Ask HN: Pay For Privacy...Really?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865049

by makalu • 16 years ago

3 5 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you're a free user of prezi all your presentations are public, and in order to make them private you have to subscribe and pay. That seems like a pretty genius business model that I'm sure has been used before. But is it a feature that successfully drives people to pay? Does it open too big of feature gap that competitors can differentiate against?

Facebook's privacy is a mess as it is, and it would never (hopefully) happen, but could you imagine facebook under a "Pay for Privacy" model?

bjplink• 16 years ago

Link to Prezi signup: http://prezi.com/profile/signup/

scrrr• 16 years ago

That is exactly how github works, too: https://github.com/plans

DanielStraight• 16 years ago

As a customer, I'm actually a fan of the idea. If you aren't paying for something, you are generally the product not the customer (see: http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continu...). If I willingly become a customer, then I don't have to be a product anymore. I like that option.

jonafato• 16 years ago

That might work out well for Facebook. I don't know what percentage of their user base would care enough to do so, though. And at this point, with all of the ridiculous things that have happened with their privacy, it might even seem extortive to me. It's one thing to tell everyone their stuff is public unless you pay from the beginning, but publicizing what one would otherwise assume to be private data late in the game and then charging to reprivatize would be underhanded.

fgjhryhty• 16 years ago

Sounds good to me - I don't want to listen to all the fuss about privacy, let alone pay for it.

Ask HN: Pay For Privacy...Really?

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