[Cider9986]

>they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.

I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.

[observationist]

This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.

The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.

Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.

The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.