Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.