I would say tech workers have very weak class consciousness and understanding of power structures. Those who care about not ceeding power is a tiny minority compared to say among MDs and lawyers and their guilds/unions.

> It's quite shocking to me how many experienced, tech-savvy people, who used to care about cookies and ad tracking - are now willingly sending their business strategies, highly confidential contracts, and intimate personal issues to a cloud provider because "it is only $0.0x per million tokens!".

Because there are more privacy guarantees there, depending on the provider. "But what if they violate their contract!" is some pretty tin-foil hat stuff.

How is this any different than a business running their website out of the cloud, assuming you are using a provider with appropriate contractual terms?

You can care about tracking and ads but still be comfortable storing your backups in the cloud, and many have been for quite awhile, even sometimes without encryption - that is totally different than e.g. Meta actively trying to track you and understand your relationship graph and your purchases etc.

  But what if they violate their contract!" is some pretty tin-foil hat stuff.

The foundation of these businesses is stealing IP in bulk.

The foundation of the businesses training AI models.

So don't use them for inference.

I'm not sure about the tin-foil-hattedness of worrying about them violating their contract. But that's by-the-by. It is definitely not tin-foil-hat to worry about the data being taken in a breach.

It's no different than generally using AWS.

Depends on how you use it. You can use AWS in a way that protects your data even if Amazon is compromised. You can even run LLM inference that way, but it doesn't seem at all common.

i think you overestimate the number of tech-savvy people who ever cared about cookies and ad tracking.