Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product

https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre-still-the-product:7

by deworms • 5 years ago

192 205 5 years ago

yur3i__• 5 years ago

I think the only analogy that works now is "if you aren't in control, you're the product", ala free software and self hosting

ZeroGravitas2• 5 years ago

Or in theory at least, well regulated small businesses in a competitive market.

umanwizard• 5 years ago

That’s only assuming a large enough fraction of possible customers care.

tonyedgecombe2• 5 years ago

free software

Well maybe, if this whole sorry ediface wasn't built on top of free software.

epicide• 5 years ago

Not OP, but I assume they meant "free as in speech, not as in beer". AKA FOSS.

inkblotuniverse• 5 years ago

Free software gives control to the user, that being the person running the software.

If you're not running the software, but instead using an API to the server where I'm running it, then of course you're not in control; you're trusting my word I'm actually running the software!

agloeregrets• 5 years ago

While entirely true, I cant help but think that the overall title effectively equates what happens on Facebook to what happens on a paid service of sorts when that is a bit unfair.

JohnFen11• 5 years ago

I don't think it's unfair. The number of services that will stop spying on you because you are paying money for them is distressingly small.

moron4hire• 5 years ago

I'm shocked that it's as high as 25%. Why would anyone say yes to this prompt? What do you have to gain?

There have been plenty of studies and I've even done my own studies. Most people don't read prompts. Most people don't even register consciously that a prompt even appeared. They have gotten so used to clicking through prompts that they have become blind to them.

Prompts are the wrong way to do almost anything, unless the user is expecting the prompt to appear.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

Same is true for advertising, here it is called banner blindness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

The advertising industry has probably some counter measures.

tomjen32• 5 years ago

Prompts are bad from a design perspective: there is no way to say "ask me later", much less one that is universally recognized.

That means that if I need to jot down a quick note and some designer has decided that I should be forced to go through a set of prompts about how to use the interface then I have to close them without reading them so that I can still remember what it was I should write down.

The same thing happens pretty much with all other prompts, though to a lesser extend. If you feel like adding a prompt to the software, make sure I can minimize it, do my work and then come back.

vegetablepotpie• 5 years ago

In theory, if you’re paying, it means that you’re a stakeholder, and can have some influence over the companies revenue, and therefore have some leverage.

In practice, the fact that you are paying for a service makes you much more attractive to advertisers because it says you’re willing to spend money online.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

You are or are not a stakeholder if you pay or don't pay.

If you believe you are a stakeholder by paying you should believe you are a stakeholder because they make money from you through ads.

You are not a stakeholder in either case.

diminish2• 5 years ago

nope, if u r paying u have to agree to the terms of use which usually includes tracking and other things which sell your data.

mlang23• 5 years ago

Spon on. And that is why I will not pay for a YouTube abo. The day I can not stand the ads anymore, I will quit the cold turkey.

travoc2• 5 years ago

Ublock Origin, AdGuard or Brave gets you the best of both worlds.

Ruthalas• 5 years ago

Consider also: Sponsor Block

pdpi3• 5 years ago

The next to last paragraph bothers me:

    On Hackernews, they think it's "entitlement" to think that you can use free email
    and search engines and expect not to be tracked. The main problem with this line
    of thinking is that even if you had the option to pay for your email and for your
    search engine, some G**gle executive somewhere would mention during a meeting that
    they could add an extra $X million of revenue if they started using data from it
    from targeted advertising.

Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn't cash, it has to be something else. If you're paying cash for the service, though, you're well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 5 years ago

I think the author's point is that you will be tracked even if you do pay.

And indeed, I pay Google for gmail because some years I somehow slipped out of the free tier and had to start paying. At the same time, my email is unequivocally used by Google for tracking. I'm paying, and I'm still the product.

irjustin• 5 years ago

To be explicit, you're paying for the add-on storage. I think the distinction is important.

