Pay attention to what companies do behind our back and you’ll quickly learn which ones are super creepy.
For example, Mistral Le Chat released the memory feature, but were kind enough to notify me about it. The notification itself also had a nice toggle that allowed me to disable said feature. That was unusually considerate of them.
However, opt-out is still rude when compared to opt-in settings. Think of Debian’s package popularity statistics for example. During installation, Debian gives you the option to enable the statistics or just ignore the whole thing and move on.
Contrast that with Microsoft Copilot that also rolled out the memory feature a while back without telling me anything about it. One day, I just noticed that Copilot is referencing an older conversation, which I find super creepy. That just made me feel betrayed. I already knew that Microsoft is a creepy corporation, just like Google and Meta, so that shouldn’t surprise me one bit. Speaking of Google, better check those gmail settings on again. I’m sure Google can’t stop messing around with them and enabling privacy violating settings from time to time.
The only way to escape these companies is to prioritize your privacy. When you do so, you’ll find replacements for the current capitalist platforms. For example, I switched from Windows to Linux and from Gmail to ProtonMail. I also switched from Dropbox to Nextcloud, which offers multiple services like a calendar and tasks. This means that I switched my calendar from Google to Nextcloud, for example.
When those companies roll out new features, are they opt-in, opt-out or sneaky stealth assassin features that just stab you in the back one day without any warning?
Linux is a worldwide community project, and its source code is readily available. It’s nonprofit. Proton is now a Swiss nonprofit organization without shareholders (https://proton.me/foundation). Nextcloud is an open-source project that you can host on your own server or in the cloud, which means you have total control over your information.
These are nonprofit projects that don’t seek to monetize from you because you’re not the product.
I can’t speak to mail/cloud providers, but a big difference between 99% of open source software and proprietary software is that updates are manually installed by the user.
In theory, this allows the user the opportunity to read the new source before installation to verify it isn’t malicious or to check for any known compatibility issues or bugs.
For instance, “stable” Linux distros are not stable in terms of not crashing, but stable in the sense that functionality will not update and only security patches are applied. But the user always gets to choose when that happens.