My approach with companies that do this: Contact them, explain that I will not be giving them any money due to this aggressive anti-privacy practice, and take my business elsewhere.

In case anyone else is wondering, or simply doesn’t like reading screen shots of text, this is apparently a real report:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/32405

If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.

Wouldn’t “upvote if you have never heard of it” accomplish the same thing?

I guess it would depend on people reading and following the instructions, instead of just upvoting games they like. Maybe that’s a bit much to ask. :P

I nominate Paul Eggert and Arthur Olson before him, for the tz database, which we all depend upon whenever the time at which something happens (or did or will happen) matters.

Edit: Tom Scott touches on the subject here.

Also, when building services that are expected to send HTML email, make sure to generate a plain text version of the content and put it in the appropriate multipart section of the message. Otherwise, people reading in plain text won’t see it unless they’re willing to jump through hoops to do so (and there’s a good chance they’ll toss it in the trash instead).

Bonus points if the plain text part is formatted well.