Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

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It's even worse with drivers for hardware, like with Razer devices. I still use a Microsoft Habu mouse and a Reclusa keyboard, they are the result of a cooperation between Microsoft and Razer with Razer supplying the drivers and software. At this point they are ancient but they still work very well for me.

Recently I got a Razer Orbweaver, heavily discounted, and installing the drivers for that required me to create an account with Razer and install "Razer Synapse". I went along with it thinking that it would at least give me one package to keep drivers and options for all three of my Razer devices in one place. But it doesn't, Synapse only recognizes the Orbweaver, the other two Razer peripherals still need their own dedicated driver and software packages installed.

Synapse phones home all the time when booting up it tells me how it's connecting to the "Synapse cloud". Sounds really fancy and all but what use is that if it can't even get drivers for other Razer devices from the "cloud"?

This feels like getting all the disadvantages but none of the advantages.

<< This feels like getting all the disadvantages but none of the advantages.

I couldn't have said it better. It's funny because I'm totally cool with having an account provided it does things like gives me access to software, drivers, tools, backups, whatever. But yeah, I'm not going for it if it's just an excuse to vacuum up data. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid companies/products that just don't get the message.

To this point, I switched from Google to Microsoft a few years ago because I really got sick of feeling like my personal data was just making them richer in exchange for nothing. Email and web apps aren't worth the loss of privacy.

At first Bing search was a bit weird, but then it turned out that it worked just as well as Google for most things, and better for some.

Trust MS more than Google? MS put an ad inside windows for OneDrive. MS put a nag inside the OS to use Edge. To me MS has crossed lines you just do not cross.

MS putting advertisements of its own products inside its other products is certainly not a cool move, nobody wants to pay for ads.

But in regards to private data, the parent does have a point. Google's main business is aggregating data for ad purposes, selling their users privacy is how they make most of their money, you wouldn't expect anything else from them.

MS does some of that too, but they make most of their money through other means, so they have less incentive of disrespecting their user's privacy. Even more so considering the PR blowback if it should ever turn out that Windows spies on its users so MS can sell that data.

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