[luckylion]

> Do I trust Microsoft more to protect my long-term interest than some unknown group of open source maintainers?

Do you? I don't. Microsoft is exclusively profit-oriented, they'll sell all your information in a heartbeat if they believe to have a legal way to do it and that it won't kill them in the next 5 years.

A group of open source maintainers (the more radical the better) will not. They will (usually) not polish the product as well, and they might be difficult to deal with if you found an issue (but you _can_ talk to them, unlike Microsoft).

I definitely trust open source people more, because they do their thing for ideological reasons and based on principles, not to maximize engagement and ad-spend and their yearly bonus.

[inquirerGeneral]

Your concerns are the same that I had up until about 3 years ago when Microsoft and Google changed everything because at least at Google they do not care about your actual data because they can aggregate and anonymize it and a level that nobody else in the entire world can.

This is why it's way more dangerous to give data to even open source apps that are encrypted and secure because if they ever do change your privacy policy and you don't pay attention to it, they could say they start selling your data and you continue to agree to it.

[bigbob2]

That's why I like using a system which gives me control over which updates I want to receive. I'm not forced to take updates on an operating system which can also change the privacy policy on me and has done so in the past.

[salawat]

The Stockholm Syndrome is strong with this one. The fact they pitch their skills at anonymizing and aggregating data doesn't change the fact you can't trust Google to not utilize data exfiltration techniques in the first place. Your argument about open source license changes applies just as much, if not moreso to Google as well.

Have you really thought through that all the way?