I wonder what the "free-market" types will say to minimize criticisms like those in this thread once everything that can possibly be purchased requires bending over for this sort of abuse.

Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?

How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?

I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.

They will say what they said before. The market spoke. Your concerns are abnormal. Stop complaining.

Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.

I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.

You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.

Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.

"everyone should just learn to live without a phone" is exactly the kind of bullshit that is clearly not feasible

Hey, we don't argue like that here. I didn't say that. I said there isn't a business model yet that supports a phone with privacy. There are a few, and they'd force you to be creative on how you interact with certain apps, but you'd have what you wanted at a cost. Hell, I'm sure a Linux Phone with a bunch of crypto apps would work fine, suck for other reasons, but there you go.

The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.

You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."

I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.

Hey, you're right. When I said nothing will change them I guess I should have said "nothing will change the goals of a company" apart from your money. The practicalities are hugely affected by law. Maybe I should have originally said "Vote with your money, lobby with your voice"?

Basically impossible, or at best very impractical. Companies change their product after you buy them. This is not a hypothetical - this happens all the time. It happened to you, and to me.

My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.

Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.

These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.

Completely agree that this kind of behaviour should be illegal. My thoughts are products should work from purchase with their offered feature-set (or be forced to recall), have a factory reset mode, and an opt-out of updates.

People voting with their wallets is exactly how we got where we are today.

I always was told that, but I hardly believe that can work. You have to at least also do a viral YT video like the OP too or rather really have competent, independent media with a good reach doing product reviews.