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Comment by WrtCdEvrydy | Hacker News Reader

Because as a customer, you're still the product.

I'm sure any communication will have to minimize stockholder impact and will be watered down instead of being 'Oh shit, all of our crap is encrypted'

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> Because as a customer, you're still the product.

That is simply false. I'm fine with people making that claim about companies like Facebook and Google - they make most of their money selling advertising, so yes, in that sense, their users are a product they are offering to advertisers. But that's not how Garmin works.

Garmin provides products to us, and offers services that they hope will keep us in their ecosystem. Unless you have reasonable evidence that they are lying in their privacy polices, such as at https://www.garmin.com/en-US/privacy/connect/ , then you cannot reasonably make the claim you have made.

I understood the parent to be commenting that Garmin is repackaging customer revenue as a securities product, i.e., their common stock, which they sell to investors. Point being that investors are the key stakeholder, not customers.

It's not a unique POV for a company to have, it's just it's maybe more a subject of laser focus for companies in this era.

That could be extended to all publicly traded companies using that logic.

And a lot of people make that argument. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that this isn't some flaw in the theory - the theory is exactly that most, perhaps all, publicly-traded companies are answerable to their shareholders, not their customers. Attempts to reform or mitigate this often fall under the umbrella of "stakeholder capitalism," in which the customers are viewed as one of the stakeholders that needs representation, because they don't currently have any.

I got a feeling customers are more "sentient" than stock holders that can't care less about the whys or whats about the company. It is just another stock in the portfolio that is traded at market equilibrium among other stocks.

The customers has to do a informed choice.

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