I’m not reading anymore of this thread, but go move to the EU and request all the data those companies you mentioned have on you. You will see a truly staggering amount of your day to day info from some of them. Facebook and google are just advertising companies trying to get their thumbs in every pie they can convince enough people to buy into. Part of that is designing their products to require phoning home. The issue isn’t signing in. Signing in is just the trojan horse to make sure every bit of data they pull from you is tied to the right advertising account ID. They shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do that, even if they have enough money to lobby for its legality. Even if every single company on earth was freely doing it to the same degree people should still push for a change.

The business world is truly a slippery slope. Google made unethical digital advertising into a major market, and now even if they close shop somebody else will come fill the gap. The only way to put the power back in people’s hands is to regulate them out of existence but that will never happen if most people don’t even know it’s happening because you can’t even fucking complain about it on the internet without a hundred reply thread jfc

Not separated enough for me. I know all the big companies are bad, but I won’t touch google/fb hardware.

I really don’t understand this. All these search engine companies give millions of users a single button to create the most soulless art you’ve ever seen, but instead of caring about that they attack the tool that most enables the user to have control over their generation. You can argue that unlimited competition is bad for commission artists, but this attack is not “Pro Art”.

Using creative cloud isn’t a sin, but helping maintain Adobes industry stranglehold should be.

1 pic and an IPAdapter

I genuinely couldn’t find this, thanks.

There’s still notepad, but Windows 11 office suite is already subscription only. They’re only taking wordpad out so people who don’t know better are pushed to buy in to the racket.

So suppressing the next big competing technology just put their company behind after it became ubiquitous? Is there a lesson to be learned here? I don’t have time to figure it out—somebody’s gotta mine all this coal.