They are definitely both pretty terrible, pick your poison I guess. Apple will gouge your eyes out with overpriced hardware and Alphabet (Google) will spy and you and sell your data. I don’t like either, but faced with the choice I’d rather pay more for my phone and avoid Google’s surveillance capitalism empire as much as possible. If you don’t mind advertisements and privacy isn’t important Google is probably a better choice.

Ended my donations to Signal after discovering they choose Google Hosting Services over open source and privacy respecting alternatives.

It’s surprising that teenagers are uncomfortable using a surveillance device created by the largest advertising company in the world. Our friends at Alphabet Inc simply want to monitor everything you search for and all your communication because they care and want to keep you safe.

Better to De-Google sooner rather than later imho and it’s fairly safe to assume corporate greed will continue to send it’s products and services deeper into the abyss. I think using alternatives now will make life easier in the future as Google becomes less useful with each passing day. Also, just using Google gives them access to personal data to harvest and ad revenue. I think we should try to be conscientious consumers whenever possible and use less evil alternatives. I don’t want to support Google’s enshitification of the Internet, censorship, anti-competitive practices, etc…

Are you saying MK ULTRA is just a conspiracy theory and never happened? I’ve watched documentaries on PBS, BBC and the History Channel. Clearly the program existed, as for what clandestine operations it ran, that’s certainly loaded with conspiracy theories.

If everything is a conspiracy theory, nothing is a conspiracy theory.

https://www.history.com/topics/us-government-and-politics/history-of-mk-ultra

Microsoft has gone decades doing everything they can to ensure Windows is what people think of when they think of computers and its worked.

I agree, I think Google has done an even better job brainwashing people to the point that any search online is considered ‘Googling’, still makes me cringe to hear ppl unknowingly shill for a corporate monopoly without even consciously knowing they are a walking advert for Alphabet’s data harvesting empire.

Windows 11 is also much better at collecting personal data with improved analytics and Microsoft spyware running under the hood. Not to mention it’s superiority at serving advertisements and embedding them in nearly every aspect of the UI.

It’s doubtful that Microsoft shareholders have meetings about how to improve the user experience of their OS. I think they are more concerned with extracting every penny they can designing the most efficient backend to harvest data and push ads, kinda like our friends at Alphabet, Microsoft is trying so desperately to emulate.

Google Videos was an alternative to Youtube in the early days, but since Google is too greedy to invest in innovation, it just buys it’s competitors, so we don’t see them unless we consider community alternatives that can’t be bought by Alphabet like Peertube.

Kodi seems like your best bet, it’s very accessible across many devices, you could use an older PC, Raspberry Pi or even an Xbox if you wanted to save money by repurposing a device you may already have.

Libertarianism is a broad ideology that means different things depending on who you ask. The notion that an authoritarian government can be controlled by billionaires and corporations is certainly viable. Undermining those forces and resisting their control by by not paying for content and controlling your access to said content by having your media library is exercising personal liberty.

The comment I made was quite nuanced and I mentioned that I’m personally more inclined to socialism and liberal views, but hopefully not too ideological that I can’t see value in different ideas.

If you care so much about avoiding analytics and advertising why on earth are you “googling” your questions on the world’s largest advertising and analytics website?

Piracy is being proliferated by government’s inability to enforce anti-trust laws and protect consumers. We need another Roosevelt to come in and break up the monopolies corrupted by power and greed. When the government is too weak and corrupt to represent people’s interest they find another way to take care of themselves. I’m personally quite liberal and inclined to socialism, but I as write this comment I can feel some connection to the libertarian creed of not depending on a centralized authority to take care of things that could be handled more effectively at the individual or community level.

Sometimes moneygrubbing shareholders do us a favor by steering companies into implementing terrible policies. If Reddit wouldn’t have been so greedy with it’s treatment of third-party app developers most of use wouldn’t be on Lemmy right now. If Microsoft forces Windows users to pay a subscription I think it sends more people away from closed-source garbage and into the arms of the open source community. I’ve enjoyed watching Reddit implode, hopefully I get to watch a similar show from our friends at Microsoft.

In my experience the suffering of losing a romantic love is less intense the second time, but the falling in love and passion can also be less intense and take longer to build up as you’re more guarded with your heart after being heartbroken before.

If the choice is paying unreasonable prices for Apple’s overpriced proprietary nonsense or reducing my yield as another data cow in Alphabet’s surveillance capitalism human farming machine, I begrudgingly pick the former.

I think it’s safe to assume all corporations publicly traded are equally greedy, regardless of how much their marketing department assures us that they exist for altruism.

Shareholders don’t by stock to make the world a better place, they invest in the companies sending the largest dividend checks. Apple and Alphabet are equally covetous of our money (money and data for Alphabet), but I trust the old business model of selling hardware more than giving up my data forever to be used for anything in the future.

GrapheneOS is my true preference currently for personal use and it feels good to leave a corporation in favor of a community, much like my switch from Reddit to Lemmy. As the techie in my family and friend group I’m still going to have to recommend iOS to most people since using GrapheneOS as a daily driver is a big ask for my grandmother.

Using an advertising company for anything and expecting objective results is a bit ridiculous. Use DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, MetaGer, anything but Google.

Pirating gives me the option not to support shit corporations that fuck over consumers with no business ethics. I can pirate the content I choose and pay for it when I want to support creators.

Historically, pirating and underground markets for good and services begin to proliferate in a society as a sign that their economic system is failing. IMHO, unbridled capitalism and corporate shitification in the US is turning the Internet into a hellscape with 5 companies basically controlling the entire Internet with so much lobbying muscle behind them they remain untouchable through what remains of the democratic system.

Thanks for the civil tone of your reply, I have to agree that even if corporate personhood was abolished the oligarchs would just find another way to control the political system keeping rigged to favor their interests. Lobbying in the US started during the Civil War from what I understand, this lad to the creation of a Military Industrial Complex that continues to lobby US lawmakers into conflicts motivated by greed and not diplomatic interests. If you don’t believe me, please listen to the warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address.

Do you think it’s in the people’s best interest to keep the current corporate structure in tact and legislate lobbying reforms instead?

It’s certainly “practical” for shareholders with controlling interests in these publicly traded companies, but very impractical for everyone else.

The word corporation may have existed before the 14th Amendment, but the legal definition was entirely different. The word “Country” was also used to describe the state a person was from in the 19th century, if asked about one’s country, one would would reply with the name of their state of residence. The meaning over a word can change entirely in a couple generations.

What criticism of capitalism is more relevant than the abomination of corporate personhood? Toss a few more right-wing Supreme Court rulings into the mix like Citizen’s United giving corporations the ability to spend unlimited and unregulated money lobbying (buying) the legislative system and you have a nation in decline with a failing economic system.

Legally only citizens are allowed to lobby congress, if corporations were no longer considered people, then real people would have more access to power than their corporate overlords.

I think it’s time to revisit the question of why these corporations exist as “people” under the law, when they clearly operate without humanity. The perversion of justice that granted them this right was taken directly from the 14th Amendment in 1886. That amendment was written to grant citizenship to freed slaves. What a coincidence that slavery ended, but was immediately replaced with a new structure called corporations.