'Average user' just means all traits proportionally blended together, right? Lemmy users are not a huge part of the internet, but our contribution to the 'average' is just a big as any other person; and our opinions and knowledge and behaviour does matter. Some might argue that the opinions of tech-focused people matter more because they are more likely to influence other people about tech decisions.
So yeah, we're a niche group - but the discussion and sharing of ideas is important.
I think people care, but there is a lot of inertia. i.e. it takes a lot of little nudges for people to change their habits.
So why do you tell them it's a Mac rather than just telling them the truth? Do you think its somehow shameful to use Linux or something?
Every time something like this comes up, there are side discussions about all the settings and registry edits that can be used to disable various things. Each individual thing is not super hard to change, but there is an ever growing set of ads and personal-info siphoning 'features' being added all the time.
It's deliberately exploitative crap driven by greed. So I'd discourage anyone from being a Microsoft apologist for this stuff. It is not ok.
Oh. So if you go through some particular combinations of settings then maybe you can find a way to request that Google reduce the ways they use your personal information. I guess that makes it totally cool and fine? I don't think so.
Much better to use Firefox and avoid Google ever getting that info in the first place. That way you don't have to constantly play whack-a-mole with deliberately confusing 'privacy settings' which don't even fix the problem anyway.
This is a reason why I'm not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn't going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you're sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
I haven't pirated a game for a very long time. Indie games are very very cheap; and AAA games don't interest me anyway.
So I'm not really looking at this change from a piracy point of view. For me, the big message here is (once again) don't trust big corps. People who put their trust in Unity are now getting stabbed in the back. They're now have to either pay up big, or do a huge amount of additional work to write their stuff using a different engine. And this could easily happen again, and again, and with other engines... ... So its best not to rely on big corps.