No, not tyranny necessarily. If it's malign morphing into hate speech, racial or genetic seregation, imposing religion, esp. backed up by state power that's a problem. For example, the US has a senate to balance out the house while at the same time California's take on something cannot be rejected out of hand reflexively as tyranny
$100k is in Canadian dollars? I just added almost every accessory/package and option to the the 2026 GR Sport Plug-in Hybrid RAV4, and it came out to $55,821. If there were options that were nearly identical, I only added the most expensive one. So I only added one hammock ($340) and one of the Pelican Dayventure Backpack Cooler ($301). This includes the dog first-aid kit, and the human first-aid kit. Maybe all the options will come through this link:
While I agree with your outrage at cars, at least smart TVs get cheaper as they supplement the revenue stream w/ the data brokering options. Non-smart TVs cost way more.
No, they meant inflated. Cars are quite expensive right now, and dealers are notorious for raking in cash through financing. If they were subsidized, prices would be lower to increase user base, as in the aforementioned dynamic present in the current smart TV market.
I think the inital point was that car manufacturers/dealers are double dipping through initial cost/interest AND data harvesting.
Both an high end tv or a car are expensive items where the manufacturer shouldn’t be making additional income on your personal data.
A free 55 inch tv supported by ads would be subsidized. A big ticket item price likely does not change even if it intrudes on your privacy and the manufacturer makes additional income on your data. In that sense it’s not subsidized it’s just greedy business practices.
I haven't had any insight into the industry lately, but did work for a company in that space several years ago.
Most (all?) ordinary TVs, plus things like Roku streaming devices, are sold essentially at-cost. The profit comes from ads and information-brokering stuff. This makes it basically impossible to break into the market without doing the same thing.
Different products exist at different price points to cater to different customers.
If you want to sell a subsidized product with the implication that there will be ads, that’s one business strategy, but to say that it’s not viable to have a higher end product that will not sell the user data because it’s not commercially viable is something I’ll have disagree with.
Computer monitors with no smart features wouldn’t viable if that was the case.
It’s a business decision, but one of the options won’t move enough units to keep Wal-Mart and Target and Costco and Best Buy using shelf space for your product, and the other might.
Most services have privacy policies that boil down to:
- we promise not to share PII (defined as narrowly as possible)
- we promise not to share payment information except with our payment system
- if you pay us, we promise not to train LLMs on your data
- you agree that everything else can be used for any business purpose, including marketing, intelligence gathering, and "sharing with our 1735 trusted partners".
They care, but realize that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. The amount of obsession required to maybe maintain some degree of privacy is not something most people are willing to do.
When the average person thinks about "online privacy" they think about keeping things private from other people. They don't think about keeping their data private from the companies hosting/processing their data.
That research study also concludes that “59% of people have no understanding of what companies do with the data they collect”
To me, that says the average person doesn’t care enough (they care, just not enough) to do anything about it.
They might care enough to spend 5 seconds signing a petition, but not enough to spend 5 minutes installing an ad blocker, and definitely not enough to spend 5 hours doing anything more extreme like de-googling their life.
If you are in a trusted industry like finance or healthcare, the popular ones generally have industry wide privacy certification like HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 etc.
That seems more of an issue with the school, though, rather than the actual web request. In this case, there IS a prior agreement between the school and MS, so there can be additional expectations about how that works.
I didn't know the browser made an agreement between myself and it. Here I am thinking that I am forced to use monopolistic tech because I a US citizen have zero say in the direction of technology in the country, that's decided by undemocratic financiers gambling with pension funds in SF. Silly me.
Spain here. Most of our public Universities have their IT stack on MS... I cannot fathom how much of our national budget goes to their pockets.
Thankfully, I store my teaching materials on my personal non-uni webpage, and the student's marks in my office's computer (apart from the MS-based Uni system).
Whenever something happens with MS, chaos ensues throughout the whose Uni and the students end up paying the consequences.
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