7 ms·

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. Th

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.
    - astrange 9y ago
      I don't think that will hold up against GDPR.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        It won't, but despite the complaints that the GDPR reaches too far, it still only protects a minority of worldwide users.
- realpeopleio 9y ago
  What if there were a trusted third-party that periodically audited the business to see if they were protecting your privacy of not. Would people value or trust that? And who would people trust to do the audit?
bilbo0s 9y ago
Here's the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay? I know that there are several defendants [drugs etc] even in my small area who have had deleted snapchat posts, deleted texts, deleted emails, "anonymous" forum posts etc etc etc show up as evidence in court. Now I'm obviously unfamiliar with the legal and technical means by which police investigators made things like that happen, but the fact that they happen means that we can assume that at LEAST the government has access to a record of most everything we do online. Free or otherwise. Even ignoring the question of the government surveillance net, once your data is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what's being done with it? By which I mean, they say they don't share it, but how do you KNOW? So maybe we would get some pretty compelling new features in a lot of our services if we were to pay for them, but I'm not at all certain that ironclad privacy would be one of them. In fact, I'm fair certain that it wouldn't be.
- dannyw 9y ago
  It works through preservation orders, which LE can issue to companies and mandate they preserve records of something.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  "Bad money pushes out good money." Since you can't prove privacy, customers have to assume no-privacy and vendors must exploit that or else get outcompeted by someone who does. Same for any quality that customers want but can't verify, such as quickly long-life or organic ingredients or treatment of workers and animals.
  - inlined 9y ago
    I wonder if it's possible for a watchdog organization to automate trap street accounts.
- kgwxd 9y ago
  I don't think paid-for services are going to solve anything. We pay up and out the ass for television, which obviously has ads, but I'm sure they're tracking as much as possible too. Unless you've been extremely diligent, there's no way you're going to escape a targeted invasion of privacy when someone, or some group, government or not, wants it bad enough. Trying to stop that would be exhausting and futile. Right now, we're allowing highly coordinated, highly detailed, nearly invisible, for-profit, stalking to take place legally. There's no doubt that's bad for society. We have anti-stalking laws for good reason. It's worth doing something about the current state of things, even if it doesn't bring the tracking down to nothing. The free market and tech has failed to fix it so far. They don't have forever to keep trying. Laws are the next line of defense. Laws might not stop criminals from crimin' but I'm sure the Tim Cooks of the world aren't going to risk their company profits (or personal freedoms, if the laws are strict enough) to get a little extra info on everyone.
projektir 9y ago
> 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. This test doesn't seem to work in practice due to, I imagine, human psychology. When looking at a free vs not free service, most people are just comparing the cost of the service. The implied privacy costs are too diffuse and complex for the brain to properly comprehend them at that moment. The individual-based solution is to develop a feeling of ickiness towards such services, but I'm not sure how that could be implemented on a mass scale.
thebaer 9y ago
Right, you can't just take a free-to-the-user (paid by advertising) product, slap a fee on it, and expect people to pay for it. Instead products need to be user-centric from the start, with business models that align users and the company making the products. It's just rare to see companies thinking critically about this. Once they've said "let's monetize our free users" they've already lost. What people miss is that free users are incredibly valuable with a digital product -- whether it's seeing how real people use it or the free marketing they give you. Sure, a freemium product will generally have >95% of its users not paying a cent. That doesn't mean you need to sell of their data to generate value from them. And as a consumer "outraged about privacy and advertising," frankly we're faced with many products that are overpriced for the value they deliver. More companies need to find the middle ground between surveillance business models and gouging consumers.
wybiral 9y ago
Websites were "free" from the start when people were hosting them on their own machines. At this point we have the internet access and cheap hardware that would allow us to take control and build distributed solutions that are "free" in the sense that they only cost our contribution of hosting power or something. Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads. EDIT: I used Tor as an example because of the contrast with data collection companies like Facebook but there are a lot of people who run Tor relays for free that push quite a bit of traffic around. Things like IPFS, blockchains, Mastodon Project, SETI@Home, etc, are examples of free approaches given our modern hardware proliferation.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads. Oh an exit node certainly has the capability to collect data. Have enough of them and you can de-anonymize an user.
  - wybiral 9y ago
    But not everyone is running exit nodes. And even if they are they get random requests that can't easily be correlated to a source. My point is that most people run those services for free without the expectation of collecting personal data.
    - squiggleblaz 9y ago
      But I think the expectation of free internet services sort of originates in that kind of attitude. Because originally the internet was a bunch of hackers using their spare bandwidth and their spare cpu cycles to host web sites. Perhaps they enjoyed it enough to volunteer the extra cash for dedicated servers and dedicated internet connections. It's only after that in the second step that people try to monetise. Nowadays of course it's money from the getgo, but things have changed. There's still plenty of free today. Lots of people run websites with highly interesting information and then distributed it without benefiting from the ads that run on the site (e.g. a Wordpress blog, where the privacy invasion and ad revenue profits go to Wordpress not the blogger).
inlined 9y ago
And the problem too is that even paid products like my NYT subscriptions have ads. If the point is privacy, I don't have an option to buy it.
- bb88 9y ago
  The newspapers and magazines have had advertisements for at least the last two centuries to help subsidize the cost of the subscription. If you had to pay full price for a subscription, you probably wouldn't have it because the publisher couldn't afford it. And likely even if you paid for a subscription to a magazine, your name and address was sold to marketers to sell you direct mail. And this ended up in someone's database, who resold it to advertisers time and time again. Cook's Illustrated is an example of a magazine that doesn't sell ads. But the cost per issue is higher and the number of pages is lower. Also most of the magazine is usually printed in black and white to save publishing costs. The question I ask myself constantly, is do I want to end up being advertised to (Google, Facebook), or do I want to end up being part of someone's brand (Apple, Nike)?
  - thinkingemote 9y ago
    One model, in the UK at least, is to use an agent for purchasing of subscription publications. This newsagent delivered the papers and magazines to your door before you left for work in the morning, didn't send your data to organisations and allowed flexible purchasing options (monthly, weekly, etc). Many people still use news agents for their subscription delivery mechanisms. Perhaps we can see an online agent, where we pay a trusted third party that negotiates transactions on all our online activites on our behalf, and protects our privacy, location, when else we buy, etc. That digital agent would collect a small (1% of transaction cost) as fee, to continue it's operations.

