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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

> The appetite to depart from subscriptions and loaning your personal data to ad/ai companies is stronger than ever.

Only on HN, the general public don't care, they don't even know the name of their web browser.

General public is weird because everyone, yet no one, is the general public.

Fwiw I've started to see a shift in many non-tech circles I'm a part of. Especially when you take the time to explain the problems. Many do care, they just aren't made aware of the issues.

GP typically means middle of the bell-curve. HN visitors and for sure commenters are at the edge of that curve...3-sta-nines away.

The general public will do whatever their friends do. If there was an iPhone charger sized box they could plug in anywhere and have their own personal cloud that can interconnect with other personal clouds, and a celebrity said it was cool to have one, the general public will do it without giving it a first thought.

In my experience just telling people to enable Google / Apple backup for photos is a chore at 5€ a month. And for general public this covers 90% of their needs.

You mean like this?

https://freedombox.org/

It’s been around since 2010.

Why didn't you tell me about this years ago?

Because it's not as conventient or functional as cloud and they don't pay me to talk it up.

There should be influencers or agitators (as named correctly) to tell general public what distro to install, what server to buy and how block tracking and ads

Precisely. My uncle has been using the builtin Samsung web browser for years on his phone, just because it said "Internet" in the name, and "Chrome" just wasn't a familiar name to him. Most people are like this.

and didn't even matters tbh

Samsung web browser uses chromium under the hood

Syphoned off a lot more data to Samsung though, further supporting and enabling their ugly business practices.

I actually prefer the Samsung browser over Chrome.

True, most people get the full ad driven internet experience and it drives me nuts. Everytime I have to help other people with computer stuff I almost get an aneurysm when opening their browser...

At some point I started just installing ABP/uBO without even bothering to ask/tell them, if I had the opportunity. So far my reads seem to have been correct regarding whether this would conflict with each person's typical web use, as I've never heard back about any trouble.

Digital rights are indeed important, but only a small portion of the entire concept of human rights. I can imagine general public places much more emphasis on wealth (re-)distribution policies.

A lumberjack may also argue GP don't care about environment laws if they had timbernews.

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