No, this is different. They’re not saying “we’re allowed to,” they’re saying “we didn’t do it”:

In no circumstance did the test affect the standard functionality of the device nor did it limit access to its main features. The users could and can continue to normally use all HDMI inputs, external devices, consoles, subscription streaming apps, or standard broadcasts without any type of interruption or obligation to watch advertisements.

Which is totally believable. /s

I fundamentally disagree with both your premise and your example’s conclusion. I’m not saying that it can be justified, though; just that it must be contextualized differently. To wit: it would be right for you to criticize them even if you are being hypocritical. You have far fewer resources to dispose of that oil. Your business model is not predicated upon handling oil well. You are not enriching yourself at the cost of others. And yes, there may be others doing it as well, but the combined impact of every individual doing it is almost certainly a tiny fraction of the company doing it.

It’s not really beside the point, from most reasonable perspectives. A multi-billion-dollar company enriching itself on the backs of starving authors so that it can go on enriching itself on the backs of its users is significantly different from a small number of comparatively destitute individuals stealing some temporary enjoyment for themselves. They are both wrong, but the discussion is utterly useless if you don’t talk about the harm involved and who benefits.

There’s a pretty big difference in scale, and the perpetrator, and whether or not they’re benefiting monetarily, and much more.

Games already have this. There’s almost always a difficulty setting, and one of those settings in newer games is often “story only.” You make decisions, but your character executes the fast-twitch stuff itself.

As far as I can see, you can’t really fear or rejoice with the results until you know the false positive/negative ratio.

I’m not getting any meaningful results searching for that project. What is it?

You could alias sudo to just for a little more rudeness.

That’s fair. She’ll get it.

the politicians debating online abuse mean well

Let me stop you there

OMG, a Pokemon All Stars would be amazing. But I do want them to get fancy with it: with every new game that starts, make me start with a starter as usual, but once I get access to trading, let me pull Pokemon that are below the soft level cap out of my boxes.

If it’s altering snapshots, it’s not a reliable archive. Simple as that.

Username checks out

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

I think I buy this worldwide, honestly. Case in point: one of the most popular video game series for young people recently has been Five Nights at Freddy’s, and that series dropped its first four games in eleven months, and its next four games in four years. Minecraft remains one of the most popular games in the world, and it’s releasing full free content drops every few months. Pokemon is still insanely popular among kids, and there hasn’t been a year without a new Pokemon game release since 2015.

So, yeah. Hey, kids like novelty. Who knew?

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.

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