But, like, do you have something to hide?

The trick is to avoid normies

The hyper-normalization and gaslighting continues, and evolves.

2010: I'm getting commercial ads relevant to my interests.
- Yeah, right. As if you were so important that anyone would follow you through the entire internet.

2018: I'm getting commercial ads relevant to my interests.
- It's your own fault for not installing an ad blocker.

2026: I'm getting right-wing political videos in my feed.
- It's your own fault for taking an interest in rage porn.

If the company is sued and your personal device is also your work device, everything in it can be part of the discovery process. If it's a criminal affair, such devices can be confiscated as evidence for an indeteremined amount of time.

This shit goes way beyond "mere" privacy concerns.

If the incompetent idiots keep on pushing for you to run company stuff on your devices, simply point out that it would legally expose you to the company's legal affairs.

Honestly, you are supposed to keep personal and work devices separate. Not only does it provide work life balance, but it also avoids lawsuits.

Yes, people have sued workplaces for infrigement of privacy

There is a fine line between work and personal life that should never be crossed!!!

I went through this exact same thing at a previous job, and they also reacted like I was speaking another language. These weren't dumb people either, but they were very much the types who had never spared a thought to anything about technology, much less privacy.

They eventually offered to pay me a monthly stipend and put it back on me to use that to buy a work phone or just pocket the $. I didn't feel like going through that hassle, so I caved and just kept the money.

Not every OS, none of the ones I use do.

But I get your point.

The bigger issue is that having your third-party "security" software betray you while using Windows is like pissing in an ocean of piss. The OS itself is spyware!

Lol

Maybe I’ve always misunderstood the term but it seemed to me that spyware was a category of malware that would secretly and excessively harvest user data whatever the purpose or the actor behind it. I’d guess this was more likely to be done for commercial or criminal purposes than state surveillance or espionnage.

Indeed, this quote seems a gross misrepresentation but is it not that harvesting of user data for commercial purposes has become so ubiquitous that the term has shifted to only designate malware used by actual spies?

People can grow completely desensitized to the negative meaning of a word.

Something that the modem conservative movement has discovered, and glommed onto. Unfortunately, very successfully.

It's not always as stupid as you make it sound. Sometimes there are many subtly different ways to achieve a basic result and using a common component rather than rolling your own can be the difference between familiar and surprising behaviour. Although obvs if it's 3 lines just c+p that, but it's unlikely to really be that