• BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      When Gmail first came out 20 years ago (as of yesterday), we all thought that. It was a new world and nobody was thinking about the long term ramifications. Before that point, there wasn’t even such a thing as a Google account, Google was just a search engine that didn’t operate all that differently than Duck Duck Go does today.

      I don’t even think that Google had a plan at that point in the game. Monetization was the obvious goal, but nobody really thought about what that would look like.

      Since then, Google users’ privacy has experienced death by a thousand cuts. If the terms you have to agree with today were known then, Gmail never would have succeeded.

      With every new product and feature added to a Google account holder’s toolbox over the past two decades, creeping normalization came with them, and here we are today…

      • fluckx@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Exactly. Same as is happening with privacy right now. Chip away bit by bit. Do it all at once and people will complain. But do it bit by bit and they won’t know until it’s too late.

        Similarly to the story of the frog in the boiling water. Drop it in hot water and it’ll jump out. Heat the water slowly and it’ll boil to death.

        But hey. At least we’ve got nothing to hide right? /S

        • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
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          7 months ago

          Protonmail is today (or was a few years ago) what everyone thought Gmail was when it came out. I can still remember how excited I was to get an email accepting me into the Gmail beta. A crazy amount of space, no one knew how they did it.

            • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
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              7 months ago

              It came with an implicit agreement of trust. You had a company just wanting to make the world more connected and had the money to do it. Cue the Snowden leaks and we find out they’d been working with the NSA for some time, giving indirect access to all user data.

          • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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            7 months ago

            I moved to the Proton suite last year, apart from some shitfuckery regarding decrypting/organizing and some teething issues with their Linux app, it’s been all smiles.

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          7 months ago

          As a side note, here’s what Wikipedia says about the frog experiment:

          “While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual,[2][3] according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.[4][5]”

          Your point still stands, but you might want to consider switching to another metaphor next time.

          Source: Boiling frog

            • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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              7 months ago

              Neither did I until one day I stumbled upon a video that explained the misguided experiments that were behind the saying. Just today I started reading about it on Wikipedia and found that juicy summary.

              There’s a pretty good reason why we have ethical restrictions and peer review with modern science.

    • Rolando@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was “Do No Evil” and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.

      (disclaimer: I didn’t trust them.)

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another “Company of Engineers”) they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven’t written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)

        • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.

          • grue@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.

            • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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              7 months ago

              You can change the license at any point. You just can’t make people change the license of past copies

                • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
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                  7 months ago

                  gpl does not prevent the owner from changing the licence later. (Unless it is also making use of someone else’s gpl components.)

                  For example, Qt has a free version which is under the GPL; and a paid version which is not. So if you were making software with Qt, if you were using the free version, you’d be compelled to also release your product under GPL. But you could then later switch to a paid subscription and rerelease under some other licience if you wanted to.

                  • Blisterexe@lemmy.zip
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                    7 months ago

                    doesnt it require any modified versions of the code be shared, preventing a change to a non-copyleft liscence?