Yes, and it won’t get better. There is no effective regulation against this kind of stuff. US big tech companies are basically (not theoretically/legally, but in practice) allowed to steal everything from their consumers what they want these days, just like AI companies violate copyrights on a massive scale.
In the EU, the US big tech companies already managed to pull off a regulatory capture of the Irish Data Protection agency, the one responsible for all US big tech companies operating in Europe, the one that is theoretically supposed to ensure data protection. Because that agency is being headed by a former Meta lobbyist. That means there will be effectively zero repercussion for US big tech breaking copyright, privacy, data protection or other such laws in the EU, despite the EU having some of the strongest data protection laws in theory. They will all be not mostly, but fully, ignored. There were never many repercussions before, and fines had symbolic character at best, but now they can all go completely unhinged, and on top of that the US will also add political pressure on countries which dare to hold US-based companies accountable under local laws. Since many EU countries and/or UK are essentially digital colonies of US tech companies I don’t think there will be much resistance. There are tons of self-inflicted painful dependencies on the dollar, on SWIFT, on US-based credit cards, on US-based cloud providers, … for the EU, the US turning rogue is massively painful, but this outcome was already predictable decades ago, yet nothing was being done about it.
And so MS will absolutely enshittify Windows even more to harvest more and more data and feed their AI models, and there will be zero repercussion, except that Windows will continue to slowly decline and desktop Linux will continue to slowly climb up. It’s just a matter of time. It’s just sad that MS gets away with all that crap. The people who value data protection or privacy have already left the MS world long ago. The rest will simply get looted - all your personal and work life belongs to MS (and, by extension, to the US) if you continue to use their software and services.
Yes, and it won’t get better. There is no effective regulation against this kind of stuff. US big tech companies are basically (not theoretically/legally, but in practice) allowed to steal everything from their consumers what they want these days, just like AI companies violate copyrights on a massive scale.
In the EU, the US big tech companies already managed to pull off a regulatory capture of the Irish Data Protection agency, the one responsible for all US big tech companies operating in Europe, the one that is theoretically supposed to ensure data protection. Because that agency is being headed by a former Meta lobbyist. That means there will be effectively zero repercussion for US big tech breaking copyright, privacy, data protection or other such laws in the EU, despite the EU having some of the strongest data protection laws in theory. They will all be not mostly, but fully, ignored. There were never many repercussions before, and fines had symbolic character at best, but now they can all go completely unhinged, and on top of that the US will also add political pressure on countries which dare to hold US-based companies accountable under local laws. Since many EU countries and/or UK are essentially digital colonies of US tech companies I don’t think there will be much resistance. There are tons of self-inflicted painful dependencies on the dollar, on SWIFT, on US-based credit cards, on US-based cloud providers, … for the EU, the US turning rogue is massively painful, but this outcome was already predictable decades ago, yet nothing was being done about it.
And so MS will absolutely enshittify Windows even more to harvest more and more data and feed their AI models, and there will be zero repercussion, except that Windows will continue to slowly decline and desktop Linux will continue to slowly climb up. It’s just a matter of time. It’s just sad that MS gets away with all that crap. The people who value data protection or privacy have already left the MS world long ago. The rest will simply get looted - all your personal and work life belongs to MS (and, by extension, to the US) if you continue to use their software and services.