whataboutism – as long as you’re distracted by “China!”, you aren’t paying attention to the far more egregious privacy violations happening right here at home
in the case of technology (specifically anything cloud based * ) – if you have your needs split across multiple services, if one of them goes down / gets hacked / goes belly up, you only lose access to what was stored on that service – if everything is on one service, then you lose access to everything
* the cloud is just someone else’s computer
network effect – easy when it’s just you – but then you need to convince all your friends and family to switch over as well – and they’re not interested because it would mean convincing all their friends and family too … best you can hope for is a trust thermocline, a catastrophic event that’s more likely to leave millions of Facebook users floundering in anger than in curiosity at alternatives …
a distro that has let their SSL certificates expire four times …