22 ms·

I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so tha

by drchiu 9y ago

I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.

dleslie 9y ago
I pay for a VPN, Cloud Storage, VPS hosting, and Encrypted Email; I'd probably pay for Maps if Open Street Map weren't sufficient. The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?
- projektir 9y ago
  > The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it? I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.
  - dleslie 9y ago
    I agree, but this is HN; isn't it safe to assume a certain income among most commentators?
    - lazyasciiart 9y ago
      I know of at least two homeless HN commentors, and more than that who are unemployed.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      I'm quite poor and was homeless until a few months ago. I am quite open about that and I get told bluntly to stop talking about myself here at times. I have seen evidence that suggests other poor people here are reluctant to stick their neck out as much as I do. So the number of poor people here is probably more than it seems.
      - dleslie 9y ago
        That's a shame; but perhaps I can understand why? The get-rich-quick, or how-I-got-rich stories that bubble up to the top nigh daily are intimidating as hell, as is the discussion similar to such that abounds around here. I'm not a fan, and I apologize for contributing to it. I'll try to be more thoughtful in the future.
        DoreenMichele 9y ago
        Thank you. I suspect most poor people hide it in part because the stigma can impede their ability to escape poverty. Classism is alive and well. Ideally, I would like to see a culture where "rich" people help poor people figure out how to solve their problems. That's all I have ever asked and it doesn't really get taken seriously. I get a lot of flak about just being a charity case, not worth real money, and that I should get a real job instead of trying to figure out how to make money online. Meanwhile, almost everyone else on HN is trying to figure out how to make money online in some sense.
      - Trundle 9y ago
        Most people don't "stick their neck out" as much as you do. I'm a casual browser and I feel like I've seen you discussing your life situation enough to the point where I know your circumstances better than that of some people I consider friends.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - delhanty 9y ago
        It's good to have you here! HN benefits from the perspective that you bring. Plenty of other people must value your comments too, because you've accumulated a karma of over 5000 points in about 4 months - say 15,000 points a year, which is definitely a lot - cf HN leaders. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
        9y ago
    - Mononokay 9y ago
      Four person home, annual shared income is ~20k in the rural Midwest. Not exactly rich, but semi-affordable given they have a house already. The line gets a bit blurry when you consider that there are a few high school-aged people on HN who can't legally get a full time job.
    - toomanybeersies 9y ago
      Not really. A couple of years back I was so poor I was sleeping on my brother's couch. Not to mention that there are people on HN who are from developing countries, where even relatively well paid jobs don't pay a lot by Western standards.
    - pdkl95 9y ago
      I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and said, "How are you still alive?". (Previously I had a decent engineering salary writing embedded firmware) SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses) I'm lucky that my interest has always involved computers, which I can use for free for many different purposes. Well, as long as nothing happens to my old desktop (Core 2 Quad Q9650, nForce 790i, RAID-1 of ancient SATA disks). An extra $300/yr would would mean buying new boots and some new shirts. Paying that would mean dropping on of my medications (maybe fatal in the short term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food. For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias[1], because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse[2] situation that mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w [2] I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white. My friends without those privileges have only recently been able to start leaning math/software/etc. They are hackers at heart, but a math/CS/engineering education and SV startup opportunities were not available to black women in the 80s/90s.
      - hycaria 9y ago
        Is it not possible to work without driving ?
        pdkl95 9y ago
        That's not the only problem, unfortunately. The results that prompted that comment from 3 different doctors was the results from two sleep studies at different locations that indicated an AHI[1] of 152 an 148. Hypoxia and no stage 3/4/REM sleep for >10 years does bad things too your heart, endocrine system, memory (and other conative functions), etc. (Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)
