[moritonal]

Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.

I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.

You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.

Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.

[nyx]

The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.

You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."

I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.

[moritonal]

Hey, you're right. When I said nothing will change them I guess I should have said "nothing will change the goals of a company" apart from your money. The practicalities are hugely affected by law. Maybe I should have originally said "Vote with your money, lobby with your voice"?

[queenkjuul]

"everyone should just learn to live without a phone" is exactly the kind of bullshit that is clearly not feasible

[moritonal]

Hey, we don't argue like that here. I didn't say that. I said there isn't a business model yet that supports a phone with privacy. There are a few, and they'd force you to be creative on how you interact with certain apps, but you'd have what you wanted at a cost. Hell, I'm sure a Linux Phone with a bunch of crypto apps would work fine, suck for other reasons, but there you go.