17 ms·

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

192 points by deworms 5y ago

yur3i__ 5y 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
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Or in theory at least, well regulated small businesses in a competitive market.
  - umanwizard 5y ago
    That’s only assuming a large enough fraction of possible customers care.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      That probably applies to the free software option too and may be unavoidable. Reducing the number of people who have to care and how much they have to care are both achievable goals though and snallwr businesses working with some free software is a workable synergy to some degree. Many of the free software success stories involve a bunch of compeitors trying to dethrone a monopolist. Since the other conpanies are already excluded from being the king, they work together to avoid veing totally crushed. Regulation could encourage this too.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >free software Well maybe, if this whole sorry ediface wasn't built on top of free software.
  - epicide 5y ago
    Not OP, but I assume they meant "free as in speech, not as in beer". AKA FOSS.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      It doesn't really make much difference in this case though does it.
  - inkblotuniverse 5y 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 5y 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.
- JohnFen 5y 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 5y 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.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Same is true for advertising, here it is called banner blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness The advertising industry has probably some counter measures.
- tomjen3 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- diminish 5y 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 5y 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.
- travoc 5y ago
  Ublock Origin, AdGuard or Brave gets you the best of both worlds.
  - Ruthalas 5y ago
    Consider also: Sponsor Block
pdpi 5y 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y 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 5y 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?
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      I pay for ad-free YouTube and YouTube music premium. It’s possible to make any fees for service a fee for something other than service. “You’re not paying for YouTube you’re paying to not see ads on YouTube”. You’re not paying for gmail, you’re paying for removing ads in gmail, so you can still be analyzed and tracked, etc. It’s just semantics and creative structuring.
      - 5y ago
encryptluks2 5y ago
Does that mean that Odysee itself thinks that its users are the product?
corpdrone2021 5y 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.
- j45 5y ago
  The reality has changed a lot about self hosting. Looking into it might surprise you.
  - folkrav 5y 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.
    - j45 5y ago
      There’s more pragmatic ways to self host, other than configuring everything from scratch.. including email. Lots of tools and suites like Zimbra and Mdaemon that can self host mail just fine. Outbound delivery can use a service as well. Look for options and possibilities and they can be found. Look for reasons not to do something and those will be found too.
  - hundreddaysoff 5y ago
    You're saying self-hosting is easier now than in the past?
    - j45 5y ago
      Having done self hosting and and coming back to it after a 10 year break.. much easier. One example of not setting everyone from scratch.. IaaS/Paas: Install Proxmox from USB.. 10 minutes from boot to web interface to your own local linode/digital ocean. Redundancy, setup 2 and link them. Disaster recovery, put it off site. Backups, connect it to one of a few built in options. Network/infrastructure: deploy docker images for VPN (algo), firewalls (pfsense), dns (pihole), proxy (traefik, etc). It can remain an appliance that can be configured to self update if needed. Storage: make storage into an appliance that you set and forget with a nas. Next spin up your services/packages. Things like turnkeylinux is a nice way to try out things. There is a nice self hosting community on Reddit if you’re interested for folks who have setup homelabs.
shoto_io 5y ago
I agree in general. Although I still firmly believe it’s not the case with Apple. Haven’t been convinced otherwise yet.
trjordan 5y 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.
- JohnFen 5y 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 5y ago
God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.
- Nicksil 5y 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!"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
telendram 5y 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.
emodendroket 5y 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?
poidos 5y 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.
- SCNP 5y 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 5y 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.
  - poidos 5y ago
    I didn't know that, thank you! This will be a big relief.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hanniabu 5y 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.
jamiequint 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
  > These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world. Perhaps they should have.
- soco 5y 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.
  - 5y ago
cocktailpeanuts 5y 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.
- 6r1d 5y 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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- k33l3r4pp 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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…
- diminish 5y ago
  most paid products actually add tracking as a condition to their terms of use.
- LatteLazy 5y 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.
  - tomjen3 5y 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.
    - LatteLazy 5y ago
      Agreed. I find it reassuring in a weird way. I bought a toilet seat last year and got nothing but toilet seat ads for months. Because if you just bought a toilet seat you must need 10 more!? It surprises me they don't have a list you can at least cross things off...
- enumjorge 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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-technology/ https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/tracking-technolo...
LatteLazy 5y 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.
s17n 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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!
npteljes 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
Definitely the case with those Nvidia Shield units. Fuck those pieces of shits.
cblconfederate 5y 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 5y 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.