You can't pay for GMail unless you're part of Workspaces (GSuite). Am I still the product in GSuite? Well I don't get ads so... maybe not?

busterarm• 5 years ago

It depends on the host you pay. It's very simple. Don't use email from Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc.

Get email from providers who care about the same things that you do. I've been using Migadu happily for over a year now.

JohnFen11• 5 years ago

I'm paying, and I'm still the product.

Yes, but you're not the only one who is the product. Everyone who sends email to you is as well.

raxxorrax2• 5 years ago

If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit.

I don't need to use any of Googles services to be tracked by Google, although Facebook is probably the largest offender here.

In social networks, friends of mine have shared my contact information without me even knowing it. So other people might pay with your data.

And I believe the text is correct. You would pay and be tracked. Companies found out that the mass of users is pretty uncritical and if they are allowed to do it, they will do it.

Also, websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. A simple policy change and you blow a lot of mostly useless ad company out of the water.

I think that would be good.

asplake• 5 years ago

Websites are financed by people and organisations with all kinds of motivations and business models. Websites don’t all have to make a profit! It is totally unfair (not to mention nonsensical) to represent the above argument as leading to the inevitable conclusion that there would be no free websites.

JohnFen11• 5 years ago

If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit.

This is demonstrably untrue, as demonstrated by the fact that there were tons of useful free sites before advertising was even realistically possible, and there are still quite a lot of useful free sites now.

Also, I take issue with calling ad-supported things "free". They aren't free at all -- you're just paying with a different form of currency.

websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking.

This would remove roughly 95% of my problems with the modern web and online services.

SCNP3• 5 years ago

To add to your 3rd point, your friends (and possibly you) may have shared yours and other's contact information without them even knowing it. As you said, Facebook is one of the worst offenders of grabbing all the contacts in a phone without the user's knowledge...

nonameiguess• 5 years ago

That doesn't seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn't saying you should expect totally free services. It's saying you have the right to expect not to be tracked. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research.

It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24/7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don't realize they're being used as research subjects, which is what this is saying.

jamiequint8• 5 years ago

You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.

emodendroket16• 5 years ago

If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail. It seems hard to imagine any way providing that service for free would be worth their while if they couldn’t harvest the data.

pdpi3• 5 years ago

Tracking is becoming less effective, and the only recourse they have is stuffing even more ads everywhere to make up for the lost revenue from targeting. This is great, because you're not affected if you have uBlock Origin. If you don't, install it right now.

That's part of the context, and pretty much goes in the direction of "I just don't want any advertising at all". I can sympathise, but we need to find a way to pay for services.

benjaminjosephw2• 5 years ago

Wow, I thought you were about to object to the generalization of an end-usr denigrating HN perspective!

Okay, even if it is "entitled" to expect something for nothing, it's dishonest not to be clear and upfront about the costs. In fact, if you think the entitlement is misplaced then it's really a failure of the service providers in educating the users rather than a failure of the users themselves.

If you don't agree, it would suggest that you think the average user should be able to read the world the way you do and understand the subtext of "free" services without having to spell it out. Would you be suggesting then that it's okay to take advantage of people who don't understand this the way you do?

emodendroket16• 5 years ago

I find it hard to believe in this day and age that people don’t understand the basic business model of these services.

hiptobecubic• 5 years ago

Except not because Gmail (and the rest of Google Apps) has an explicit policy against this.

o8r3oFTZPE2• 5 years ago

Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.

IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.

p_j_w3• 5 years ago

Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.

I have internet at home through Spectrum, who offers email service. I don't use it, though, because the experience of ISP email, from my memory, was not good. Syncing up new devices with IMAP always took an annoyingly long time and my client would occasionally seem to forget that it had already got the headers for a message. The webmail was also shit. And then the SPAM filtering in Gmail at the time was miles better.

