I know you were referring to Google, that is why I made the point about Google. Xiaomi is a tech company with a personal data spying program and is worth maybe 50 billion, and supposedly the "4th most valuable startup in the world," if you trust Wikipedia. My point is that the valuation is based on the profit potential that investors see, not how ethical either company actually is. And both derive a non-zero amount of that value from spying on humans.

The Russian oligarchs are a group of people that grabbed large amounts of wealth by reaping the downfall of the Soviet Union. They are a very specific, well connected group of people outside of normal Russian billionaires. The reason specifically that they are oligarchs instead of just normal billionaires is that they are very plugged into the government and sway its operation. And I know there's some cynics out there that will be like "well that's just billionaires in general" but I encourage you to learn about the leverage this group of people have on normal government operations.

With regards to the observation that no one refers to Google as spyware, I don't think I see this either. But I do see tons of mainstream articles raising the point that Google spies on users. The problem is that (it feels like, at least) only us tech-inclined seem to care:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2020/10/27/heres-...

>The report found that 80% of Americans think at least one tech giant is listening in on their conversations: Facebook at 68%; TikTok at 53%; and Google at 45%. But only 18% said they had deleted Facebook because of privacy concerns.

I fully agree Google is just an advertising company dressed up, and also further propose that its open source contributions and tech projects are its robing. I think there's still room to criticize other companies however, especially since privacy issues from companies like Xiaomi don't often get featured on HN.