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Its why I continue to maintain a physical, offline music collection even though it feels increasingly pointless. I've still got a bunch of my old CDs in a box in my closet as a last resort.
I pay 8 bucks and I can stream 95% of the music I want anywhere I am, which is a fair deal. The problem is they've trained me to expect betrayal and removal of songs I enjoy for reasons beyond their control, so archives/backups feel like a necessary step. Music files are small, storage is cheap.
I AM certainly willing to pay to see live performances, the value add there is clear, but digitization of everything has made me very unwilling to hand over money for an ephemeral digital file that I'm technically not allowed to copy.
There was a similar controversy years ago, around the time when cloud storage first took off. People were very skeptical of putting all their files onto someone else’s servers, hoping that it would still be there, hoping it would still be secure. A handful of people thought it was idiotic and said you’d never get them onboard with it and that you should stick to local storage. The counter-response was, “What if there’s a fire in your house? What if you get robbed?” These are all risk factors, and I’m not against cloud storage at all, but I prefer the vectors I have direct access and control over rather than the ones I don’t. It’s also why I don’t use ebook readers for general purpose consumption. If I’m at work and I have some downtime, sure. But generally I don’t like the thought of losing my place because my alarm clock drained the battery which caused my book to die.
Amazingly, Dropbox has never betrayed me over the course of 15 years. But the only reason I tolerated it in the first place is because it syncs with a local folder on my own computer so it was added convenience with no additional risk.
Then Microsoft tries to force that same crap on me and I get mad because they're trying to dictate what I keep on my computer.
Depends on what you consider a betrayal, I guess. A year or two ago, they added a new setting that (if memory serves) allowed them to train models on your data, and turned it on by default. I considered that a massive betrayal and moved to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance after that. I might move to Proton Drive once they have a Linux client.
I do recall that but... I'm not TOO mad about letting my data get hoovered up to help summon the Silicon demon.
I actually WANT the machine God to have a piece of my personal data in there. I tailor my behavior online to make it easy for the thing to figure out my preferences.
For me, it was the underhanded way they did it. If they introduced a setting and it's off by default, fine whatever. If they turned it on by default but gave copious notice, that's not great but I might have been ok with it. It was the fact that the setting was both on by default and they snuck it in (I found out from a hacker news comment thread) which I found so unacceptable.
I agree with you here, but I can only imagine if they introduced a default-off setting, maybe a dozen total users would go out of their way to enable it. And 8 of those would be cats or toddlers pressing random buttons.
And in this case, I think their expectation of access for that purpose was unreasonable.
Sure, I know that's why they did it. But that is their own problem, not mine. And when they chose to solve the problem by betraying my trust, I chose to end the business relationship and encourage everyone else I know to do the same. It isn't much, but one should vote with one's wallet IMO.
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It seems to be standard corporate operating procedure. Do the thing, if there's enough blowback then walk it back/undo it, but depend on the apathy/laziness of the consumer to let you get away with 4/5 of what you want to do.
Sure. But that doesn't make it ok, of course, and I refused to allow them to continue to get my business after that kind of betrayal.
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I used to have Dropbox but dropped them after the change in their privacy policy. I’ve used MEGA for over a decade now and never looked back. I still prefer things locally and disk duplicators have never made the task easier than they have today, but the cost of physical storage is actually more expensive than cloud subscriptions, ironically. The increase in content quality has matched the rate of storage expansion such that it’s less economical than it used to be. I don’t like the trend in that direction but realistically what can you do? Either bite the bullet and accept the out of pocket cost or take it to the cloud. I’ve tried the synchronization thing too, MEGA also has the same thing but I can never optimize it for how I want things to synchronize and just forego it entirely.
Its me, the bullet muncher.
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