  - brandmeyer 9y ago
    50 USD/month for a bundled infotainment package (cable+internet) comes to 600 USD/yr. I think most urban Americans are going to spend at least that much.
    - friedman23 9y ago
      well great you just added $300 to that which was previously $0
    - projektir 9y ago
      I'm concerned about this wording. Internet is very important to pretty much everyone in the modern developed world. Cable is often bundled into internet whether you want it or not - when people can get rid of cable for a cheaper plan, they often do. "Infotainment" sounds like a disparaging term here, it's inappropriate. The internet is effectively a need, on the level of electricity, so it's closer to being an assumed cost. Nonetheless, some people probably can't afford it, and for those that do but struggle financially, adding more on top of it doesn't at all help. The idea that these people should be concerned about a diffuse danger of privacy violations compared to the very real danger of not being able to afford important things is completely preposterous. Stop passing the cost to the consumer. Companies that abuse privacy should be regulated. If you're expecting this task to be done by people of low socioeconomic status, whom your own system has deemed as people deserving of less power, you're looking at the whole thing completely backwards.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  $300 is around ₹20k. Certainly not much for me. But if I have a choice between free and ₹20k I'll almost always choose free.
- rtpg 9y ago
  I think if you divide the money brought in via web advertising across all users of the web it comes out to like $150/month/user. Would you pay $150/month to not have ads ever again? I definitely would but considering how much people complain about $3/month for no-ad hulu...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I might want it now, but if that was the condition when I was a kid, I'd probably not be computer-proficient right now. In my childhood, unless you came from a rich and computer-interested family, everything you used was a combination of free software and pirated software. I'm all for getting rid of all advertising in any (humanitarian) way possible, but that's the one thing that still bugs me - how to ensure kids with no disposable income will be able to work with the software used by pros?
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    If advertisers are spending $150/month on users they are probably earning at least $50/month from users. But it's not distributed evenly - a lot is probably for big ticket items. My point is, people are paying it anyway.
- freddie_mercury 9y ago
  I live in a country where $300 is the average monthly wage. Is paying 1/12th of your total annual income just to get 4 services worth it? That would be, what?, like you paying $10,000 a year for those services?
ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it's not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to pay and be free of advertising.
- kardos 9y ago
  How would you know if the paid version is privacy respecting or not? If for example FB had a 5$/mo subscription that was ad free, how would you know that access to your database wasn't still being sold? For me that kind of problem is the blocker, and "oh look nobody paid for for the premium version, therefore people don't value privacy" is a bit disingenuous.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
    If you are buying a product/service and it says it won't do something (like sell your data) and does anyway, that's clearly wrong. They agreed to protect your privacy. With services that state they will use your data to run targeted ads you are immediately accepting the loss of privacy.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
      Being ad free is not the same as not tracking though. They are just saying, you get the version with no ads.
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      "clearly wrong" means nothing if you can't win a law suit against megacorp's carefully worded legalese. "We use this information to improve the Service" means game over.
rectang 9y ago
Subscription services are such a pain, because so many companies do their best to trick you with deceptive pricing models and service agreements. I often don't want to haul out the credit card because it takes so much energy to evaluate a service.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  I deliberately chose to buy ADSL service from the only company I found that instead of billing automatically and renewing the contract implicitly requires a fax with proof of advance payment and eagerly disconnects me if I'm late.
