iPhones will report it too if they have Maps open.

You can see their strategy at work here.

It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).

The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.

There is no “your computer”, it’s just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.

The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.

Or the fact that once it’s off of your hard drive and sitting comfortably on their cloud (their hard drive), they can scan it and harvest it for data.

This is just Lemmy.World. You don’t have to be an admin here to help out Lemmy as a whole.

That’s kind of what I’m thinking too.

Legitimately, the degree to which proton advertises, the sheer amount of blog spam and such, made me very, very resistant to it. I really don’t care how private it all is or how well it works, I have spent enough time on the internet and engaged with enough small tech company services to recognize a fierce push for growth, and experience has taught me to avoid a for-profit company that sells to you that hard. One day the growth will stop, and the cannibalizing begins.

But a move to a non-profit model is, at least theoretically, a move in the right direction. I’m more willing to engage.

I still don’t trust that they won’t change their mind down the road, but it’s a start.

And the point about OpenAI is moot because being non-profit doesn’t make the actual purpose of the company any less shitty. Especially when Microsoft was feeding it money for the purpose of harvesting what they would create. They still had shitty motives and created a tool that is very ethically “questionable” at best, and that was true from the very beginning.The fact their ethics team was gutted the moment they tried to exercise their purpose tells you everything.

The non-profit company created a tool that will be used primarily by for-profit companies and hurt individuals. The moniker barely applies.

a detailed list of TPN violations

Eh, that’s actually kind of a selling point. I’ve got no interest in an OS on my personal PC that focuses on being made more friendly to the MPA.

The security will definitely also take a very profitable shape. I.e. further locking the OS away from the user, more black box software, etc.

Very common tactic for many of these sites. They’re either paid by Microsoft or they’re just run-of-the-mill Microsoft boot lickers.

If you search for how to disable or bypass something in Windows, these SEO’d junk articles pop up and trick you into reading them. It’s usually a long preamble full of arguments for why you really shouldn’t try to disable or bypass the thing, because Microsoft’s shit doesn’t actually stink, and they know better than you. Then at the bottom they put the generic instructions that may not even work anymore, that you’ve likely already read.

Yes, that’s true. But I’m kind of going off the assumption anybody that actually wants to use a local account is somebody who knows better than to use the Home edition. Without group policy and a couple of the other configurable points, I’m not sure how viable it even is to use Home anymore if you want Microsoft off your back.

YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free

Because Google chokes the market. There could be plenty of other competitors if Google charged for it like other companies would. Google subsidized YouTube with the rest of their company’s profits, not to provide us a free platform because they’re so nice, but to prevent competition. As long as YouTube was free, no other companies would be able to keep up with the costs, therefore no one else would enter the market.

If this shit is so expensive, and they want money, they can gate the content like every other streaming service, and then deal with the competition that would swell up.

The problem is that user generated content still takes time. Which means money. Also, people don’t want vlogs with a drywall background anymore and the number of creators who can get away with simple prop free skits are double digit, at best. So making the videos also cost money.

That’s why I don’t use Sponsorblock: it hurts the wrong people.

But I’ll still block the ads because to hell with Google and their monopoly. I’m only interested in supporting the artists directly, Google can get fucked.

I don’t give a shit if it’s reasonable anymore.

Google has done enough terrible things over the years, ruined enough services, some of them paid services, continually harmed content creators with their trash algorithm, refused to defend them from bogus copyright strikes, refused to provide meaningful support to anybody but advertisers, all the while hosting hate on their platform, for profit. So I don’t give a damn what’s fair to them.

They won’t get a penny from me ever again. I’ll continue to find every way of accessing any content on that platform that I choose, without ads, and without paying them, and it has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or reason. It is entirely, 100%, because fuck Google.

Fuck their ad network, fuck manifest 3, fuck their “integrity” checking, fuck all of this. I’d rather see it all burn to the ground than help them turn the internet into cable tv.

By default you DO need a connection to create or sign in to an account to complete the install process as it’s currently presented

You don’t “need” it, they lie to you and imply it’s a requirement, but it isn’t needed. It’ll download updates, and finish the install just fine with local account.

It’s a junk article, likely written by AI in part or entirely. Paragraphs and paragraphs of nothing just to reference a support article they found, all the while subtly implying a Windows account is a really good thing to use and everyone should use it.

Thr FN part is notable if you have a recent computer. A lot of laptops and keyboards ship out with media keys as the default on the top row now, and you must hold the FN key to use F10. Lot of people don’t realize this and think Shift+F10 isn’t working.

