I feel like positioning the ‘average person’ as always disengaged or never doing enough reads more like an attempt to define in/out groups than a genuine effort to actually do anything about the problem.

Disagree. I think everyone deserves a reasonable degree of privacy and interoperability and choice as a protected right, within the markets and services we already have.

I don’t think this is true. Most people do care, in my anecdotal experience. I am not in tech circles. It is not a niche thing to be concerned about these days.

Actually, good news, they have! Google just lost its search monopoly trial with the US government, and they seem to be about to lose their advertising monopoly trial too. The US FTC also just released a report (not a legal action) concluding that all the big companies have abused data collection and recommended that the government do something to make those practices unprofitable for companies. I know the EU has also been doing some significant stuff, both against apple specifically and big gatekeeper companies generally. You can certainly argue it’s not enough, and I would agree with you - but it’s given me some optimism that more action and real enforcement might be in the near future in many countries.

People always say shit like this as if people don’t have a multitude of different life circumstances that affect and coerce how they interact with technology. That’s just how capitalism works. It’s not a matter of willpower. Privacy Bootstraps Theory is unhelpful. Being able to completely opt out of entrenched tech monopolies is a privilege. It’s great that you can do that, not everybody can.

It’s excellent that alternatives and ad blockers do exist but we need regulatory action to hold companies accountable for things that are designed to worsen user experience to pressure people into paying. It’s also a serious accessibility issue, to increasingly have everything be bright and loud and motion filled and unpausable all the time. This trend goes beyond YouTube and it sucks, we need to regulate this nonsense.

How tricky is this to install and use? I have a samsung and use lots of the usual apps. Wondering if it would be feasible for that purpose.

No, thanks for the clarification. I misunderstood that part.

I genuinely don’t even know where to buy an affordable device that is free from this kind of control. Some company always has outsized control (and in some cases arguably surveillance) over anything you can find on the market. It sucks so bad.

Ew. Fuck google

Disagree. These companies are exploiting an unfair power dynamic they created that people can’t say no to, to make an ungodly amount of money for themselves without compensating people whose data they took without telling them. They are not creating a cool creative project that collaboratively comments on or remixes what other people have made, they are seeking to gobble up and render irrelevant everything that they can, for short term greed. That’s not the scenario these laws were made for. AI hurts people who have already been exploited and industries that have already been decimated. Copyright laws were not written with this kind of thing in mind. There are potentially cool and ethical uses for AI models, but open ai and google are just greed machines.

Edited * THRICE because spelling. oof.

I honestly think it’s about degrading the right to free expression. But yes also probably. The people who cast women and kids as pawns in need of protection are usually not super respectful to the real women/kids in their lives.

Pretty sure the normalization of sexual violence and harmful attitudes came from the adults in my life. If parents and teachers adequately teach kids to identify those things and know that they are unequivocally wrong, then teens who see unhealthy stuff in porn will notice and be critical of it. Probably indignant, too, since no one is more justice focused than a teen who has just learned something about the world.

The issue is backward ideas about relationships being reinforced by adults, either through active misogyny or just never talking about it. This argument boils my blood because the porn itself is not the problem. Awful attitudes about relationships and women start very early and they often come directly from parents themselves.