> they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too

No, they won't. And that's the problem in your argument. Google landed in court for tracking users in incognito mode. They also were fined for not complying with the rules for cookie popups. Facebook lost in court for illegally using data for advertising. Did it lose them any paying customer? Maybe, but not nearly enough for them to even notice a difference. The larger outcome was that people are now more pissed at the EU for cookie popups that make the greed for data more transparent. Also in the case of Google most money comes from different people than the ones that have their privacy violated, so the incentives are not working as you suggest.

> Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live

Ignoring existing problems isn't a recipe for a happy life either.

I can't agree with a 'companies won't be evil because they will lose business if people don't like their evilness!' argument.

Certainly, going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live. Going through life not trusting in general, isn't a fun way to live.

Would you like to see my inbox?

We as tech people made this reality through believing in an invisible hand of morality that would be stronger than power, stronger than the profit motives available through intentionally harming strangers a little bit (or a lot) at scale, over the internet, often in an automated way, if there was a chance we'd benefit from it.

We're going to have to be the people thinking of what we collectively do in this world we've invented and are continuing to invent, because the societal arbitrage vectors aren't getting less numerous. Hell, we're inventing machines to proliferate them, at scale.

I strongly encourage you to abandon this idea that the world we've created, is optimal, and this idea that companies of all things will behave ethically because they perceive they'll lose business if they are evil.

I think they are fully correct in perceiving the exact opposite and it's on us to change conditions underneath them.

>Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live.

Isn't that the Hacker mindset, though? We want to trailblaze solutions and share it with everyone for free. Always in liberty and oftentimes in beer too. I think it's a good mentality to have, precisely because of your lens of selfish motivations.

Wanting money is fine. If it was some flat $200 or even $2000 with legally binding promises that I have an indefinitely license to use this version of the software and they won't extract anything else from me: then fine. Hackers can be cheap, but we aren't opposed to barter.

But that's not the case. Wanting all my time and privacy and data under the veneer of something hackers would provide with no or very few strings is not. tricks to push into that model is all the worse.

> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.

I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.

Sadly, this is not a land of hackers. It is a market of passive people of various walks of life: of students who do not understand what is going on under the hood (I was here when Facebook was taking off), of businsessmen too busy with other stuff to understand the sausage in the factory, of ordinary people who just wants to fire and forget. This market may never even be aware of what occurred here.

This is so naive