I understand anti-government sentiment but whenever I see a statement like this it makes me devalue anything that comes after it. You really think there is nothing a foreign government might do with your personal data that your government hasn't already done? You really feel like there's a similar level of accountability at stake?
As I understand it, the claim is not that the US/UK are as evil as Russia, or even more or less morally equivalent. The claim is that the US/UK hoover up online information just like Russia (maybe even more), and that they are more exposed to what the US/UK governments do than they are to what Russia does.
Without minimizing the misdeeds of Russia, without resorting to (false) moral equivalence, it's still a defensible point. (Mind you, I'm not sure I agree with it. But it's defensible.)
When millions of us give them our data these kinds of attacks become easier and easier.
But the GRU isn't going to come to my door and arrest me because I searched on the wrong thing, even if I use Yandex. So in that sense, I'm insulated from what they know about me.
I am indeed more afraid of what my own country can do with my data than foreign countries, especially Russia.
What's the phrase... letting perfect be the enemy of good? We'll never be perfect. So by that logic we won't ever be able to criticise anyone, even if their record is considerably worse than our own.
> The US collects so much data about everyone, but people seem to find that ok. On the other hand, Russia collecting data is outrageous. This is such a weird thinking tbh.
The US government is accountable to US citizens. There are regular elections where they can vote out a government that acts against their wishes. They have no such power over Russia, an aggressive power currently waging war against a US ally. Equivalence is the weird thinking, IMO.
I don't think this applies. When it comes to privacy of its citizens, there is no 'good' in the anglosphere. In the US we have a constitutional amendment specifically about the government not snooping but it's effectively moot. There is no respect given at all to the privacy of citizens by government.
In any case, I'm not wanting to get political here, which doesn't make sense, but it's pretty new to me that Ukraine, or for that matter, any european eastern country is our "ally" (US/EU/UK) what we merely did the last 20 years is exploiting them to get what we need (e.g. precious metals, oil and stuff), just as we're doing with Africa.
I get your point about critics, but we condemn, accuse and create conflicts around things we do just the same as Russia. All this, is creating a huge mess and threat of very very severe escalation, that will probably impact Humanity in its entirety. So, in some sense, it's scary and outrageous to see that we (stupid) humans cannot get along.
(answering to the OP) Yes, there is nothing the Russians can do with my data that my government hasn't done.
>Depends how good the search is. Google doesn’t seem to want to provide me proper results anymore, even very basic image search tasks on google now net you only about 20 results all of which are wrong or useless. Yandex image search actually works.
Same, google is either doing this on purpose to then launch the "saving" LLM or they're just forgetting how to do it, google images is unusable and when it is everything is a .webp. And google search is a pay to win, you type "official python documentation" and the whole first page is full of geekforgeeks and other sponsored websited, and don't even get me started on facts/news where it just shamelessly turns into a propaganda machine.
Yandex is at least gives you 5 or 6 good results before it starts showing things in Russian.