I mean, people are dying. Including the people who didn’t pay for it. So, kind of a bigger deal than that.

I look some clips of Star Trek Discovery but I didn’t like the first episode of the series

It changed so much in between episode one and the season featuring the Breen that I’m honestly not sure you’d recognize it.

Your mileage may vary about whether it’s better, but it’s absolutely different.

people were shocked that banks are businesses trying to maximize profits like any other business.

Because every ad they see talks about how respectable and responsible they are. Like I said above, they’ve spent billions trying to cultivate this level of obliviousness in their customers.

Still even if people are so ignorant that they are unaware of privacy issues, they have chosen to be willfully ignorant, because this issue has been talked about non stop for decades. For nothing to sieve in at some point, you have to be a special kind of willfully ignorant.

In our sphere, sure. But most people don’t live in our sphere. Most people don’t mainline tech news and privacy updates. A lot of “normal people” (i.e. people you meet dropping your kids off at school, or in line at the supermarket, or on a bus) would have trouble telling you the name of the company that made the phone they stare at for seventeen hours a day. Some of the smartest, most world-aware people I know couldn’t tell you the difference between “encrypted” and “password-protected.” The stuff that breaks through into the mainstream are the huge breaches, but the problem is always spun to be the hackers, or one guy in the IT department who did something wrong, or whatever, not the fact that they’re even collecting all of this data in the first place.

And this isn’t willful ignorance, it’s just not something they think applies to them. Maybe they bought the “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” line, but more likely they just don’t actively think about it at all. Like how, if you live inland, you probably rarely worry about tsunamis; they’re simply a reality, and they probably vaguely know about the danger, but they’re a fact of nature, there’s nothing they can do to change it, and it’s not a risk they face personally. That doesn’t make them willfully ignorant, it just means they think it’s something that really only matters to spies or whoever.

Even people that are very low information on technology, know that the Internet is a source of potential surveillance, and having your info on the internet in any form is a potential for being surveilled.

But usually only in the abstract. “Oh, as long as I just look for the lock in the top left of the browser, I’m ok.” They think the threat comes from hackers and foreign governments, not companies that make the funny cat meme service.

Everybody knows that all the big IT companies are trying to gather as much information as they can. And Amazon is right at the top among them.

No, I think you’re wrong about that, and I think that’s because–again–these companies have spent billions trying to convince people that they aren’t. Even in the rare cases that they do see a threat, they have completely the wrong idea about what the threat really is; think about those memes that go around from time to time saying “I hereby declare that Facebook doesn’t own my photos!” or whatever. Zuck doesn’t want their photos, he wants to be able to lock them and their friends in, he wants their personal data, and he wants exclusive, 24/7 access to their eyes so that he can cram personalized ads into them.

All of that advertising may not necessarily convince people that the company is good, but it might cast just enough doubt or confusion to get them to focus on the wrong issue.

And Amazon? If people have anything against Amazon, it’s probably just “oh, they’re trying to put mom & pop companies out of business!” (Which, in fairness, they are also doing). Do you think the average person knows that they even own Ring and Roomba and AWS? I would submit that a surprisingly large chunk of the population probably doesn’t even know that they own Alexa.

Not because they’re ignorant, just because (1) it doesn’t matter to them, and (2) they’ve been aggressively propagandized to not care.

Question is why they bought a Ring camera in the first place?

Probably because of marketing.

There is no way they can have been unaware that these gadgets can be accessed from outside.

(1) Clearly you’ve not talked to enough people outside the privacy-aware community. Absolutely they can have been unaware of that.

(2) They may well have known, but not known the scope, or not cared. If you’re having trouble with (for instance) porch pirates, you might not care about the privacy ramifications.

But it was only when the evidence was put right in their face they finally connected the dots?

Yes. When you don’t live and breathe this stuff, a lot of times that’s what it takes.

My mom used to use the same password for every service. It was a ten-letter password that she came up with in 1999, and she essentially never deviated from it; until I typed it in for her on haveibeenpwned and showed how many times it had been leaked. People who don’t care about privacy won’t care until they’re shown how it actually affects them.

