Comment on From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
Poutinetown@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
And the company came under fire again in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed it was allowing third-party developers to trawl users’ Gmail inboxes, to which Google responded by reminding users it was within their power to grant and revoke those permissions.
So you can remove those permissions, just that it’s enabled by default. Shitty design, but it’s not mandatory to enable those, just like how you are not forced to use edge when you get a Windows computer.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
You kind of are forced to use Edge though. There are certain functions via which Edge and only Edge will always launch. F1, the help button, is bound to a function that launches Edge anywhere in Windows Explorer, so you have a hotkey that cannot be rebound.
The only way you can prevent it from launching Edge is either to intercept the keystroke with AHK or similar, or remove Edge in an unsactioned manner that requires deep system fuckery. There are other links within the system settings dialogues that do this too.
At that point I’d call it mandatory.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Unless you want to fix your computer abd clean the windows off.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 8 months ago
I do actually. It’s just a lot of work that I haven’t had time or energy for. Not everybody has the spoons to switch to linux.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Honestly, with a super used friendly distro like mint or Ubuntu, or even pop, its not actually harder than windows, it’s just pve instead of PvP when you have trouble; it feels like teamwork and learning rather than being fucked with like windows always seems to.