Except that existing in modern society requires giving immense amounts of personal information for even basic transactions.

It's beyond absurd and desperately needs to be addressed. Too bad both the government and corporations stand to loose too much that I doubt it will be treated seriously.

I personally think that the Apple anti-trust is being pushed due to their privacy stance.

Apple looked at the pen register cases and realized the best position to be in as a third party is to not possess usable data.

The US case from my point of view is trying to fore Apple to share user data with third parties.

How would a successful antitrust verdict against Apple further the NSA's implicit dogma of "insecure by default"? Especially if it winds up breaking up Apple into many pieces. It's far easier for a centralized tech industry to bend the knee to the NSA than a distributed one.

>It's far easier for a centralized tech industry to bend the knee to the NSA than a distributed one.

I don't agree. NSA can hack/pressure smaller companies much easier than a giant like Apple.

easier but you get less data. There's thousands of small knees to get to bend to. More points of failures for public outings Centralizing it to one company makes everyone's lives easieer.

Furthermore the NSA/FBI/CIA want all their spying behavior to be secret. If you have to bend a lot of small knees then someone's going to fib before they get the data they want. And moving off a small company that's bent the knee is way easier than moving off FAANG, which can keep secrets[0] and has your balls locked in a vise.

[0] Because, among other things, the whole "Surprise and Delight" doctrine demands internal controls and secret-keeping discipline not that far off from an actual intelligence agency

Forcing Apple to hand over data to a third party for commercial reasons (not needing a warrant) is much simpler than whatever scenario you have worked out.

We all have choices to make. I avoid all sorts of things people consider indispensable.

2 examples are not having an amazon prime account and running my own mail server.

Given recent events, I don't think Amazon Prime is that necessary anymore.

Mail servers, sure. The big issue there is another annoying pseudo-monopoly issue where so many major email servers assume anything not from [major email server] is spam, so you may not even get to communicate properly. More sticks for the fire.

I'm anything but a major mail provider and I don't have any issues. I did have some hiccups around 2008 and had to implement DMARC-DKIM. I use strict delivery so my mail server must delivery all mail directly.

Occasionally people have a vanity domain email that bounces back to me. I have to search the headers for the actual email address and re-send.