Perhaps things have improved since (this was 15 years ago, so I'd certainly hope so), but what you're remembering here as "the good old days" are etched in my mind as not being so good.

tomrod• 5 years ago

Entitlement, or reasonable payback for the employee economic surplus that has driven the technology boom for owners?

winternett• 5 years ago

That would be fine if the assumption wasn't based upon thousands of content creators, who are also sharing their work for free, most who unknowingly were building Facebook and other sites into popularity through their work for no pay, that now have the rug pulled out from under their ability to be seen.

Now, on top of creators that drive Facebook's most interesting content while contributing their music, stories, and videos etc. (for no profit) Creators have to pay to run promo ads for visibility even among people who previously followed them for updates, while Facebook collects the profit from all that work.

The model was broken by greed, not by a desire to connect people better nor to do good.

strogonoff• 5 years ago

If you're paying cash for the service, though, you're well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.

And you can vote with your wallet. Once the user is being charged, the choice becomes not “should I pay?” but “whom should I pay?”. If we imagine some evil exec deciding to sell user data, once that inevitably leaks it is much easier for the users to decide to switch to another search/email provider (which would have much easier time surviving, not having to compete with free). And losing users means losing advertising appeal, so both streams of revenue would be lost simultaneously.

coldtea3• 5 years ago

Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn't cash, it has to be something else.

And that's well understood, and it was supposed to be advertising.

Which can be orthogonal to tracking, privacy violations, selling your data, and so on.

only_as_i_fall2• 5 years ago

The entitlement argument has always been a strawman.

If I could pay Google $30 a month to use Google services without having to send any unescessary tracking info back to their servers AND I was still complaining you might have a point.

BizarroLand2• 5 years ago

Think of how much money google & fb is leaving on the table by not selling google ad exemptions.

"Pay $5/month to google or $10/month for google & fb and they will not track you on signed in browsers & devices" would be a hell of a temptation to buy.

acituan2• 5 years ago

Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement

Like open source software?

What you’re talking about is not entitlement, it is directed transactionality; “if I am using a service by x, I need to be the one personally compensating x”.

X could as well receive some form of compensation from elsewhere. Open source developers can be receiving satisfaction, recognition, even financial compensation without the end user. In fact that’s how charity, in its original sense of a virtue, works.

There is no inherent entitlement in assuming non-reciprocal charity. That’s a behavior baked in to humanity. I’d say expecting transactionality everywhere is the truncated, cynical view of human activity.

Kalium• 5 years ago

Like open source software?

Given how poorly people often treat maintainers, I think "entitlement" is precisely the correct word.

Your point about charity is well-made. Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity.

ThrustVectoring• 5 years ago

"Commoditize your complement" means that cheap-to-provide yet valuable services will be offered for free, simply because it drives down the total cost of buying from their main profit center. Regardless of how valuable Amazon's open-source AWS-related tooling is to developers, it's still not in Amazon's interests to charge for the software.

bachmeier• 5 years ago

Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement.

Suppose an old couple had some gold stored in the backyard. I offer to cut their lawn for free. They gladly accept. In return, I grab eight ounces of gold after every mow.

Their son finds out what I've been doing and calls the cops. Would I be able to get away with this by claiming it's entitlement to expect me to cut someone else's lawn for free? Or would I be told that my fee needs to be based on an agreement by both parties and then sent to jail?

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

I don't think it's entitled at all.

Giving and receiving freely, without expecting anything in return, is built into human nature from before we were even human, and is still practiced everyday by many.

To give something away with strings attached, and then act entitled to those strings, THAT is entitlement.

mindslight• 5 years ago

Talking about "entitlement" is generally a red herring because it ignores talking about why expectations are a certain way. On this topic, useful services in exchange for absolutely no consideration is exactly what the surveillance companies are marketing. When you go through the sign up flow, there is no attempt to inform users of what they're actually exchanging. And no, boilerplate legalese that nobody reads doesn't count for anything. To have an actual meeting of the minds, there should be at least one page of friendly infographics showing the extent of what data they're capturing, where they're using it, and how long it will be stored.

encryptluks2• 5 years ago

Does that mean that Odysee itself thinks that its users are the product?

corpdrone2021• 5 years ago

I realized this when Microsoft started reading the emails and attachments in my office 365 account, and having Cortana "helpfully" suggest various to-do items from them.