ozim 9y ago
It looks like there are no alternatives. You pay or lose privacy. I think you can have advertisements without targeting single people and without selling data. Single person targeted ads are bullshit. You still can count clicks to your ad without need to know personal details. I do not think anyone in adtech is keeping that data to check later if click caused actuall buy. They just keep it as reference to spam you with the same crap and have some points when they prove clicks were kind of legit.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
There's the Amazon Prime / Apple iCloud whatever model: you pay a single monthly fee and you get access to a wide range of services. Amazon even has their Appstore whatsitcalled library where 3rd party apps are no-added-cost and they pay the app publishers on some kind of spotify like pay-per-use model.
- VLM 9y ago
  Its a very slight variation on the middleman problem that doesn't really fix much, you just get a slightly different financial model for a creepy invasive middleman not much different than social media and advertisers.
jjoonathan 9y ago
Would I be willing to pay the pennies a day that free services get from advertisers on my behalf? Yes. Would I be willing to pay 10x-1000x times that for a half dozen $10/mo subscription? No. The problem is is that (lack of) apathy is a strong signal, ripe for price-grading, and boy do they price grade!
- Avshalom 9y ago
  And this is sort of the problem. In order to overcome freeriders subscription prices are always exorbitant compared to the ad revenue. I can't afford even 1 dollar a month for every site I visit, I could however almost certainly beat the cpm price those sites earn from ads... But we have no way to ensure every one pays and we have no way to distribute even if we did.
  - retrogradeorbit 9y ago
    There is a way, actually. Browser crypto mining. People just seem to (IMHO irrationally) hate it even more than surveillance and data gathering.
    - Avshalom 9y ago
      I'm not personally opposed to it actually but A) does it actually work? B) until people can pay rent in arbitrary coins it very much relies on mining the "right" coin to be able to get any useful USD, SEK, ZAR... Whatever out of it. C) because A is reliant on the cost of mining and established crypto-asset-ma-bobs are expensive to mine trying to get value off the small amount of cpu you can grab via JavaScript mining it incentives ScamCoins.
    - eli 9y ago
      I think the hate is rational, but more importantly the math really doesn't work. It pays far less than advertising on all but the very least desirable sites.
- daveguy 9y ago
  Pennies on the day is a significant underestimate of how much value you are providing to the company that provides the service. That would be ~$7.30/year. Actual revenue per user for Facebook in the US and Canada is $26+ / quarter or over $100/year... That is on the order of $10/month [1]. So if a company wanted to be as profitable as Facebook, and not make money from advertising, they would have to charge $10/mo. That is more than I am willing to pay for Facebook -- my friends have my phone number. If you think profit of providers like Facebook should be limited then that's a regulation issue. Personally I don't think that should be the case. It is possible to provide the service Facebook provides in a fully encrypted manner. Individual companies would require subsidies and audits to ensure encryption. Essentially regulation. Another alternative is fully encrypted, distributed services where personal CPU and storage are used to support the service. This is possible through systems like Diaspora or Mastadon, but there is an ease of use / network effect issue there. I just don't think it is as simple or inexpensive as pennies a day. Or to push a company to charge that little would require regulation. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/fac...
carapace 9y ago
What about services that run on a P2P cloud? No fees, no ads, no tracking?
- eksemplar 9y ago
  There is tracking on most p2p networks, and there aren’t really any p2p networks where the service is free, as in free beer. I mean, the whole concept of the most widespread p2p networks is piracy, or the act of paying for bandwidth and electricity to save money on the movies that you steal.
chongli 9y ago
If we're going to talk about a hypothetical internet where Google and Facebook have no ability to siphon all our data, we might as well propose IPv6 for everyone and NAT for no one. Then we could have high quality peer to peer services for things like instant messaging and email and social networking. We'd have the best of both worlds. Oh, and ISPs would be regulated as utilities so their services would be dumb pipes with high bandwidth, low latency, and no caps or throttling of any kind!
mc32 9y ago
