[5636588]

Defeatism and cynicism are simply excuses for complacency. If you think companies like Microsoft are exploiting your data, don't just whine about it; take action. Your passivity won't stop them; stricter regulations and public pressure will. Just the other day, Microsoft decided to decouple Teams from the Office Suite in an attempt to preempt a potential antitrust penalty from the European Union. It's just one example of how a regulatory body can influence how companies conduct their business.

[c4mpute]

On the one hand, yes, in that one example it worked. After quite a while, during which the competition already suffered massively.

On the other hand, triple nope. E.g. the council of German GDPR enforcers declared most of Windows and Microsoft Office unfit for use in public offices and companies. https://www.wbs.legal/it-und-internet-recht/datenschutzrecht... or https://datenschutzbeauftragter-dsgvo.com/dsgvo-teil-2-micro...

But nobody cares, everyone just ignores those kinds of decisions and continues to not get fined because as especially the second link shows, "its complicated". Nobody even knows which agreements with Microsoft are actually valid for which license, software and situation. At the same time, for all the office drones, Microsoft software is just "the standard" and nobody even considers switching. It is just a complete refusal to get compliant by all the public offices, let alone private companies.

[edgyquant]

The only reason Europe has successfully enacted such laws and pushed back against big tech is because it isn’t dominated by European companies. The US has no economic incentive to do the same.