Possibly an easier option: you can let it connect to the internet, and then when it tells you to set up a Microsoft account, click on “Other sign in options” (or whatever it says beneath the text box). Then select “Domain Join instead”. It’ll let you use a local account, expecting you to join it to a domain later, then you just…don’t join it to a domain.

Always be sure to use something like O&O ShutUp10 or Winaero Tweaker after you reach the desktop, so you can shut off all the bullshit, otherwise it will keep harassing you to make an account. I think you need to uninstall OneDrive too, to stop it hijacking the address bar in file explorer with constant nagging to set it up

Are you talking about the Support article, or this WindowsCentral article?

Because I would say that’s true of both.

This article is heavily inflated/extended with pablum that could come straight from Copilot, and frankly, it seems more concerned with listing the benefits of a Microsoft account than reporting on the support article.

It’s AI junk all the way down.

Do I trust them? Sure, I guess, when it comes to privacy from other entities.

Do I trust that I will have privacy from Apple? Hell no. What does “local” even mean on an iCloud connected iOS device anymore? Because there’s nothing on that phone Apple can’t access remotely if they want to, and if any of the AI cache is backed up on iCloud, that’s not local anymore.

Do I trust them with the data they’re absolutely gathering? No, but I don’t trust anyone with it. But I also think that data would be relatively safer with Apple than their competitors.

If Apple announced Recall? Apple wouldn’t announce Recall, that’s the whole point. Apple wouldn’t be so brazen and stupid to push a tool that is so obviously invasive and so poorly implemented. Apple earned its trust by not making those mistakes.

But if they did decide to say fuck it and implement something like Recall, of course people would trust them. That’s what trust means: consumers take them at their word. But if it’s as bad as Microsoft’s Recall, Apple would burn all that trust when people found out.

People don’t believe Microsoft because they have long since burned any trust and good will for most of their consumers. They have proven time and time again they don’t give a shit about users’ wants or needs, and users have felt that. So when they announce Recall, they have no earned trust. No believes them. There’s no good faith to cushion this. And it turns out everyone was right not to grant them that trust.

Does that mean I’d ever use an Apple device? Hell no. I value my privacy, but I value it on my terms, not Apple’s, and I will never use a device that creates privacy through taking power from the user.

Think back to when we were kids. Remember that period of time when not everyone owned a computer? Or if they owned one, it wasn’t necessarily used much? There were people that were “computer people”, who used computers daily for entertainment or tinkering or socializing (once the consumer internet took off) and there were people that didn’t need or care about them outside of their workstation at the office.

Even after the Internet, this dynamic was there. You had the enthusiasts who really spent time on their computers and got to using them well, and you had people that simply owned them and checked email or browsed the Internet from time to time.

The enthusiast/non-enthusiast dynamic has always existed. There’s always a gap. It just takes different shapes.

Now, everyone owns a smartphone and uses for everything. They’re critical to life, enthusiast or no. That’s the baseline now. The gap is entirely in skill and usage, not so much hardware or time spent on it.

Before computers and the internet, no tech skill was needed to interact with our modern world.

After them, and for a few decades, the skill floor rose. You needed to learn technology to participate in the modern world.

Now technology has reached a point where the skill floor has dropped down to where it was before.

The mistake we made was in thinking that our generation learning to use technology was happening because they wanted to. It was incidental. Skill with technology comes from desire to obtain it, not simply using technology a lot.

The problem is the software isn’t making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.

It’s not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it’s removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.

The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.

For example, if you don’t know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won’t). That’s bad for users and for the industry overall.

Basically, without the skills, you have to trust the tech companies to guide you by one hand and not stab you with the other, and they are increasingly unworthy of that trust.

They’re also market-locked. If you have so little ability to function outside of an app, you become incredibly resistant to moving from one to another unless it’s identical, and you’re incapable of using marginally more complex things.

It also gives immense market control to the app stores, have been allowed to exist mostly unregulated. Thankfully that might be changing.

When everyone must be spoon-fed, that makes the only company selling the spoons insanely wealthy and powerful.

It’s also going to have a degrading effect on popular software overtime. When the only financially viable thing is to make apps for the masses, you are not incentivized to make something extraordinary.

Compare Apple Music to iTunes, just on a software level. Just on the sheet number of things you can do with iTunes, all the nobs and levers, all the abilities it grants a user willing to use it to its max potential. At some point, it no longer became viable to create an excellent piece of software, because most people have no skills or patience or desire to use it.

So you start making things that don’t empower the user, instead you make things that treat them like children, and your products get stupid.