[m463]

I stopped using consumer reports online because they LOST their independence.

Their website connected very intimately with the sales channels and they made their money from referrals.

This reminds me of apple touting privacy, while simultaneously tracking all your activity with little or no recourse.

[jcoq]

> connected very intimately

Do you mean hyperlinks?

They're not hiding anything: https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/about-us/our-partners/co...

[m463]

I used to subscribe to the physical magazine and I thought they had much higher standards.

They accepted no advertising in their magazine. They bought cars independently, and tested them as customers.

I think their "adaptation" to the internet might have been necessary to survive, but I believe it made them less objective.

[bigmattystyles]

It’s like how VPN providers say to use them to protect yourself from your ISP. Don’t get me wrong, Comcast has its many many issues, but I still trust them more than I would most VPNs. I guess it’s easier to create anonymity with VPNs, but still, most people just think they have a VPN so they’re good.

[kerkeslager]

The word "trust" is pretty meaningless in a void--if you can't answer "trust to do what?" I think you're missing some nuance to the concept.

For example, I trust my parents to do what they think is best for me, because I have decades of experience showing that is genuinely their goal. But would I trust my father to perform open-heart surgery on me? Absolutely not! The man doesn't have a medical degree of any kind.

With corporations, my trust is largely based on their incentives.

I trust Comcast not to sell my credit card data to Nigerian scammers, because they're clearly making more money by being a cable provider than they would by being a credit card data darknet wholesaler, and selling my credit card data to Nigerian scammers would put their more profitable business at risk.

VPNs... might sell my credit card data to Nigerian scammers, because their profit margins aren't as high and their reputations are already not great.

I don't trust Comcast not to report my metadata to the NSA or to reject MPAA requests for torrent data, because they already did both those things and have incentives to continue.

I trust VPNs to request MPAA requests for torrent data, because as soon as that became known it would hurt their business model. I don't trust VPNs not to report my metadata to the NSA because acting as a honey trap for the NSA could be pretty profitable and probably wouldn't become public, so it wouldn't hurt their business model.

[bradknowles]

In contrast, I would trust almost any VPN provider far more than I do Comcast or any other major ISP that I know of. AT&T has already had major litigation against them for their activities with deep packet inspection, injecting their own ads, and blocking or traffic shaping other sites on the Internet that compete with services that AT&T wants to sell you instead (like Netflix). And Comcast is far worse in this space than AT&T.

[KyeRussell]

This particular situation feels sufficiently far from the original point that I’d say it isn’t that fair a comparison.