What if you could pick a bundle? A $1/mo, $10/mo, $100/mo bundle? You get whatever those bundles allow for whatever time window is set. Not the same as free and choice-wise is restrictive (but then the tyranny of choice). While not "the" answer, it could be an option so that you're not paying for each and every content driven website independently. Of course, the downside is this harkens to the time when we had limited sources of information (newspaper sub, broadcast TV, cable TV and radio). If micropayments is not working (yet?) and advertising is proving too invasive but we're also not willing to pay underutilized individual subscriptions, what else is there?
Pxtl 9y ago
The frustrating part is that there is no "pay what they get from advertisers" price point. Facebook gets $5 per user per year last time I checked. But if FB were a paid service, it would probably be like $10/mo... And I wouldn't pay that much for it.
- okmokmz 9y ago
  $6.18 per user per quarter in 2017 Q4, and $26.76 per user per quarter for US/Canadian users. So nearly $25 per year, and over $100 per year for US/Canadian users assuming earnings per user stays constant or continue to rise https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...
textmode 9y ago
How can it be possible for the "buyer" to assess the cost of something if it was never offered for a price other than 0.00 Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" if that which is "free" has never before been offered for a price greater than zero Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" when there is no such alternative (e.g. because alternatives have been acquired or blocked by a monopolist) What if companies exist to serve advertisers and other customers and are not actually "serving" users What if it was shown that many users do not actually require storage of data in data centers What if the needs of users and the needs of data collectors are truly not aligned What if users' "choices" are nonexistant or illusory
piokoch 9y ago
That's something most people think and do. The problem is that they assume that all this targeting will work in future as it is now. My wild guess is it will not, it will get much clever, it will be able to figure out if a given person is "worth being targeted" (buys expensive goods and services and does this often, has big credit on his card, etc.). Soon or later those who does not qualify will get nothing or will have to pay a lot to access given service since not being part of it will be considered suspicious (by government, employers, shops). US gov wants people to give their "social" username at the border, Chinese government is working on system to "rate" citizens, companies are setting the prizes in online stores on the base of knowledge they have about incoming customers. Traversing a saying about communists and capitalists it seems that social networks are giving away a rope they will hang its users someday.
onion2k 9y ago
subsidized currently by an advertising model It's only an ad model at the moment because we're only just getting started with ways to utilise massive amounts of data. Give it time and, unless we're vigilant and guard against it, it'll be an insurance model, a career model, a justice model, etc. Anything you can imagine turning big data to will become a business model if we let it. Ads are an incredibly tame use of the data corporations have access to. It could be much, much worse. That's why we need to work out an alternative now.
throw2016 9y ago
This seems to be a very constrained limited way to frame the issue. It is a false choice. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean you are also not the product. Businesses will maximize value and then they will draw revenue from both subscriptions and advertising. So simply paying will not solve the problem. Negative externalities are usually handled by regulation in a civilized society as markets are a race to the bottom and cannot account for them. So safety standards, environmental protections, child labour, drugs all have to be regulated and enforced. In this case the potential for micro targeted propaganda and misinformation are negative externalities. In this specific case its easy to tackle the problem at source by banning micro targeting by advertisers and platforms. Only textual context and immediate location can be used. This protects revenue streams and the current model. But removes the incentives to stalk everyone and hoover up incredible amounts of data to build profiles for micro targeting.
c-smile 9y ago
TV model: I am paying for basic channels. Yet I am paying for selected channels, say National Geographic or BBC Earth if I want to get those. Will this schema work with Internet? Like if I want FB I will pay for facebook's dedicated TCP/IP port access. Sounds crazy of course but could it be something along these lines?