The degree to which this seems to be the case has me convinced that the only way I will actually have any control of my data is if it's on a hard drive in my physical possession. And frankly I don't have time to maintain my own IT infrastructure.

j453• 5 years ago

The reality has changed a lot about self hosting. Looking into it might surprise you.

folkrav• 5 years ago

Self hosting e-mail? With the trust issues you get with small mail servers these days, I've got better things to do than worry if that job application ever reached their inbox.

hundreddaysoff• 5 years ago

You're saying self-hosting is easier now than in the past?

neither_color• 5 years ago

I was mortified by Cortana auto-extracting todos from private emails but my father in his late 50’s said it was neat and very useful for him. So it goes.

emodendroket16• 5 years ago

I have always found it pretty helpful when Gmail would add reminders and calendar events by scanning emails so I can see it.

merrywhether• 5 years ago

Long term this is definitely something I want from my personal AI assistant, filtering out all kinds of annoyance/tedium from my life, so I totally understand how your father could like it. The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.

Spivak• 5 years ago

I feel like the rule for these kinds of features goes like this: if it would be fine and useful for a self-hosted version of the app to do something then it's fine if a cloud-hosted version to do it as well.

If you don't like that o365 is scanning your emails for todos and potential calendar events but it would be a non-issue on your Mail-in-a-Box then you have a problem with MS not the scanning.

SCNP3• 5 years ago

Precisely this. I think this is why these discussions always blow up. A lot of commenters talking past each other about the tech that is pretty awesome. I've loved the idea of a personal assistant since I saw the movie Cherry 2000. However, I don't want MS or Google in charge of it. I'm in the process of setting up home automation and I'd like to eventually get to some AI driven processes but it needs to stay in my house. It makes me sad that the tech exists but I can't trust it's purveyors. I'm gonna have to figure it out myself.

starky• 5 years ago

It irritates me to no end how Microsoft keeps updating their programs to make them be "helpful". I literally NEVER want their suggestions, I just want their programs to get out of my fucking way so I can do my work.

blooalien• 5 years ago

One of a thousand Microsoft "papercuts" that drove me to Linux. Admittedly it ain't Windows, but that's pretty much the point. After enough years of daily little Windows annoyances built up, the fact that Linux was not Windows was worth the learning curve to me.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

I agree in general. Although I still firmly believe it’s not the case with Apple. Haven’t been convinced otherwise yet.

trjordan• 5 years ago

This line of thinking ends with "companies are evil." It's not totally wrong, but it's perhaps not a useful framing.

Businesses make money in all sorts of ways. Most big companies blend these together. NYTimes charges users AND sells ads. Enterprise SaaS sells licenses AND charges for installation and configuration services. App store widgets charge for download AND sell aggregate data.

Brand gets undersold in a lot of tech/startup communities, because those communities are frequently organized around doing new things, which necessarily don't have brands. But the answer to a lot of these problems IS brands, because brands are a proxy for trust.

At some point, if you want a service, you have to decide which company you trust the most to deliver it without misleading you or doing things you disagree with. Most businesses run without constant lawsuits keeping them in line, because trust and word of mouth and reputation matters.

If you can't trust anybody, then don't use computers, I guess. But the world is shades of gray, and I do think it's worthwhile to figure out which companies you do trust.

JohnFen11• 5 years ago

I do think it's worthwhile to figure out which companies you do trust.

I have yet to see a for-profit business that I "trust" in a widespread sort of way, although small mom-and-pop ones can come close.

The problem is that companies tend to have a strong desire to make as much money as possible by any means that they think they can get away with. That makes anything like actual trust impossible.

whckt• 5 years ago

God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.

