I absolutely loathe web development, yet I've been having to work on implementing a webshop from scratch, as I'm trying to start up a laser business. To make the experience slightly less painful, I implemented the backend in #freepascal ; as most out of the ready-made solutions are evil in various ways. (eg: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/08/1518213/shopify-ceo-says-staffers-need-to-prove-jobs-cant-be-done-by-ai-before-asking-for-more-headcount ) --
It's just about done, the only bit I need to finish yet is some sort of solution for shipping/tracking info.
I've been looking into ShipStation and actually started implementing their API('s); learned they just acquired the ShipEngine company, leading to some API confusion - which lead me to look more into the company.
It turns out that the same company that recently acquired them (Auctane) owns a myriad of shipping-type companies, including stamps.com, endicia, shippingeasy, shipworks, and many others,...
It seems to me that they put themselves in a position where there's basically few alternatives.
If you think about how much e-commerce integrates with at least one of these, you quickly realize that most of what pretty much anyone buys online goes through one of the companies owned by them, which means they know what everyone buys, their name, their home address, etc,...
This absolutely sounds like a #privacy scandal waiting to happen.
Needless to say, I'm not going to be using ShipStation.
I guess I'll just try to use ups/fedex/whatever directly then. Back to the drawing board. :(
It never fails to blow my mind that whenever you turn over even the most benign rock, you'll find some billionaire sucking our society dry. Nothing seems immune to #enshittification these days.
(Probably a surprise to no-one that actually deals with this stuff on a regular basis - but like i said, i've not been doing webdev in a long time, and actively avoid the www even as a user, I've been a bit out of the loop)
