsoft initially required all consoles to have an always-online connection. People rebelled, but today and certainly on our current trajectory, it now looks like Microsoft was just a little ahead of the curve. I think people will eventually become a lot more comfortable with companies owning their data because the benefits will be so enormous. I'm not happy about that future, but I think I understand it.
It seems to me that we've reached a crossroads. I've been very aware of the data mining, garden walls, data trading, privacy violations, security issues, ownership issues, etc. - for roughly 30 years. I regularly make the choice to be exploited for the benefits I extract, largely because the data they've gotten from me thus far I don't highly value. But the necessity to develop strategies to keep the devil's bargain beneficial has reached a fevered pitch. I want to train my own AI and public AIs. I want to explore the vast higher dimensional semantic spaces of generative models without API charges. APIs are vanishing as we speak, anyway, companies fearful of their data being extracted without compensation. Can't really sit on the Open/Closed fence anymore.
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