Nicksil• 5 years ago

God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.

milkman: "Hey, you guys happy with the milk?"

customer: "Yeah!"

milkman: "Great!"

telendram• 5 years ago

Interestingly, the author manages to spend the entire blog entry without even mentioning Apple's own Ad Network. If there is a single example where you pay (the devices, the apps) and are nonetheless tracked (without even receiving a warning selection prompt, in contrast with _all others_ Ad networks), it should be this one.

emodendroket16• 5 years ago

This is the worst possible situation for the advertisers, because it can reveal that tracking users offers no ROI. In fact, the overwhelming majority of ads are already being ignored, and they're basically fighting for scraps.

Well, it could, but what if it showed the opposite?

poidos3• 5 years ago

It gets grosser by the day.

This is something that is endemic not just to ad-tech companies, but regular brick and mortar stores as well: it isn't enough to just be consuming, to actually be producing value for the business: they must monetize as many seconds of our attention as possible!

If I'm buying gas, I'm being served ads via the little screen. If I'm at the grocery store, there's ads plastered onto my cart. Buy something online? I get ads for unrelated products emailed to me in the weeks after, even if I didn't agree to be marketed to (I never do.)

It makes me feel like I'm going crazy, sometimes. And what's worse is it feels like there isn't an end in sight.

SCNP3• 5 years ago

Small band-aid on the repressive overall issue. You can usually push the second button down on the right-hand side to mute the mini-TV once the ads start playing. Not sure if you knew this already but I like to get the word out. And, maybe if they track how many times that button gets pressed they'll take a hint but I doubt it.

pavon• 5 years ago

Every time I have been to a gas station that does this, the mute button is broken, presumably from so many people violently jamming it to make it stop.

poidos3• 5 years ago

I didn't know that, thank you! This will be a big relief.

hanniabu• 5 years ago

What's worse is I feel like I can't trust anything I hear because I'm just trying to get sold something. Look at the FDA and it's recent extremely controversial approvals. If you can trust regulating boards anymore meant to keep you safe then there's nothing you can trust.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

There is no perfect. Tossing away all the trust is also unnecessary. There will always be corruption and mistakes, but as long as there is transparency and correction, it is still a pretty good situation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/health/aduhelm-alzheimers...

SyzygistSix2• 5 years ago

If I'm buying gas, I'm being served ads via the little screen.

The first time I saw that, my immediate reaction was to hit the screen. My second thought was to pour gas on it and light it on fire. I refuse to use any place that does this unless it is a last resort. It's not terribly common where I live (yet) but I assume it is becoming standard. It's enraging.

mtnygard• 5 years ago

In my area, I have one option for fuel without ads. That's a place that has old analog pumps that still ding when the gallon dial rolls over. Obviously there's no pay at the pump.

If that store goes under or decides to modernize, then I will effectively not have a choice to get fuel without ads.

It's really frustrating. I want to let competition and the market sort it out, but when there's no variation in the options there's no real competition.

_nalply• 5 years ago

You could put a pinch of salt into your bottle with hand sanitizer and wait for about a day till the salt is dissolved. Then when disinfecting your hands, pour a little bit into any opening you see near the screen.

(Never tried that out and never will. Hand sanitizer has about 30 percent water and salt water will both short-circuit and corrode circuits.)

personlurking• 5 years ago

And now we can add getting ads while at the beach

https://www.reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/oovnrj/only_in_miami...

poidos3• 5 years ago

It's disgusting! And it's not just the fucking boats, but planes overhead, constantly! (I've lived in M my whole life)

npteljes2• 5 years ago

This YouTube video "HYPER-REALITY" perfectly illustrates this, for the augmented reality era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw

i guess 81% is the end :P

jamiequint8• 5 years ago

My primary problem with this article is that the author assumes that consumers get no value from ads. While the author may not personally like ads, it is undeniable that thousands to tens of thousands of consumer brands (the same ones who are now suffering with iOS 14.5 changes) now exist as a result of Facebook’s distribution. These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world. The idea that there is zero consumer value from Facebook ads or ads in general is absurd. There is a real cost to disabling tracking and blocking ads, it’s just often not borne immediately, or in a directly measurable way.

