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My problem with all those pro-privacy apps is that privacy has a price[0], and a price most consumers (me included) are not willing to pay. There are, essentia

My problem with all those pro-privacy apps is that privacy has a price[0], and a price most consumers (me included) are not willing to pay. There are, essentially, two business models on the web. One is to provide the services for free and sell ads, the other is to charge for the services directly. To earn substantial amounts on ads, you need to track consumers massively. As a consumer, I definitely prefer being tracked than paying for all the services I use. That's the stance of most consumers. If there's a free alternative with a lot of tracking and a paid alternative with good privacy, the free alternative will win. That's how the free market works. Privacy has a price, and a price most consumers are not willing to pay. Forcing them to pay it for some antiquated notion of privacy is just... wrong.

ampdepolymerase 7y ago
Nobody is forcing anyone to pay for anything. If a paid product gains enough momentum to crush free products, then it is the free market in action yet again. Short of rough men threatening to do violence upon you, nobody is being "forced" to pay for anything.
- sbuttgereit 7y ago
  I think your point is largely valid today, but there is push for a regulatory regime to force some of those privacy invading, but "free" options to either be greatly curtailed or eliminated. Without getting into whether such a push is valid or not, should it succeed... the rough men threatening violence won't be coming to force you to buy something... but they will come to stop those from offering you a product that you might choose to use. In that event, we shouldn't confuse the outcomes as being free market outcomes.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    How would you even begin to imagine a free market around this? To get even the slightest approximation you’d first need to abolish copyright and patents and any other distortions enabling hoarding of imaginary capital, probably need to take a stab at the very definition of a corporation even. Whatever market there is to speak of currently has very little resemblance to a free market in any case.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
As a consumer we don't get that choice. Most of the products we want are not available for purchase, and often when they are they still track us and use our data against us. The notion that there are two business models on the web is a myth, at least for consumers. Only in B2B services do you ever see things available for sale or a fee without data collection and tracking attached.
d--b 7y ago
If the price was charged by the isp, you wouldn’t feel it at all...
Jasper_ 7y ago
Radio, TV and magazine ads were minimally tracked and worked for years. The only people telling us we need tracked ads to make money are people selling tracked ads.
- chongli 7y ago
  Radio, TV, and magazines all have the same thing in common: from the user perspective, they’re read-only. As broadcast media, their scaling models work differently than social media, which includes the storage and/or transmission of user-created data. If Google, Facebook, et al had no costs whatsoever involved in scaling their businesses, then they could be replaced by non-profits providing the services pro-bono.
eitland 7y ago
> My problem with all those pro-privacy apps is that privacy has a price[0], and a price most consumers (me included) are not willing to pay. For anyone who wasn't aware: WhatsApp was killing it even as they were shouting from the front of their app and their web page that they were a paid product. And they hadn't even started monetizing API access etc. Edit: just looked at this and it checks a number of boxes: - no blockchain (as far as I can see) - no coin (again AFAICS) - smart people - a real problem that has been bothering me I guess I might be happy to stand in line to pay for the product when this materializes just as I was happy when I finally could pay for WhatsApp (I was an early adopter and got it for free the first few months and paid later).
codr7 7y ago
What looked like acceptance for a while was mostly ignorance, and that's changing fast as people start facing consequences. I prefer a world where no one is tracked or profiled, because every step down that road increases the difficulty of turning back exponentially. This is not about convenience, this is about creating a future no one wants to live in.

ampdepolymerase 7y ago

Nobody is forcing anyone to pay for anything. If a paid product gains enough momentum to crush free products, then it is the free market in action yet again. Short of rough men threatening to do violence upon you, nobody is being "forced" to pay for anything.

sbuttgereit 7y ago
I think your point is largely valid today, but there is push for a regulatory regime to force some of those privacy invading, but "free" options to either be greatly curtailed or eliminated. Without getting into whether such a push is valid or not, should it succeed... the rough men threatening violence won't be coming to force you to buy something... but they will come to stop those from offering you a product that you might choose to use. In that event, we shouldn't confuse the outcomes as being free market outcomes.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  How would you even begin to imagine a free market around this? To get even the slightest approximation you’d first need to abolish copyright and patents and any other distortions enabling hoarding of imaginary capital, probably need to take a stab at the very definition of a corporation even. Whatever market there is to speak of currently has very little resemblance to a free market in any case.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

As a consumer we don't get that choice. Most of the products we want are not available for purchase, and often when they are they still track us and use our data against us. The notion that there are two business models on the web is a myth, at least for consumers. Only in B2B services do you ever see things available for sale or a fee without data collection and tracking attached.

d--b 7y ago

If the price was charged by the isp, you wouldn’t feel it at all...

Jasper_ 7y ago

Radio, TV and magazine ads were minimally tracked and worked for years. The only people telling us we need tracked ads to make money are people selling tracked ads.

chongli 7y ago
Radio, TV, and magazines all have the same thing in common: from the user perspective, they’re read-only. As broadcast media, their scaling models work differently than social media, which includes the storage and/or transmission of user-created data. If Google, Facebook, et al had no costs whatsoever involved in scaling their businesses, then they could be replaced by non-profits providing the services pro-bono.

eitland 7y ago

> My problem with all those pro-privacy apps is that privacy has a price[0], and a price most consumers (me included) are not willing to pay. For anyone who wasn't aware: WhatsApp was killing it even as they were shouting from the front of their app and their web page that they were a paid product. And they hadn't even started monetizing API access etc. Edit: just looked at this and it checks a number of boxes: - no blockchain (as far as I can see) - no coin (again AFAICS) - smart people - a real problem that has been bothering me I guess I might be happy to stand in line to pay for the product when this materializes just as I was happy when I finally could pay for WhatsApp (I was an early adopter and got it for free the first few months and paid later).

codr7 7y ago

What looked like acceptance for a while was mostly ignorance, and that's changing fast as people start facing consequences. I prefer a world where no one is tracked or profiled, because every step down that road increases the difficulty of turning back exponentially. This is not about convenience, this is about creating a future no one wants to live in.