For some values of voluntary. You need to take into account marketing and other dishonest business practices perverting the transaction, and the fact that the market offers you a pretty binary choice: either accept the benefit with all the garbage, or don't have it at all. The alignment of interests is minimized to be just above the point below which people wouldn't buy.

I agree, we should be spending money with companies that have aligned their interests with ours, and refraining from spending money with companies that haven't aligned with our interests.

However, there's a problem with free services. Internet was largely free in the past and now it's still largely free - but now users are the product themselves. Interests are no longer aligned.

People happily pay premium prices for apple products, and they're interests are clearly not aligned. For instance, apple fights against the right to repair. I think this extends to a lot of companies.

Apple's consistently fought for privacy, though, and against ads and crapware. That's a good example: because you're paying a premium price for the product, they won't jeopardize those profits through contracts with other parties.

With the right-to-repair, your interests are definitely not aligned - each time you repair an iPhone, that's money you give to someone else that you're not giving to Apple. It's good to be aware of these situations - you'll never avoid all of them - but at least you can predict in which ways companies might try to screw you over and decide if you're okay with that.

The only reliable promise is someone else's self-interest.

It's never that simple unless you're buying something as simple as potatoes or a hammer.

With an iPhone I may find myself aligned on 5 points, and not aligned on 4, so perhaps I buy as being the least worst available. The iPhone, or other brand, with all 9 things I care about may never have been sold, even though technically and commercially feasible.

In the case of phones, no maker seems to care a jot about right to repair any more. So it's not deciding I'm OK being screwed over that way, but a choice of screwed that way or no phone.

The fact that their interests are not perfectly aligned does not mean they are not aligned. Apple is able to fight rights to repair because people love their products so much that they don't care. They have the leverage to be misaligned in one little area, because they are so overwhelmingly aligned everywhere else.

Only problem is, profit margins for hardware are tiny and the company will gladly sell your soul for an extra 1%.

"not aligned" or "unaligned"

non-English speaking down-voters I see ;)