So my answer is quite simple: Because they are stupid,

Profoundly uncharitable read on the situation. Are you “stupid” if you don’t know what you don’t know? We don’t have classes about this sort of thing in high school or anything. There are billions of dollars going toward telling people that sleazy products are actually great and companies actually care about their well-being, and only neckbeards like us on Lemmy spending $0 to tell them the opposite. If they’re not watching tech news because the regular news is too much, or because they have jobs and families and hobbies, or because they don’t know how to process or parse it, or just because they’re not interested and have never been convinced that they should be, they aren’t stupid, just propagandized.

and bought a sleazy product from a known sleazy company,

First of all, “sleazy” is a perfect word for this, and thank you for using it.

But second, keep in mind that for a lot of people, most companies are still responsible members of society; “pillars of the community,” and generally worthy of trust. It’s not because they’re dumb, it’s because they’ve been propagandized into believing it.

and when they found out it was in fact as sleazy as could be expected, they figured that maybe they didn’t want to to be voluntarily surveilled anyway.

People are waking up to the reality of big tech “convenience.” That’s a good thing. Don’t shoot at them for coming to their senses.

It’s kind of a weird game theory thing, because the industries affected aren’t consistently losing. A decision he makes on Wednesday can help the finance industry but hurt the tech industry, and then he can reverse it on Thursday and now the finance industry is tanking but the insurance industry is up. It’s tough to know who would work together to pull him out of office, because between any two given days, the people who have the money have different opinions on how he’s doing.

I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.

Whoa, that’s very impressive! The only one you missed was “p10y,” which is in fact “particularly.” (“Practically” would be “p9y.”) But honestly that’s still amazing.

That would be…what, an ampliviation scheme? (since it’s longer than the original word)

A4y, t2s i0s n1t p10y r6e a1d t3s m2h l4r t0o c5e.

This isn’t about the email marketers. I think you’ve got it in your head that this one guy is a scummy email marketer when he’s really just trying to let people who have opted in to getting email from him know when he has more stuff for sale.

Believe it or not, there are other uses for email lists that aren’t spam.

How is Amazon preventing customers from signing up? How even could they?

When Amazon scrapes the seller’s website for listing information and then circumvents the seller’s own storefront, they’re not giving the customer the information that (1) the seller has a website at all, or (2) the seller has a mailing list. This means that the customer will just never find out that information without looking for it, despite clearly being interested in the seller’s work (as they’re purchasing from the seller). It’s Amazon inserting themselves into the process so that they can skim some money off the top at best, or extort the seller for access to their customers at worst. And all of this while the seller has created the mailing list specifically to prevent such corporate malfeasance.

What he is saying is that he doesn’t get the customers email from the sale, to which he’d start to send marketing emails.

“customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said."

That’s not what he said.

You know, what pretty much every company does when you buy something.

Pretty much every big company, yes. Small businesses are pretty careful with that sort of thing, though, because unless they want to be dependent upon Facebook or Instagram or whatever for their entire lives, they have to not make their customers upset.

“Not being exposed to me, the ‘artist’” is a perfectly valid reason, and one I would agree with. But the mailing list excuse rings hollow to me.

“customers never get to interact with my website, they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list. They have no idea who I am as an artist or what I stand for,” Montes-Tarazas said."

they have no ability to sign up for my mailing list

Democracy dies in darkness, and the oligarch running the Post bought it so that he could turn off the lights.

“Mailing list” is not “marketing.” It’s all opt-in. Montes-Tarazas wants his customers to be able to interact with him directly, without going through a big tech monopoly that can pull the rug from underneath him or demand a ransom at any time.

just another capitalist

He’s working within the system that he lives in, and doing it ethically.

Oh, absolutely–but back then it was just normal, ordinary platform decay, not the sparkling AI hellscape of today.

Office has been Microsoft 365 for five years now. They added “Copilot” to the name at some point last year, but it’s been M365 for a while.

Quite a bummer. We’ll just have to go with “one-quarter impulse.”

Absolutely no argument from me there.

Thank you, you’re very kind.

By volume of harm, yes. But by character? I’m not so sure. Trump does whatever he wants, and doesn’t realize that what he does is awful. He often has to be reminded to hide his crimes. But Epstein knew that what he was doing made him one of the worst people to have ever existed, and did it anyway; even hiding it all away on an island to keep it under wraps. His was a calculated evil. Trump is just a selfish agent of chaos by comparison.

I guess what I’m saying is that Trump doesn’t seem smart enough to have character as bad as Epstein did.

I don’t disagree that some articles could use better information hierarchy. Headings could make that experience way better. But to say that the info shouldn’t be there at all is short-sighted and ignores the point of an encyclopedia.