Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.
Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model.
I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instance, we can patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a lot faster for everyone.
What we offer today is a faster way to use applications that do own your data so you can be much more productive and hopefully enable a new set of applications never before possible.
We help improve decentralization of the web over duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more powerful, not less.
We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer computing OS as it underlies our tech.
In time, we might be open to people owning their own hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I don't view either world as mutually exclusive.
If there's an opportunity to research making things trustless, we'll work on that.
Also, history tells us when companies say they wont be evil... they mean "not yet". It is a middle man power play pure and simple.
The rest feels like classic SV/startup window dressing to get the job done.
I think that's just called "switching to a subscription model". "Rent seeking" has a different meaning.
That's factually incorrect that, that always happens and I am not sure why you think we're grouped into that without any evidence or a basis of reasoning.