Sadly its too easy to claim a lack of understanding and continue on with life as usual. At this point, we should be working together to buy NOTHING from these corporations until our rights are firmly guaranteed. (exceptions for meds and similar essentials). I've cut back significantly, but I still made an Amazon purchase recently. A strengthening of secondhand marketplaces could take away another excuse for this. If they saw even a 25% drop in revenue it might be enough. We have to starve the beast.

Nah… no matter what they do, people - especially Americans, are too lazy and apathetic to care.

Apathetic is the key word there. And can you really blame Americans for being apathetic? In 2008, Democrats promised to give us socialized healthcare and the people showed up in record numbers. We gave Democrats complete control over the House, Senate, and Executive branch. And what happened? Nothing. They made up countless excuses on why they couldn't help us so our healthcare system stayed as broken as ever.

Last year, what did Harris promise to do to help us if she won? Nothing. She wouldn't endorse socialized healthcare for all, she wouldn't support free college for all, she wouldn't promise to connect all the major US cities by high speed rail, or to mandate that all working Americans have a minimum of 2 weeks of paid vacation each year + paid sick days, etc.

US politicians don't give a shit what the American people want. They don't even try to pretend anymore like they will help us. Instead, all they do is claim the other party will be more damaging. So yes, we are apathetic but that is because we live under a corporate dictatorship.

I think you overestimate the average American's aptitude for both understanding the ramifications of such spying, and to understand how to go about seeking out alternatives. Joe/Susie Random doesn't have a clue about how what makes their phone screen work, only that it's a tool to do things. Social media especially is so ingrained in modern life that you can become ostracized for not using it (even jobs sometimes see not having SM as a red flag). And even SM aside, what options are there (aside from FOSS, which does require a certain technical aptitude to adapt)? It used to be that you could customize android via roms to get away from it, but with these latest changes happening, even that's becoming difficult to avoid big tech's dominance. But again, it takes a certain level of know-how to seek out and implement such an alternative. And for the layman that doesn't really have a clue about how this stuff work nor the bandwidth to learn it, i can't entirely place the blame on them. The focus should entirely be on Apple and Google for strangling the competition that renders the options limited. I'm all for placing the blame on the individual when warranted, but we need to remember that merely by being on Lemmy we have a bit more technical understanding than most, and that must be taken into account for how we view these things. Many of the people out there aren't inherently lazy or stupid, they just have different understandings and priorities in life, and we should be looking at these companies and also regulators for their failures of responsibility.