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.
  - astrange 9y ago
    I don't think that will hold up against GDPR.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      It won't, but despite the complaints that the GDPR reaches too far, it still only protects a minority of worldwide users.
realpeopleio 9y ago
What if there were a trusted third-party that periodically audited the business to see if they were protecting your privacy of not. Would people value or trust that? And who would people trust to do the audit?

bilbo0s 9y ago

Here's the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay? I know that there are several defendants [drugs etc] even in my small area who have had deleted snapchat posts, deleted texts, deleted emails, "anonymous" forum posts etc etc etc show up as evidence in court. Now I'm obviously unfamiliar with the legal and technical means by which police investigators made things like that happen, but the fact that they happen means that we can assume that at LEAST the government has access to a record of most everything we do online. Free or otherwise. Even ignoring the question of the government surveillance net, once your data is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what's being done with it? By which I mean, they say they don't share it, but how do you KNOW? So maybe we would get some pretty compelling new features in a lot of our services if we were to pay for them, but I'm not at all certain that ironclad privacy would be one of them. In fact, I'm fair certain that it wouldn't be.

dannyw 9y ago
It works through preservation orders, which LE can issue to companies and mandate they preserve records of something.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
"Bad money pushes out good money." Since you can't prove privacy, customers have to assume no-privacy and vendors must exploit that or else get outcompeted by someone who does. Same for any quality that customers want but can't verify, such as quickly long-life or organic ingredients or treatment of workers and animals.
- inlined 9y ago
  I wonder if it's possible for a watchdog organization to automate trap street accounts.
kgwxd 9y ago
I don't think paid-for services are going to solve anything. We pay up and out the ass for television, which obviously has ads, but I'm sure they're tracking as much as possible too. Unless you've been extremely diligent, there's no way you're going to escape a targeted invasion of privacy when someone, or some group, government or not, wants it bad enough. Trying to stop that would be exhausting and futile. Right now, we're allowing highly coordinated, highly detailed, nearly invisible, for-profit, stalking to take place legally. There's no doubt that's bad for society. We have anti-stalking laws for good reason. It's worth doing something about the current state of things, even if it doesn't bring the tracking down to nothing. The free market and tech has failed to fix it so far. They don't have forever to keep trying. Laws are the next line of defense. Laws might not stop criminals from crimin' but I'm sure the Tim Cooks of the world aren't going to risk their company profits (or personal freedoms, if the laws are strict enough) to get a little extra info on everyone.

