Almost anyone who cares about their privacy should be able to Google how to improve it, find an article about VPNs, and sign up for Nord VPN (pretty user friendly and commercials everywhere). Dive just slightly deeper and you can find information on DNS and set the VPN to use the DNS you were recommended.

Most people don't care enough to even ask the questions. Creating competing services were the value differentiation is privacy (likely at the trade off of cost or quality) is bound to fail for that same reason.

You're proving my point, that users have to be protected by software engineers in the same way that pedestrians know nothing of civil engineering but trust that bridges are safe to walk on, and aren't to blame when they fail. It's not a marketing or FOMO issue, it's a matter of culture within our profession and way of life as engineers.

No, that would be a matter of law. Bridges aren't safe because some group of engineers wants safe bridges. They have to meet safety standards set by the government, the engineers need license issued by the government, etc. If you want privacy, you need to change the law to grant it. Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile. People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers.

Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up. I don't know about you, but in my current country I have absolutely zero representation with the current oligarchy.

> Trying to make some end-run around market forces is futile

Market forces and the law are two different things, which one are you arguing?

> People en masse aren't going to pay for a service with privacy when they can get a free version that does the same stuff but blasts them with ad trackers

I never suggested anyone pay for anything, this is a straw man argument.

I don't understand your aggressive stance against engineers building better, open alternatives to current offerings. The market is getting hungrier for it, and if a product is genuinely better, "market forces" will do their thing, no run-around needed.

You are mischaracterizing my stances. Please go back and read the comments.

I'm not sure how else to interpret them. Would you like to try clarifying your point?

The workflow goes like this -> R&D -> rl testing -> if broken with deaths -> law to prevent it from happening again

But.. it's a chicken-egg problem. Has there been a law for prevention before an incident happened or is the law formulated after something happens?

.. it's naive to think and say

> Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up.

If it were like this, then no house would be destroyed by earth quake like in Turkey somewhen 2-3 years ago - and Turkey did pass a law some 10 years ago to prevent cheap buildings in earth quake areas.

No bridge would've collapse in Germany - the laws in Germany are one of the toughest making construction very expensive.

And there are much more examples in real world that opposes your "Okay, you can work on changing the law, and the rest of us can work on just building infrastructure now and not waiting for the law to catch up."

The problem is no one wants to pay much money for the better quality, if a little less in quality will do similar job. Compare housing and housw building costs in US and western Europe/Germany.

So, your engineers can do the best things and the market decides. .. yes, ma‘am!

All of those examples are irrelevant because we are talking about software, which is much, much different than your physical examples. Get back to me when we can have open source, community-maintained roads and bridges which can be copied, forked and modified to suit anyone's needs.