by drchiu 9y ago

dleslie 9y ago

I pay for a VPN, Cloud Storage, VPS hosting, and Encrypted Email; I'd probably pay for Maps if Open Street Map weren't sufficient. The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?

projektir 9y ago
> The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it? I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.
- dleslie 9y ago
  I agree, but this is HN; isn't it safe to assume a certain income among most commentators?
  - lazyasciiart 9y ago
    I know of at least two homeless HN commentors, and more than that who are unemployed.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I'm quite poor and was homeless until a few months ago. I am quite open about that and I get told bluntly to stop talking about myself here at times. I have seen evidence that suggests other poor people here are reluctant to stick their neck out as much as I do. So the number of poor people here is probably more than it seems.
    - dleslie 9y ago
      That's a shame; but perhaps I can understand why? The get-rich-quick, or how-I-got-rich stories that bubble up to the top nigh daily are intimidating as hell, as is the discussion similar to such that abounds around here. I'm not a fan, and I apologize for contributing to it. I'll try to be more thoughtful in the future.
      - DoreenMichele 9y ago
        Thank you. I suspect most poor people hide it in part because the stigma can impede their ability to escape poverty. Classism is alive and well. Ideally, I would like to see a culture where "rich" people help poor people figure out how to solve their problems. That's all I have ever asked and it doesn't really get taken seriously. I get a lot of flak about just being a charity case, not worth real money, and that I should get a real job instead of trying to figure out how to make money online. Meanwhile, almost everyone else on HN is trying to figure out how to make money online in some sense.
    - Trundle 9y ago
      Most people don't "stick their neck out" as much as you do. I'm a casual browser and I feel like I've seen you discussing your life situation enough to the point where I know your circumstances better than that of some people I consider friends.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - delhanty 9y ago
      It's good to have you here! HN benefits from the perspective that you bring. Plenty of other people must value your comments too, because you've accumulated a karma of over 5000 points in about 4 months - say 15,000 points a year, which is definitely a lot - cf HN leaders. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
      - 9y ago
  - Mononokay 9y ago
    Four person home, annual shared income is ~20k in the rural Midwest. Not exactly rich, but semi-affordable given they have a house already. The line gets a bit blurry when you consider that there are a few high school-aged people on HN who can't legally get a full time job.
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Not really. A couple of years back I was so poor I was sleeping on my brother's couch. Not to mention that there are people on HN who are from developing countries, where even relatively well paid jobs don't pay a lot by Western standards.
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and said, "How are you still alive?". (Previously I had a decent engineering salary writing embedded firmware) SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses) I'm lucky that my interest has always involved computers, which I can use for free for many different purposes. Well, as long as nothing happens to my old desktop (Core 2 Quad Q9650, nForce 790i, RAID-1 of ancient SATA disks). An extra $300/yr would would mean buying new boots and some new shirts. Paying that would mean dropping on of my medications (maybe fatal in the short term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food. For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias[1], because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse[2] situation that mine. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w [2] I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white. My friends without those privileges have only recently been able to start leaning math/software/etc. They are hackers at heart, but a math/CS/engineering education and SV startup opportunities were not available to black women in the 80s/90s.
    - hycaria 9y ago
      Is it not possible to work without driving ?
      - pdkl95 9y ago
        That's not the only problem, unfortunately. The results that prompted that comment from 3 different doctors was the results from two sleep studies at different locations that indicated an AHI[1] of 152 an 148. Hypoxia and no stage 3/4/REM sleep for >10 years does bad things too your heart, endocrine system, memory (and other conative functions), etc. (Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)
- brandmeyer 9y ago
  50 USD/month for a bundled infotainment package (cable+internet) comes to 600 USD/yr. I think most urban Americans are going to spend at least that much.
  - friedman23 9y ago
    well great you just added $300 to that which was previously $0
  - projektir 9y ago
    I'm concerned about this wording. Internet is very important to pretty much everyone in the modern developed world. Cable is often bundled into internet whether you want it or not - when people can get rid of cable for a cheaper plan, they often do. "Infotainment" sounds like a disparaging term here, it's inappropriate. The internet is effectively a need, on the level of electricity, so it's closer to being an assumed cost. Nonetheless, some people probably can't afford it, and for those that do but struggle financially, adding more on top of it doesn't at all help. The idea that these people should be concerned about a diffuse danger of privacy violations compared to the very real danger of not being able to afford important things is completely preposterous. Stop passing the cost to the consumer. Companies that abuse privacy should be regulated. If you're expecting this task to be done by people of low socioeconomic status, whom your own system has deemed as people deserving of less power, you're looking at the whole thing completely backwards.
dingo_bat 9y ago
$300 is around ₹20k. Certainly not much for me. But if I have a choice between free and ₹20k I'll almost always choose free.
rtpg 9y ago
I think if you divide the money brought in via web advertising across all users of the web it comes out to like $150/month/user. Would you pay $150/month to not have ads ever again? I definitely would but considering how much people complain about $3/month for no-ad hulu...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I might want it now, but if that was the condition when I was a kid, I'd probably not be computer-proficient right now. In my childhood, unless you came from a rich and computer-interested family, everything you used was a combination of free software and pirated software. I'm all for getting rid of all advertising in any (humanitarian) way possible, but that's the one thing that still bugs me - how to ensure kids with no disposable income will be able to work with the software used by pros?
- akvadrako 9y ago
  If advertisers are spending $150/month on users they are probably earning at least $50/month from users. But it's not distributed evenly - a lot is probably for big ticket items. My point is, people are paying it anyway.
freddie_mercury 9y ago
I live in a country where $300 is the average monthly wage. Is paying 1/12th of your total annual income just to get 4 services worth it? That would be, what?, like you paying $10,000 a year for those services?

ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago

This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it's not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to pay and be free of advertising.

kardos 9y ago
How would you know if the paid version is privacy respecting or not? If for example FB had a 5$/mo subscription that was ad free, how would you know that access to your database wasn't still being sold? For me that kind of problem is the blocker, and "oh look nobody paid for for the premium version, therefore people don't value privacy" is a bit disingenuous.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 9y ago
  If you are buying a product/service and it says it won't do something (like sell your data) and does anyway, that's clearly wrong. They agreed to protect your privacy. With services that state they will use your data to run targeted ads you are immediately accepting the loss of privacy.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 9y ago
    Being ad free is not the same as not tracking though. They are just saying, you get the version with no ads.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    "clearly wrong" means nothing if you can't win a law suit against megacorp's carefully worded legalese. "We use this information to improve the Service" means game over.

rectang 9y ago

Subscription services are such a pain, because so many companies do their best to trick you with deceptive pricing models and service agreements. I often don't want to haul out the credit card because it takes so much energy to evaluate a service.

HelloNurse 9y ago
I deliberately chose to buy ADSL service from the only company I found that instead of billing automatically and renewing the contract implicitly requires a fax with proof of advance payment and eagerly disconnects me if I'm late.

ozim 9y ago

It looks like there are no alternatives. You pay or lose privacy. I think you can have advertisements without targeting single people and without selling data. Single person targeted ads are bullshit. You still can count clicks to your ad without need to know personal details. I do not think anyone in adtech is keeping that data to check later if click caused actuall buy. They just keep it as reference to spam you with the same crap and have some points when they prove clicks were kind of legit.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

There's the Amazon Prime / Apple iCloud whatever model: you pay a single monthly fee and you get access to a wide range of services. Amazon even has their Appstore whatsitcalled library where 3rd party apps are no-added-cost and they pay the app publishers on some kind of spotify like pay-per-use model.

VLM 9y ago
Its a very slight variation on the middleman problem that doesn't really fix much, you just get a slightly different financial model for a creepy invasive middleman not much different than social media and advertisers.

jjoonathan 9y ago

Would I be willing to pay the pennies a day that free services get from advertisers on my behalf? Yes. Would I be willing to pay 10x-1000x times that for a half dozen $10/mo subscription? No. The problem is is that (lack of) apathy is a strong signal, ripe for price-grading, and boy do they price grade!

Avshalom 9y ago
And this is sort of the problem. In order to overcome freeriders subscription prices are always exorbitant compared to the ad revenue. I can't afford even 1 dollar a month for every site I visit, I could however almost certainly beat the cpm price those sites earn from ads... But we have no way to ensure every one pays and we have no way to distribute even if we did.
- retrogradeorbit 9y ago
  There is a way, actually. Browser crypto mining. People just seem to (IMHO irrationally) hate it even more than surveillance and data gathering.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    I'm not personally opposed to it actually but A) does it actually work? B) until people can pay rent in arbitrary coins it very much relies on mining the "right" coin to be able to get any useful USD, SEK, ZAR... Whatever out of it. C) because A is reliant on the cost of mining and established crypto-asset-ma-bobs are expensive to mine trying to get value off the small amount of cpu you can grab via JavaScript mining it incentives ScamCoins.
  - eli 9y ago
    I think the hate is rational, but more importantly the math really doesn't work. It pays far less than advertising on all but the very least desirable sites.
daveguy 9y ago
Pennies on the day is a significant underestimate of how much value you are providing to the company that provides the service. That would be ~$7.30/year. Actual revenue per user for Facebook in the US and Canada is $26+ / quarter or over $100/year... That is on the order of $10/month [1]. So if a company wanted to be as profitable as Facebook, and not make money from advertising, they would have to charge $10/mo. That is more than I am willing to pay for Facebook -- my friends have my phone number. If you think profit of providers like Facebook should be limited then that's a regulation issue. Personally I don't think that should be the case. It is possible to provide the service Facebook provides in a fully encrypted manner. Individual companies would require subsidies and audits to ensure encryption. Essentially regulation. Another alternative is fully encrypted, distributed services where personal CPU and storage are used to support the service. This is possible through systems like Diaspora or Mastadon, but there is an ease of use / network effect issue there. I just don't think it is as simple or inexpensive as pennies a day. Or to push a company to charge that little would require regulation. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/fac...

carapace 9y ago

What about services that run on a P2P cloud? No fees, no ads, no tracking?

eksemplar 9y ago
There is tracking on most p2p networks, and there aren’t really any p2p networks where the service is free, as in free beer. I mean, the whole concept of the most widespread p2p networks is piracy, or the act of paying for bandwidth and electricity to save money on the movies that you steal.