Also, while I understand the general aversion to tracking. If one believes that any advertiser cares about tracking their behavior individualy - rather than in aggregate - they are suffering from delusions of grandeur.

rideontime• 5 years ago

Did you miss yesterday's post about the gay priest being outed by his advertising data? It's not just advertisers that have access to that data.

Nextgrid• 5 years ago

If one believes that any advertiser cares about tracking their behavior individualy - rather than in aggregate - they are suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Maybe advertisers themselves don't care about tracking people individually, but the advertising industry builds & funds a tracking infrastructure that can be (and sometimes is) co-opted into tracking people by other nefarious actors, whether private or state-sponsored.

mattacular• 5 years ago

These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world.

Perhaps they should have.

soco• 5 years ago

If you define those brands as being the consumers, then yes, I guess, if they say so (did we ask them?). But I as a person get absolutely no value from those ad networks. Zero.

jamiequint8• 5 years ago

Someone is getting value from seeing ads for those brands, or they wouldn’t keep advertising on Facebook. If you are getting no value and don’t like the value exchange, well, nobody is forcing you to use Facebook.

s17n2• 5 years ago

There are plenty of legit arguments against ads, here are a few options:

- Ads create desire, which is then possibly sated by a purchase. The net increase in happiness is negative. - Brand advertising is clearly a zero sum game which creates no value - Even if ads can create value, it doesn't make up for the bad things about them

cocktailpeanuts• 5 years ago

The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.

I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.

6r1d2• 5 years ago

And, if not a secret, what ISP do you use and where?

I am often using LBRY on an ADSL modem and it's fast with all the network issue I see elsewhere.

UPD: nevermind, Odysee frontend seems to crash, but LBRY app itself works immediately with this article.

k33l3r4pp• 5 years ago

would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run.

Well that depends on how many sheep we get. People don't care about principles until they are the ones being deplatformed, and abused. I sincerely hope that eventually you will figure out that the only way to have good things in a capitalistic society is to have competition. Odysee is that. Considering it has some high-profile you tubers switching over, I'd say it has potential to make Youtube irrelevant: it makes just as much money, and a decentralised system, means there isn't a single entity to bring it all down.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Why do I have the feeling that a static site wouldn't have been slashdotted?

I can't comment on their opinions because all i get is a pretty loading animation...

disease• 5 years ago

I can't even read the article - it just shows some pulsating bars where the content would be. Eventually you see an error pop-up regarding 'libry'

zahrc• 5 years ago

When using free products, I don’t mind ads, I do mind being tracked.

The problem nowadays is that tracking and ads are pretty much a mutual thing today. And the worst about it is, to this day I still have to find an ad which seems relevant to me…

diminish2• 5 years ago

most paid products actually add tracking as a condition to their terms of use.

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

The issue is the ad is basically worthless without the tracking. No one wants to blindly advertise. They want to target, and then track the effectiveness.

tomjen32• 5 years ago

I will never understand why I can't just select things I am interested in on Facebook and then have it advertise based on that. I have problems in my life and money to solve them. I know what my problems are, but Facebook is so obsessed about tracking that they won't advertise to the things I am interested in.

enumjorge• 5 years ago

A related problem is that many people prefer not to be tracked but only if it doesn’t mean giving up something in exchange. As a result, differentiating your product by not tracking people isn’t enough of a selling point to make it valuable for many businesses. I wish we had more ad-free alternatives but often companies aren’t incentivized to offer them.

yodelshady• 5 years ago

Very similar logic applies to the durability too.

Being expensive is, usually, a necessary criterion for being "good", whether that means "privacy-friendly" or "durable", but it's not sufficient. Being cheap IS a sufficient criterion for being cheap.

If you can prove your expensive, but good product actually lives up to the claim, I might buy it. Ironically, it's an advertising problem.

Kim_Bruning• 5 years ago

If you're not paying, you're the product.

