It’s pretty clear to me that Microsoft wants your PC to be just like your phone: closed-source vendor-only hardware and software with all user data cryptographically linked to your identity. Coupled with social media and internet mass surveillance, device level surveillance will fully enable the fascist takeover of the United States, and other countries. There are untold riches in selling your device-level actions to an authoritarian government so they can eliminate electoral opposition, and to advertisers who will advertise and capture insights at the OS level.
We have been building the surveillance state for decades, and now there is a federal power that is willing to use it not just extra-judicially, but against its own citizens to suppress their constitutional rights. ICE is already using this power to arrest and disappear lawful citizens without trial. Protesting in a city where the national guard is illegally deployed? Better not bring your phone or speak about it online or do anything on your phone relating to it, really. Hell, eventually you won’t be able to safely speak out loud anywhere even near a mobile phone. The Great Eye is ever watchful.
Imagine no more covert device interception, no more packet-level analysis from expensive secret rooms at your ISP, and no more digging through phone records and social media posts - just organized, searchable, chatbot queryable information updated hourly and purchased from Apple, Microsoft, and Google with your tax dollars about what you think, where you go, what you buy, what you do, and who you talk to every minute of every day, with an integrated secret police ready to arrest you at a moments notice of thought-crime or an attempt to exercise your rights. In the end, an AI agent will just tell them where to go and who to arrest. An authoritarian’s dream.
All the attention you’ve paid and all the work you’ve done preserving your privacy is about to come to fruition. And it still won’t be enough to save us.
Recent Ubuntu convert here. Haven’t looked back yet
I remember there being a case about Ubuntu spying on users via the integrated Amazon search feature years ago. They include non-free software by default, such as the Snap store, and Ubuntu is also owned by Canonical.
I’d recommend switching to Debian. It’s community-based and entirely free and open source (except for non-free firmware packages, but those are not much to worry about, and you can easily remove them if you like). A new major release of Debian came out recently with many upgrades. You should check it out!
Welp, I know what im staying up way too late doing tonight!