chongli 9y ago

If we're going to talk about a hypothetical internet where Google and Facebook have no ability to siphon all our data, we might as well propose IPv6 for everyone and NAT for no one. Then we could have high quality peer to peer services for things like instant messaging and email and social networking. We'd have the best of both worlds. Oh, and ISPs would be regulated as utilities so their services would be dumb pipes with high bandwidth, low latency, and no caps or throttling of any kind!

mc32 9y ago

What if you could pick a bundle? A $1/mo, $10/mo, $100/mo bundle? You get whatever those bundles allow for whatever time window is set. Not the same as free and choice-wise is restrictive (but then the tyranny of choice). While not "the" answer, it could be an option so that you're not paying for each and every content driven website independently. Of course, the downside is this harkens to the time when we had limited sources of information (newspaper sub, broadcast TV, cable TV and radio). If micropayments is not working (yet?) and advertising is proving too invasive but we're also not willing to pay underutilized individual subscriptions, what else is there?

Pxtl 9y ago

The frustrating part is that there is no "pay what they get from advertisers" price point. Facebook gets $5 per user per year last time I checked. But if FB were a paid service, it would probably be like $10/mo... And I wouldn't pay that much for it.

okmokmz 9y ago
$6.18 per user per quarter in 2017 Q4, and $26.76 per user per quarter for US/Canadian users. So nearly $25 per year, and over $100 per year for US/Canadian users assuming earnings per user stays constant or continue to rise https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-arpu.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

textmode 9y ago

How can it be possible for the "buyer" to assess the cost of something if it was never offered for a price other than 0.00 Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" if that which is "free" has never before been offered for a price greater than zero Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" when there is no such alternative (e.g. because alternatives have been acquired or blocked by a monopolist) What if companies exist to serve advertisers and other customers and are not actually "serving" users What if it was shown that many users do not actually require storage of data in data centers What if the needs of users and the needs of data collectors are truly not aligned What if users' "choices" are nonexistant or illusory

piokoch 9y ago

That's something most people think and do. The problem is that they assume that all this targeting will work in future as it is now. My wild guess is it will not, it will get much clever, it will be able to figure out if a given person is "worth being targeted" (buys expensive goods and services and does this often, has big credit on his card, etc.). Soon or later those who does not qualify will get nothing or will have to pay a lot to access given service since not being part of it will be considered suspicious (by government, employers, shops). US gov wants people to give their "social" username at the border, Chinese government is working on system to "rate" citizens, companies are setting the prizes in online stores on the base of knowledge they have about incoming customers. Traversing a saying about communists and capitalists it seems that social networks are giving away a rope they will hang its users someday.

onion2k 9y ago

subsidized currently by an advertising model It's only an ad model at the moment because we're only just getting started with ways to utilise massive amounts of data. Give it time and, unless we're vigilant and guard against it, it'll be an insurance model, a career model, a justice model, etc. Anything you can imagine turning big data to will become a business model if we let it. Ads are an incredibly tame use of the data corporations have access to. It could be much, much worse. That's why we need to work out an alternative now.

throw2016 9y ago

This seems to be a very constrained limited way to frame the issue. It is a false choice. Just because you pay for something doesn't mean you are also not the product. Businesses will maximize value and then they will draw revenue from both subscriptions and advertising. So simply paying will not solve the problem. Negative externalities are usually handled by regulation in a civilized society as markets are a race to the bottom and cannot account for them. So safety standards, environmental protections, child labour, drugs all have to be regulated and enforced. In this case the potential for micro targeted propaganda and misinformation are negative externalities. In this specific case its easy to tackle the problem at source by banning micro targeting by advertisers and platforms. Only textual context and immediate location can be used. This protects revenue streams and the current model. But removes the incentives to stalk everyone and hoover up incredible amounts of data to build profiles for micro targeting.

c-smile 9y ago

TV model: I am paying for basic channels. Yet I am paying for selected channels, say National Geographic or BBC Earth if I want to get those. Will this schema work with Internet? Like if I want FB I will pay for facebook's dedicated TCP/IP port access. Sounds crazy of course but could it be something along these lines?