Firefox, Plex, Google Drive, Google Maps, Honey, BetterHelp, VPNs

Honey

Honey pot

BetterHelp
BetterHelpYourself

Nova Launcher

Woah, I'm still using this. Did I miss something here?
- TLDR; yes
  They got sold, and last I heard there was 1 Dev left to "maintaining it".
  Real shame, I switched to Neo Launcher (on F-droid/Izzy repo, not the play store). Although the last update was 3 years ago, new version "any time now", may have to find something new again.
  Lawnchair is popular too
- Would be interested as well. /e/OS doesn't report any tracker activity to me from it.
- https://www.ghacks.net/2022/07/19/nova-launcher-and-sesame-search-have-been-acquired-by-branch/

honey

Lmao what in the fuck was this even if not a machine designed explicitly to datamine?

Yeah even before the fucking scandals what the hell did you think Honey was getting out of the deal? You think it was made by some coupon-clipping hobbyist grandma’s altruistically crafting a bespoke Chrome extension?
“Oh back in my day the ECMAScript standard didn’t even have closures, pass my reading glasses Agnes”

Free != Libre

Firefox, Plex, and VPNs I can understand being surprised about. But the rest of them... I mean of course they were going to milk you for money. Was there ever a time when any of those didn't?

Betterhelp is a mental health therapy service. It's not exactly unreasonable for someone who doesn't know the company to think that their THERAPIST won't leak and sell their info.
Talk about exacerbating trust issues!
- Plus it's not free. So the assumption would be that they're making their momey by charging the therapist a service charge.
- To be fair, it's the entire platform that sells the data, not the unlicenced "therapists" they employ.
- Yeah, ok. I'll concede Betterhelp too.

But, but, all the youtubers tell me VPN are for privacy 😮

(/s)

This is especially damning for BetterHelp, as they get all your health related data and such data is especially worth protecting. Fuck BetterHelp.

Pretty sure in just about any developed country BetterHelp is breaking the law by selling at least some of that data. How they haven't been shut down is a testament to man's unending greed.

God I'm down so bad for silco

Firefox? Aren't they just getting anonymous telemetry and setting the default search engine to Google? I know they changed their TOS in the past but how are they selling data?

I think this git diff speaks for itself.
- It isn't a beauty but no it does not speak for itself.
Mozilla purchased an advertisement company and a fair chunk of the board of Mozilla are ex google.
- are firefox forks better for now?
- so they're not selling the data, they're using it internally.

I thought they meant Free Software, not free software and I'll like but you can just fork it.

If you’re getting something for free, you aren’t the consumer, you are the product. Open Source projects (free as in speech) need some way to pay for the beer (not free). Enshittification is accelerating the conversion of services that have some form of free tier into more aggressively finding ways to monetize those users. Even services you pay for are selling your data, to make sure they can get maximum juice.

Not true!
There's also stealing. That's free.
Linux is free, am I the product?
- No, Linux wants your most precious resource. Your time!
  In exchange you get to actually own your software and get to control your operating system. I would argue that this is priceless.
- Yes.
What we, the product, should be doing is selling our engagement to companies that need new and unique data to train AI models.
The data we create (including this interaction) is more valuable than the 'service' Facebook provides.
Maybe that's the way Lemmy will eventually enshittify, by paying people to join it and interact so that the data can be used for AI training... who needs advertisers? (Though, try to avoid the urge to tell them to go fuck themselves)

No money no honey.