It’s always difficult admitting you’re wrong. But sometimes, it’s exactly what you have to do in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, today, I admit that I was wrong about Google, Facebook, and surveillance capitalism in general being toxic for our human rights and democracy. You see, it simply cannot be true given how they are endorsed by some of the most well-respected groups and organisations in the world.

“Mozilla is now trying to diversify its revenue stream and, in some markets, has different default search engines. For example, it partners with privacy-championing Chinese search engine Baidu”

  • Kajika
    9·
    2 years ago

    I guess even here we will have people naive enough to think that Microsoft loves FOSS because it does some charity and not everyone inside the company thinks the same…

    Google donation is just a green-washing-style move, same for Facebook, Apple, etc. The funny thing is I am reading here: “the truth” despite all of the above having been found guilty on multiple occasions by different justice system around the world of illegal data collection/usage.

    Those big corporation are made of many teams with many people. Some are better then others but the system is bad by design. You can convince yourself that all is fine and this will ease a lot of things indeed, especially about money. But the problems are just going to get bigger. We shouldn’t assume Mozilla is going to get better. Most of entities goes worse with time as people only interested in their careers and money join them.

    I’d rather get article with facts and showing real changes about the governance itself of such companies before starting so say that they are any good.

    • bourlin
      5·
      2 years ago

      Whatever people see is just the good side of the company. That’s the whole purpose of the marketing team, it’s there to ensure no one thinks badly about these companies

    • CodeAssembler
      2·
      2 years ago

      The article is clearly satire, just read some other articles of this blog.

      • Kajika
        3·
        2 years ago

        Thanks, wouldn’t have realized. What a relief.

  • Ephera
    81·
    2 years ago

    I’m on board with the message, and to reach a wider audience I can definitely humor it being delivered with some snark. But this is mostly just snark without a solution in sight.

    No, it’s absolutely not great that GNOME, Mozilla et al have ties in that way. But, while they might have some leeway to do things better, ultimately they need a big chunk of money to fill the role that they have.

    Not taking the money and not filling that role isn’t particularly useful. Everyone could be using Xfce right now. And everyone could be using Dillo or hell, a fork of Google’s browser, right now.

    Even the author himself is using GNOME over Xfce, which I don’t care to attack, but chances are that the GNOME Foundation is doing something with that Google money to make it preferable to him.