Comment on GrapheneOS Under Threat: EU Age Verification And Google Changes Endanger Privacy-Focused Android

• The_Grinch@hexbear.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I don’t know why you think corporations aren’t effectively micro-governments themselves, ones that don’t even put on the show of democracy, beholden to essentially no one but their shareholders.

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  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The difference is that products that corporations make don’t have to be like government run products. They don’t have to be for everyone. They don’t have to accept all payment methods. They don’t need to work inter-operably with other products. I’m ok with corporations being their own “micro-governments” and being beholden only to their shareholders, because that’s what I expect of them.

    They can be for a very small subset of people, they can have features locked behind paywalls, they can have vendor lock in, they can only accept specific payment methods. If you don’t like what they do, you don’t have to use them. You think you’re entitled to use them how you want though, which is wrong.

    The problem that people like you don’t understand is that the EU has started mandating that companies do things that are against their own interests, that actively harm them, and threatening them with gigantic fines if they don’t fall in line despite not doing anything illegal or wrong. People like you celebrate them strong arming companies this way because you didn’t like something that company did at moral level, when morals have no place in the conversation. Calling it “anti-consumer” just means “I as a consumer don’t like it” in most cases, not that it’s actually “anti-consumer” by definition.

    Now the strong arming of foreign companies has shifted directly into surveillance and authoritarianism, and people like you don’t really have a leg to stand on when arguing against it because it’s what they’ve been doing all along and you congratulated them in doing so.

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