I was going to write this as a response to the top-trending Post by @Lounge Lizard - The Incessant, Full-court Media Assault on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (Especially By Microsoft?) - but it was getting too long, so I thought that I should just put it up here as a Post.
This is not in defense of Microsoft or any of our Corporate Overlords, but it has to be pointed out that realizing that WE (the Consumers) are these Corporations’ Products is the first step in curbing their excesses. The second step is using available Tools to make ourselves as unmarketable and unprofitable to them as possible.
Luckily (for us), there are still some things that we can do today, and if we don’t do them, we continue to encourage the bad behaviors. Even the Behemoth founded on the laudable Principle of “Do No Evil” is the most evil of them all today, because we keep making it easier and easier for them to benefit from their evil deeds.
Take, for example, the Microsoft Edge Browser case. It is not a revelation to say that almost all Browsers track our search and browsing histories. There are Tools (e.g. UBlock Origin, NoScript, etc) out there to prevent this (or, at least, minimize the accuracy of the data they leech from us in our hours of innocence). How many of us use these Tools?
Even the Browsers themselves have options for tweaking privacy preferences and, to be technically accurate, these tweaks work to a large extent. Here is what my Microsoft Edge splash screen looks like if I don’t do anything other than just a few tweaks (my apologies, but this Post will be too long and incoherent if I try to get into specific per-browser tweaks)
As you can see, I’m not inundated with the same contents that @Lounge Lizard complains about. This is most likely because our browsing and search histories are very different.
Talking about things that we can proactively do to make our eyeballs unprofitable for those building businesses around our habits, how about we just use the Tools available to impose our desire and preferences on them instead of venting about their insidious and nefarious exploitations?
Say, for example, I go into Microsoft Edge and tell it that I don’t effing need the Notifications (TYVM)?
Or, what if I just tell Microsoft Edge, “Oooohhhh… so you’d like to open a page everytime I launch you? Page Rank kind of thing, uhn? Well, let’s play… How about you give www.dailykos.com a boost everytime I so much as look at you?”