Yeah, there’s a huge difference between (e.g.) ProtonMail and “the new” Outlook.
Some companies sell their privacy policies as a feature. The issue is that a lot of customers don’t really care about that feature and there’s no strong regulation to protect them.
You’re right, but privacy policies are binding for the company. So it does matter if you pick a company that says “we share your info with everyone” compared to the company that won’t.
The problem is avoiding "surveillance capitalism" or even generally "privacy" isn't a selling point for the mass market.
Things which matter to people:
- Do you like moderators in a foreign country being paid $2 an hour reviewing your personal photos?
- Do you agree that your personal messages to a friend can be retroactively edited if you sent something that was "disinformation"?
- Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message?
- Would you like to read advertisements and news articles when launching your favorite application?
- Would you like those ads and news articles to become more invasive over time based on which ones you looked at last time?
- Would you like the owners of the app store you purchased your favorite app from make more net profit from the sale than the developer who built it?
- Would you like your favorite app to run differently than it did yesterday, without choice or warning?
- Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased?
Even someone who broadcasts their personal life publicly, with strong signals of their wealth and where they will be to rob or kidnap them, will have issues with things in this list.
All of those points are unknown unknowns or minor inconveniences to all of my non technical friends except these two:
> - Would you like files on your computer's personal hard drive copied in to a commercial cloud service and deleted locally because you accidentally mis-read or mis-read on a single pop-up message?
A friend of mine was bitten by this and One Drive (is that the subject, right?) is really difficult to understand and get right. I had to configure it on a server of a customer. We needed a remote share and it does not behaves like that. Nobody expects it to work in the way it works. There is something wrong in all of its design and UX.
> Would you like your favorite app to no longer be usable or downloadable because development ceased?
Another friend of mine is keeping her very old phone alive because it's the only way to operate I don't remember what (heating?) The app does not work with both new Android and new iOS (she has both) so she has that old phone at home in a drawer. I just refuse to buy anything that requires an app to work. I want physical switches, knobs and displays built into the device.
They are unknowns until they encounter them directly. As Apple and Microsoft receive their revenue growth from advertising and subscription services, they will all get worse and encountered more frequently by more users.
I got a few 'what the fuck' messages from distant contacts when they discovered that Facebook modified or deleted messages, which they believed to be private. This drove significant growth in Signal (which probably was under or not reported.) I'm not sure if people don't actually care about privacy/security, or rather they don't really comprehend how this stuff works.
Some companies sell their privacy policies as a feature. The issue is that a lot of customers don’t really care about that feature and there’s no strong regulation to protect them.