Ah, I see your arguments a lot more clearly now, and I agree with many of the points you've made. To address your final points, because I think they're the mos

Ah, I see your arguments a lot more clearly now, and I agree with many of the points you've made. To address your final points, because I think they're the most salient, yes, we need to move away from "free" services, and the sooner the better I think. Gmail / Hotmail / Whatevermail people are using has perpetuated the idea that email has no real value, but I think that's easily disproven by simply locking someone's account for a month. I guarantee you anyone living in the modern world without email for a month would immediately see the monetary value. This is why I pay for ProtonMail, among other reasons (chiefly privacy). I think people really need to get into the mindset of paying for social media services as well. I don't think anyone can argue that Facebook has real, tangible value. It not only connects you to your friends and family, but the storage of media (videos, pictures, etc.) is also useful. I know some people whose entire family photo albums exist only on Facebook's servers. I don't know what kind of pricing would be reasonable... maybe as little as $1 a month for basic services, and then you pay more to unlock more storage for your photo uploads or something, but its a model that I think a lot of people might be interested in, if Facebook respected your privacy, etc. Once again, I don't claim to know the answers, but I do know that we need to move away from the "free" model. My older brother told me 20 years ago, "If you go to a website, and you can't tell what the product is - you're the product." Seems as true now as it was then.