can we build software and services without mining people’s identities? it just won’t be as profitable, and frankly a lot of the innovation is consumer hostile. it’s certainly worth trying to dont you think?
For example, before Facebook, in Germany there existed studiVZ, schülerVZ, meinVZ (basically the same social network of the same company for different audiences). But this social network wasn't a commercial success, even though for some time it was much more popular in Germany than Facebook.
Generally, many successful German software companies were simply bought by US-American companies:
- SuSE was bought by Novell
- DLD (company: Delix; https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Linux-Distribution ) was bought by Red Hat
- Star Division (the company behind Star Office) was bought by Sun (which again was bought by Oracle)
- In 2023, Software AG was bought by the private equity company Silver Lake
- Recently, Hornetsecurity was bought by Proofpoint.
For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".
I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.
One can try it, but it will never be a fair game.
I don't know what to make of that.
If these practices were invented in China/Russia we would call them deceptive and fraudulent.