There are, unfortunately, a lot of abuses people will tolerate in the name of convenience, especially if those abuses aren't readily apparent and affecting them directly at the time they learn about them.
The alternative is not running any proprietary tech. This would require people to give up a lot of convenience, build their own tech stack, make tools where none exist, etc. Doable for most on this forum I'd suspect, not really feasible for the population at large so the choice is even worse for them: be spied on, or abstain from using technology all together.
Its a captive audience, and why advocating for privacy is such a difficult, losing battle. People aren't going to stop using Windows because of this, so Microsoft has no incentive to do anything differently. Same goes for Meta, Google, Apple, etc.
Even for myself, I've gotten really lazy over the years and have traded quite a bit of my computing freedoms for the Apple device ecosystem's convenience factors. And that's the trap. When even the people who understand exactly what they're giving up still choose the golden handcuffs, the market has no incentive to change.
A typical phone operator records the data your phone sends to them on their servers. They're just lucky enough to have the absolutely unique ID of your phone number. Don't confuse this with something else. Microsoft and Google don't have the authority to create an ID for your computer unless they allow me to use that ID to make calls to your computer.
The alternative is not running any proprietary tech. This would require people to give up a lot of convenience, build their own tech stack, make tools where none exist, etc. Doable for most on this forum I'd suspect, not really feasible for the population at large so the choice is even worse for them: be spied on, or abstain from using technology all together.
Its a captive audience, and why advocating for privacy is such a difficult, losing battle. People aren't going to stop using Windows because of this, so Microsoft has no incentive to do anything differently. Same goes for Meta, Google, Apple, etc.
Even for myself, I've gotten really lazy over the years and have traded quite a bit of my computing freedoms for the Apple device ecosystem's convenience factors. And that's the trap. When even the people who understand exactly what they're giving up still choose the golden handcuffs, the market has no incentive to change.