[tlhighbaugh]

Why is anyone surprised, Microsoft can do whatever it wants and people still spend hundreds on its OS offering that has been awful for over a decade, so of course they are going to get more abusive to lower costs and raise revenues since people still buy the thing. This is at the heart of Meta (I hate that name) and Alphabet too, the most simplistic understanding of market dynamics should illuminate how this is working. What's weird is the government not trustbusting them and letting Germany cut them down here and there (not because they care about privacy but to make room for their domestic firms) while the once called conspiracy theory NSA are still amassing a monster to make Big Brother look like Little Whimpy Cousin, does no one else see the writing on the wall here?

You really can't even blame any of them for being that way, the public could have a multitude of free alternatives with a bit of effort and yet they rather spend 200 on an upfront abusive and honestly highly flawed OS, pay google to store their photos (and scan them with emerging AI technology) and use Facebook for whatever reason people even use that for. Why shouldn't they find the edge of what the public will now accept, since its changed so much. Such is the nature of organizations interacting with a market or the public (in the case of government agencies which operate the same way just less efficiently). As my dearly departed great grandmother said about this sort of thing between drags from her Lucky Strike unfiltered cigarette while tending her rose garden, "Ya gotta get it while the gettin is good!"