If you are paying, you're the rube who's dumb enough to actually pay for stuff. :-P

eevilspock• 5 years ago

There's an old adage that goes "if you're not paying for it, you are the product"

What does it say about our society that this is now an *old* adage?

Someone yesterday commented here that this is the most repeated quote on HN:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Everything we as a society today see as categorically wrong and repugnant was at one time in the not far past actively and passively accepted by the mainstream, with nearly everyone looking the other way and going with the flow. Yet even back then our societal conscience knew the very inconvenient truth. Those who repeatedly tried to wake society's conscience, to unbury the truth were invariably branded as radicals or crazies, doomed to be modern day Cassandras.

praptak• 5 years ago

Point in case: cars. You pay quite a lot of your hard earned money for a car, and they are much worse privacy invaders than any nominally free product.

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/tracking-technolo...

LatteLazy3• 5 years ago

One of the few concrete changes I think would improve big tech, privacy etc would be to require providers over a certain size to offer a paid option and then NOT advertise, track, share data etc.

Maybe the price would be stupidly high. Maybe 99.9% of people wouldn't pay. But at least the option would exist.

We could even require providers to link the price to the advertising etc revenue missed.

s17n2• 5 years ago

And conversely, just because you're not paying doesn't mean you aren't a stakeholder. Companies value you based on his much money you make them, they don't care if it's ad money or not.

TheMagicHorsey• 5 years ago

On one hand he says companies have no incentive to allow you to block tracking. On the other hand half the article is about how Apple allows you to do precisely that.

Silly author.

api• 5 years ago

Payment is necessary but not sufficient to support privacy-respecting software and services.

Yes a paid service or application can still track you, but without payment companies don't even have the option of respecting privacy. Without payment the only possible financial model for software and services is surveillance capitalism or ads, with the latter usually leading directly to the former.

gerbilly• 5 years ago

We’ve squandered the ‘personal’ part of personal computing.

A lot of this tracking nonsense is enabled by services which rely on server side processing.

For example somewhere lower down someone mentioned an AI assitant to extract todos from your emails.

This might not be so bad if the AI was running on your machine. But of course it’s always running on some cloud server.

For another example, any of those Alexa like devices have to analyse your voice input serverside. If it could do text to speech with local processing then it would be possible to make the device much more respectful of your privacy.

If you want total contol over your data, you have to use programs that can be used totally offline.

Regrettably everything is subscription now. Hold on to your perpetually licenced software if you still have any!

npteljes2• 5 years ago

Since ads with tracking sell better than ads without - never minding whether it's worth it or not - businesses who do more tracking will fare better. Since the market won't, regulation could help at this point, but I don't think that will happen, because businesses and goverments have similar interests here. From a government standpoint, let the businesses track the users, and when the time comes, they'll just get the results with a subpoena.

In conclusion, the general public's privacy is only important to the general public. The other entities are struggling for the opposite of privacy, and this is why I think we're seeing such an invasion on privacy.

Havoc• 5 years ago

This is currently annoying me with the economist and Financial Times. Even after paying their heavy subscription you’re bombarded with ads and FT has the audacity to block you from some article because they added another tier of premium above that.

Their content is good sure but they sure are milking that on all fronts

racl101• 5 years ago

Definitely the case with those Nvidia Shield units. Fuck those pieces of shits.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Most people don't though. Given choice, most choose to not be spied on. Mindboggling.

I agree that tracking is oversellign itself, and sadly, the monopolization of ads has led to more and more, and worse ads being shown on websites. I do however want the sites i visit to make money, through advertising if possible. It's the most direct and easy way, since we are not yet allowed to have direct peer-to-peer payments on the web without 17 rent-seeking middlemen eating them up. As much as advertisers are to blame for pushing tracking vs other advertising channels, the payment gatekeepers are worse

trop• 5 years ago

13.6% of Faceberg's $94.4b is almost $13b. A good start, but we'll need more.

Presumably a slip on the part of the author, rather than facetious. Regardless extremely unfortunate.

Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product

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