Live data from Hacker News

Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

old.reddit.com

31–40 of 280 posts

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#32

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

You’re comparing vscode telemetry with “selling your data”? For real? Do you think the amount of time you spend in the File menu is as monetizable as your search history?

[deleted]

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#33

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

> I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. Much of the “fantastic” content I do watch on YouTube has sponsored content in the video. Mostly I avoid YouTube.

correct, but also for me, much of the usefulness of youtube is for looking up how to do something quick. This has been ruined by google emphasizing longer vids to up the “engagement” aka add time… and so now all of youtube has become the video equivalent of a recipe site…

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#34

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

Use VsCodium, telemetry is disabled.

https://vscodium.com/

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#35
post #10

Interesting, I still don't, though I acknowledge perhaps Google has the greater capacity for harm; here's why. Over time, Google absolutely has been in a position to abuse data, and to some extent it has done so -- but honestly, if you compare what they COULD do to what they END UP DOING, they're not doing so bad at all. They mostly self-correct relatively nicely. Microsoft, on the other hand, clearly does the bare m…

What could do with your data to make more money that they aren’t?

Sure in theory they could be selling access to anyone’s Gmail account to the highest bidder, but that’s going to lose them money by actively driving their customers away.

Google may be actively harmful/evil, but they aren’t stupid.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#36
The best part is that Microsoft and Google are working together towards the end goal of locking users out of their own machines.

Microsoft is really pushing for its trusted OS platform, with a completely locked down kernel, that will grant them full control over what can and cannot be done on the computer. Google is pushing for the same, but in the browser space. Except their Web Integrity effort has no chance of succeeding unless there's an OS support. One guess who'll be providing that.

Then, once all is in place, there will be a fully opaque content delivery pipeline from online servers to users' HDMI monitors. No peeking.

And that's just one application of the trusted OS. Once people lose control over their machines, it'll open the floodgates for lot more nefarious opportunities.

But, yeah, this new Microsoft is so white and fluffy that it's almost unbearable.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#37

Times are changin’. All you young whippersnappers wouldn’t believe that back in my day, Microsoft was evil, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Google was the scrappy upstart who prided themselves on not serving ads and irrelevant fluff on the search results page.

Well. They were proud of no fluff on the home page. But they had ads on SERPs, though they were text only ads with strict styling. This was good because they replaced evil Flash ads.

Re: Today I realized I now trust Microsoft more than Google. What is happening?

#39

I generally avoid Google products, but I do not understand the animosity towards YouTube, nor why anyone would not just pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads. The content being created for YouTube is fantastic, you can easily watch news from all over the world, conference talks, lectures, interviews, in-depth documentaries and deep dive analysis that blows away anything you'll ever s…

> pay the very small fee for YouTube Premium and do away with all the ads

because it doesn't do away with _all_ the ads: every video still has the video maker themselves talking about their 'sponsor' for at least a minute, reminding us to 'like and subscribe' for at least ten seconds, and a patreon scroll of users that have paid extra for another three minutes

Post reply on HN