I’m willing to bet that the people who switch to Firefox for ad-blockers and ad-free YouTube aren’t the kinds of people who are donating much to Mozilla. People in online forums talk a big game about wanting to pay for products and not be the product. But it seems like people don’t really want to pay any meaningful amount of money for a browser.

What are you talking about? Google does not give law enforcement information without a warrant or valid subpoena.

https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/9713961?hl=en#zippy=%2Chow-does-google-handle-government-requests-for-user-information

You clearly have no idea how any of this works and are fear mongering based on sound bites you may have heard. I work in this field and I know that Google (at least in the US) won’t just hand over data without a valid warrant or subpoena. Now this can be a FISA warrant where the defendant (imo) doesn’t have proper due process rights, but it is still a court order requiring them to comply.

Yeah, I realize it’s worse than that… When did I say otherwise? I even started off the comment by stating that Apple and Google’s privacy features were made for anti-competitive reasons, not to benefit the consumer.

Your type of fear-mongering isn’t really helpful though. It just makes people feel powerless to large corporations and makes people try to address the wrong issues. It’s important to accurately state what they are collecting and how they are using that data. We spent a decade complaining about Google not respecting privacy and selling data and what we got was Google gaining even more power. Because, that wasn’t what Google was doing or their end goal.

To say they are part of it kind of implies they even had a choice. When Yahoo tried to fight being a part of the program they were going to be fined $250k a day.

Only for things that are on Google’s servers. If you have something that’s on-device police will use something like Cellbrite to access it.

The vast majority of stuff Google has on their servers isn’t really all that useful to law enforcement anyway and Google requires a search warrant before handing it over. And they generally notify the user when it happens (when legally allowed to do so). Most useful would probably be location data, but law enforcement can also get similar information from cell phone companies (who are much more carefree about handing over subscriber data).

Google and Apple are both actually kind of a pain to deal with for warrant related stuff. In my line of work, I most often see subpoenas for cell phone providers and social media records as those are much easier to get.

People often act like Google is just handing out user user data to the highest bidder, but that really misunderstands their profit model. They are very protective of user data. Google does not like to give it out so that only they can be the ones to profit off of the data.

From what I’ve heard it’s been harder for law enforcement to get into Android phones now.

Also, the whole privacy features only make Apple’s data gathering more valuable because they become the only ones that can access that information. Google caught on and is doing the same thing with their privacy features. Privacy features are nice, but it’s naive to think that Apple and Google don’t have other ulterior motives with implementing them.

Excellent take, but in defense of the AB PR team, I don’t think they were expecting so much backlash from giving a 6 pack of beer to a trans person. I think it was just a small promotion they were doing and they were not anticipating this blowing up into something big. Right wing Twitter caught wind of it and made it a much bigger deal than it was.

No thanks. If this is remotely successful these fucks will next use it to Minority Report us.

Windows is constantly nagging you to switch to Edge when you use a non-Edge browser but apparently Nadella is totally cool with that.

Letting your child touch something hot (like a stove) to teach them a lesson is in itself physical abuse…

Love the double standard. When you do this as a passenger to get a cheaper fare the airliner will ban you for life.

Like that “American” girl that joined ISIS and tried to come back but then the courts were like… actually we don’t think you’re an American citizen. Have fun in Syria!

Because your comment suggests that heat pumps can’t work in Canada. It’s like an American dismissing heat pumps because Alaska is part of the US. For at least 70% (if not more like 90%) of Canadians, heat pumps work just fine. Obviously, if you are in the part of Canada that gets consistently below -40 degrees, don’t get a heat pump.

Also, I’m not from Toronto or Canadian so I’m not sure all that talk about elitism applies to me. I’m from a small city in the US where I experience weather similar to most Canadians.

Which would account for 5-10% of the Canadian population. Just the three metros I mentioned would account for 35% of Canadians. The record low for the coldest of those cities (Montreal) is -36F, but the average low in January is 7F.

70% of Canadians live south of the 49th parallel (the northernmost point of the Continental US) and 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.

Tbf, most Canadians don’t live in those areas. Places like Toronto/Montreal/Vancouver rarely get that cold.

I need this premise expanded into a book or movie.

For that to even remotely be an issue there would need to be millions of moon landings. If we reach that point we could probably easily yeet our fecal waste into deep space if we needed to.

Reddit has toxic positivity with regards to Starfield. I find the comments I’ve read here so far to be a much more measured take. Basically that it’s a good game but it has a few minor issues that make it not live up to what was advertised.

Cause a lot of indie devs are also idiots when it comes to business decisions. Many (especially solo devs) didn’t get into the industry to make boatloads of money; they are often creative types who are passionate about their work.