projektir 9y ago

> 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. This test doesn't seem to work in practice due to, I imagine, human psychology. When looking at a free vs not free service, most people are just comparing the cost of the service. The implied privacy costs are too diffuse and complex for the brain to properly comprehend them at that moment. The individual-based solution is to develop a feeling of ickiness towards such services, but I'm not sure how that could be implemented on a mass scale.

thebaer 9y ago

Right, you can't just take a free-to-the-user (paid by advertising) product, slap a fee on it, and expect people to pay for it. Instead products need to be user-centric from the start, with business models that align users and the company making the products. It's just rare to see companies thinking critically about this. Once they've said "let's monetize our free users" they've already lost. What people miss is that free users are incredibly valuable with a digital product -- whether it's seeing how real people use it or the free marketing they give you. Sure, a freemium product will generally have >95% of its users not paying a cent. That doesn't mean you need to sell of their data to generate value from them. And as a consumer "outraged about privacy and advertising," frankly we're faced with many products that are overpriced for the value they deliver. More companies need to find the middle ground between surveillance business models and gouging consumers.

wybiral 9y ago

Websites were "free" from the start when people were hosting them on their own machines. At this point we have the internet access and cheap hardware that would allow us to take control and build distributed solutions that are "free" in the sense that they only cost our contribution of hosting power or something. Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads. EDIT: I used Tor as an example because of the contrast with data collection companies like Facebook but there are a lot of people who run Tor relays for free that push quite a bit of traffic around. Things like IPFS, blockchains, Mastodon Project, SETI@Home, etc, are examples of free approaches given our modern hardware proliferation.

mschuster91 9y ago
> Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads. Oh an exit node certainly has the capability to collect data. Have enough of them and you can de-anonymize an user.
- wybiral 9y ago
  But not everyone is running exit nodes. And even if they are they get random requests that can't easily be correlated to a source. My point is that most people run those services for free without the expectation of collecting personal data.
  - squiggleblaz 9y ago
    But I think the expectation of free internet services sort of originates in that kind of attitude. Because originally the internet was a bunch of hackers using their spare bandwidth and their spare cpu cycles to host web sites. Perhaps they enjoyed it enough to volunteer the extra cash for dedicated servers and dedicated internet connections. It's only after that in the second step that people try to monetise. Nowadays of course it's money from the getgo, but things have changed. There's still plenty of free today. Lots of people run websites with highly interesting information and then distributed it without benefiting from the ads that run on the site (e.g. a Wordpress blog, where the privacy invasion and ad revenue profits go to Wordpress not the blogger).

inlined 9y ago

And the problem too is that even paid products like my NYT subscriptions have ads. If the point is privacy, I don't have an option to buy it.

bb88 9y ago
The newspapers and magazines have had advertisements for at least the last two centuries to help subsidize the cost of the subscription. If you had to pay full price for a subscription, you probably wouldn't have it because the publisher couldn't afford it. And likely even if you paid for a subscription to a magazine, your name and address was sold to marketers to sell you direct mail. And this ended up in someone's database, who resold it to advertisers time and time again. Cook's Illustrated is an example of a magazine that doesn't sell ads. But the cost per issue is higher and the number of pages is lower. Also most of the magazine is usually printed in black and white to save publishing costs. The question I ask myself constantly, is do I want to end up being advertised to (Google, Facebook), or do I want to end up being part of someone's brand (Apple, Nike)?
- thinkingemote 9y ago
  One model, in the UK at least, is to use an agent for purchasing of subscription publications. This newsagent delivered the papers and magazines to your door before you left for work in the morning, didn't send your data to organisations and allowed flexible purchasing options (monthly, weekly, etc). Many people still use news agents for their subscription delivery mechanisms. Perhaps we can see an online agent, where we pay a trusted third party that negotiates transactions on all our online activites on our behalf, and protects our privacy, location, when else we buy, etc. That digital agent would collect a small (1% of transaction cost) as fee, to continue it's operations.