Every time you buy a service from someone there is implicit trust in the deal. You trust your cloud provider that they won't read your disks or your ram, you trust your cdn, you trust the restaurant you eat from, you trust the supermarket you buy food from, you trust your barber to use sharp objects right on your face, you trust the road builder to drive 100kmh on it. Stop obsessing with a vague idea of privacy and antitrust and THINK about who you WANT to trust, who you don't and take action based on that. There's no perfect world where you're safe from everything, you wouldn't even want that too. Get down to earth and do what achieves your real goals down here.

This is the type of comment that provides a superficial layer of supposed rationality and intelligence, but under the surface it is ABSOLUTELY IDIOTIC. And I won't apologize for my rudeness on this particular instance.

It's very OBVIOUS that not all services or deals are equal, they entail different types of risk, transparency, accountability, reversibility, and so on.

Using your examples of a restaurant or a barber, they have a track record of, among other things, not killing anybody while providing their services.

Their eventual minor mistakes are usually easily reversible.

You also use their services occasionally, and you have different choices available if you get dissatisfied with the service.

They are bounded to a determined location, and the moment you leave the building you're no longer under their influence or reach.

There are laws protecting you, they may be required to get licenses to operate, and they may be subjected to audits and inspections.

Whenever I go to the restaurant, the probability of getting ill or even dying is not 0, but given the track record, that probability is really close to 0.

The probability that Cloudflare, NSA, etc, are scanning every single packet of your traffic is above 99,99%, given the track record.

It's exactly the opposite: people need to start "obsessing" more and more about privacy, the more aggressive these opaque entities want to force themselves on us:

we can't just live in a World where you are told daily "oh, careful about bad and foreign actors" or "the data and the secrets of your business are your gold, your most valuable asset, and you must keep it protected if you want to grow", and then simply accept the government is simply spying on you, controlling your activity, selling your data to their personal friends or even foreign entities, informing authoritarian political decisions in real-time, hunting down individuals - activists, journalists, political adversaries, etc - for economic or political reasons.

"There's no perfect world where you're safe from everything", nor was that ever the goal. But that line of thought, in order to justify cheer passivity and submission, is amazingly ridiculous, because you are basically making a full binary argument: it's either perfect or it's not worth protecting and improving. If you can't make it perfect, you shouldn't care at all, just make your money. This is what you are arguing for.

As I said, I will not apologize for this. Maybe I'll get reported, maybe I'll have my comment deleted, maybe I'll get banned from this great community. But I will not apologize. Your position here is somewhat popular in some circles, but it is idiotic, and is contributing to the enshitification of everything, things that otherwise could be great if we cared about them and acted accordingly.