unwarlikeExtortion

They are. It's a step in the right direction and I absolutely welcome it.

However, it's way overdue in my book, and the harm is im the waiting. It's much better to strike while the iron's still hot and avoid these issues. As is not waiting on improving accessibility.

I'm also intrigued by the fact Google makes such custom devices for the market. I think I came across some explanations lurking (and sometimes popping my head out and commenting) here on Lemmy (and on Reddit before the API apocalypse), but I don't really have anywhere to point you in your search other than Libredirect+Reddit since searching Lemmy has always proven an uncatchable golden goose to me.

There are a few issues with there being... a single ideal privacy option line of devices (the Pixels):

• the pixel isn't available for sale in all regions
• there are only so much Pixels out there.. Meaning less options to choose from and potentially higher prices
• people using them stand out... So much so some agencies treat Pixel users like criminals even if they don't have Graphene on it
• Google may choose to end the Pixel line, drastically limit production or remove some feature Graphene relies upon any time they feel like

Having more vendor choice drastically lowers these negatives. And I can't really think of any negatives for the other side than increased dev time and operating costs.

Having the privacy features trickle down to other devices is great since some already landed in AOSP.

However, the trickle down is slow (and often a myth). And some protection is better than no protection.

Why are a multitude of poor options better than a few good options?

Is anything other than a Pixel a poor option?

They may be suboptimal but... Some hardening is definitely better than no hardening any day of the week.

What actively blocking "okay" or even "good" options when "the perfect" one exists should be plainly obvious.

Privacy-consciousness will never spread. Which also has negative effects on the privacy-conscious. Namely point 3 of my little list.

I'd choose gold. AFAIK most all money laundering rules deal with cash.

Even if a geine were to give you 500 tons of cash or gold, some governments may have a problem with that and choose to redistribute it.

Choosing gold makes the value much more liquid in my opinion.

Not to mention that gold doesn't rot (unlike USD). In today's economy gold is probably more value-dense (as in, a pound of gold is worth more than a pound of hundered-dollar bills).

Currencies also come and go but gold stays. If you're thinking long-term, gold is the vastly better choice.

reCAPTCHA protects. your privacy

I love how they used that period. Seems way better than that lawyer guy from the Simpsons.

Well...

A data center is... A data center. So a central plave for data.

It isn't called Data Warehouse, Data Industrual Plant or Data Mega Shop.

So - if the place is... a central place for the town people's data (as in OC's cases)....

Wouldn't "Data Center" be a fitting name?

So what?

As if the US government or US compabies don't play the same "underhanded" tactics to harm competition.

Selling at a loss to earn market share is a perfectly valid strategy for US corpos. Why is China supposedly doing the exact same thing suddenly not as nice?

So... a "Make sure all votes are for the only true candidate" army?

And... They didn't communicate this with you beforehand?

Yeah.

Edge still has its problems, but it's nowhere near the hot mess it wass in 2015 when it was basically a reskinned IE. Once they switched to Chromium it was still a hot mess, butit did get polished and has all the features you'd expect of a modern browser.

That being said, Edge is the main innovator behind built-in AI chats and similar bloat, which Chrome also likes to shove down people's throats.

And although the feature has existed as a Firefox addon for ages, I think the first browser to support tab groups and horizontal tabs was Edge.

So since both are pretty on-par feature (and bloat) wise, run the same engine and are made and maintained by billion-dollar corpos gobbling user data, both seem like two sides of the same coin.

So for 'normies', it pretty much boils down to which ecosystem you're more ingrained - that will make you prefer Edge or Chrome.

Us lunatics on Linux and/or ActivityPub prefer an independent option.

Still. A civilized society doesn't give every single person in a uniform the licence to tackle, kill and assault whomever without facing any real consequences. Sure, the money's nice, but not getting tackled would've surely been much more civilized.

Aunt Tifa hit a double-jackpot. Second, the money. But first and foremost - she's still alive. She's also white, which might have more causal relationships with her getting said jackpot than should be the case in a civilized society.

The problem is that not everyone has either her luck or her complexion.

When the company's immune to accountability [...] backlash changes nothing.

Not really. Backlash is important because it shows there's an alternative. And not to the company - the company won't change. But its users, customers and consumers just might.

It creates publicity, which triggers people to talk and think about the issue.

Which is a good thing as well as a driver of change.

Boycotts are also effective. The only problem is, huge companies have their fingers in multiple jars (industries, brands, etc.) and their main customers are other companies.

This gives them a great dose of stability. But if people were to suddenly boycott all of say Nestle's brands, stores wouldn't order new Nestle stock.

There's also no need for extreme backlash in some cases. Just look at Walmart or Microsoft.

Microsoft is bleeding users at a record rate. Sure, the year of the Linux desktop is still not here, but Linux market share has been rising dramatically lately. Why?

Because Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot.

Walmart is a similar story.

There's something about huge consumer-facing companies that makes them extremely vulnerable to losing focus and falling out with consumers.

If some more Boeings fell out of the sky and not just one or two a few years ago, airlines would be looking to clear thenselves of all Boeing stock. This wouldn't even need backlash.

Backlash is a source of bad PR. And bad PR causes customer loss. That's profit loss. That's a bad credit score. Hell, even the government might take a look and find some issues they'd like to check out!

As you can see, this can all spiral out of proportion.

And backlash is the first step in this story.

Well, I was thinking along the lines of, if you fall for a crypto scam, 24 h does nothing about it.

If someone calls as a Nigerian Prince and you want to buy in, a cooldown won't help either.

If someone impersonates your close family, it just might. But I imagine scammers are smart enough to dissuade the victim from calling the known number with a reasonable excuse. Then the cooldown wouldn't help in this situation either. Something something scammers being good and all that.

And even if we disregard all that, there's always the option of having the switch have no cooldown if set during initial device setup. Afterwards - sure. Give a 24 or 48 hour cooldown.

If someone wants it immidiately - they can do a factory reset.

But the problem is - this is not what's being done. What is being done is the start of a 72 hour cooldown, then 1 week, then 3 months, then no option to switch off at all. This is what I'm against, and what most other Lemmings are.

And to top it off - acting like this to "protect users" is a slippery slope of ignorance in and of itself.

You see, putting users under a glass dome (what all these "security" measures are) takes away their knowledge. With enough hand-holding ("security" or otherwise), they end up dumb, ignorant and incompetent.

"With great power comes great responsibility". Well, the opposite is also true: "With no power comes no responsibility".

And such powerless users are the ones who will, ironically, fall for ALL the scams.

The ones who are so "protected" that they have no common sense idea of how and what their phone does.

Once "logic" turns to "magic", you're in for a wild ride.

Because, even if they do know (which most won't), they won't be able to prevent the scam.

Why?

Because they're mostly locked out of and don't have posession of their phone.

They may be the owners, but Google is the one who can do what it wants with the phone. Not the user.