>Going through life not trusting any company isn't a fun way to live.

Isn't that the Hacker mindset, though? We want to trailblaze solutions and share it with everyone for free. Always in liberty and oftentimes in beer too. I think it's a good mentality to have, precisely because of your lens of selfish motivations.

Wanting money is fine. If it was some flat $200 or even $2000 with legally binding promises that I have an indefinitely license to use this version of the software and they won't extract anything else from me: then fine. Hackers can be cheap, but we aren't opposed to barter.

But that's not the case. Wanting all my time and privacy and data under the veneer of something hackers would provide with no or very few strings is not. tricks to push into that model is all the worse.

> If they promise those paying customers (in legally binding agreements, no less) that they won't train on their data... and are then found to have trained on their data anyway, they wont just lose that customer - they'll lose thousands of others too.

I sure wish they did. In reality, they get a class action, pay off some $100m to lawyers after making $100b, and the lawyers maybe give me $100 if I'm being VERY generous, while the company extracted $10,000+ of value out of me. And the captured market just keeps on keeping on.

Sadly, this is not a land of hackers. It is a market of passive people of various walks of life: of students who do not understand what is going on under the hood (I was here when Facebook was taking off), of businsessmen too busy with other stuff to understand the sausage in the factory, of ordinary people who just wants to fire and forget. This market may never even be aware of what occurred here.