192 points by deworms 5y 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

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Or in theory at least, well regulated small businesses in a competitive market.
- umanwizard 5y ago
  That’s only assuming a large enough fraction of possible customers care.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    That probably applies to the free software option too and may be unavoidable. Reducing the number of people who have to care and how much they have to care are both achievable goals though and snallwr businesses working with some free software is a workable synergy to some degree. Many of the free software success stories involve a bunch of compeitors trying to dethrone a monopolist. Since the other conpanies are already excluded from being the king, they work together to avoid veing totally crushed. Regulation could encourage this too.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>free software Well maybe, if this whole sorry ediface wasn't built on top of free software.
- epicide 5y ago
  Not OP, but I assume they meant "free as in speech, not as in beer". AKA FOSS.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    It doesn't really make much difference in this case though does it.
- inkblotuniverse 5y 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 5y 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.

JohnFen 5y 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 5y 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.

raxxorrax 5y ago
Same is true for advertising, here it is called banner blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness The advertising industry has probably some counter measures.
tomjen3 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
diminish 5y 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 5y 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.

travoc 5y ago
Ublock Origin, AdGuard or Brave gets you the best of both worlds.
- Ruthalas 5y ago
  Consider also: Sponsor Block

pdpi 5y 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.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y 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 5y 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?
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    I pay for ad-free YouTube and YouTube music premium. It’s possible to make any fees for service a fee for something other than service. “You’re not paying for YouTube you’re paying to not see ads on YouTube”. You’re not paying for gmail, you’re paying for removing ads in gmail, so you can still be analyzed and tracked, etc. It’s just semantics and creative structuring.
    - 5y ago

encryptluks2 5y ago

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

corpdrone2021 5y 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.

j45 5y ago
The reality has changed a lot about self hosting. Looking into it might surprise you.
- folkrav 5y 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.
  - j45 5y ago
    There’s more pragmatic ways to self host, other than configuring everything from scratch.. including email. Lots of tools and suites like Zimbra and Mdaemon that can self host mail just fine. Outbound delivery can use a service as well. Look for options and possibilities and they can be found. Look for reasons not to do something and those will be found too.
- hundreddaysoff 5y ago
  You're saying self-hosting is easier now than in the past?
  - j45 5y ago
    Having done self hosting and and coming back to it after a 10 year break.. much easier. One example of not setting everyone from scratch.. IaaS/Paas: Install Proxmox from USB.. 10 minutes from boot to web interface to your own local linode/digital ocean. Redundancy, setup 2 and link them. Disaster recovery, put it off site. Backups, connect it to one of a few built in options. Network/infrastructure: deploy docker images for VPN (algo), firewalls (pfsense), dns (pihole), proxy (traefik, etc). It can remain an appliance that can be configured to self update if needed. Storage: make storage into an appliance that you set and forget with a nas. Next spin up your services/packages. Things like turnkeylinux is a nice way to try out things. There is a nice self hosting community on Reddit if you’re interested for folks who have setup homelabs.

shoto_io 5y ago

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

trjordan 5y 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.

JohnFen 5y 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 5y ago

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

Nicksil 5y 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!"

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

telendram 5y 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.

emodendroket 5y 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?

poidos 5y 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.

SCNP 5y 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 5y 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.
- poidos 5y ago
  I didn't know that, thank you! This will be a big relief.
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hanniabu 5y 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.

jamiequint 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago
> These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world. Perhaps they should have.
soco 5y 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.
- 5y ago

cocktailpeanuts 5y 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.

6r1d 5y 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.
- deleted 5y ago
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k33l3r4pp 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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…

diminish 5y ago
most paid products actually add tracking as a condition to their terms of use.
LatteLazy 5y 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.
- tomjen3 5y 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.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Agreed. I find it reassuring in a weird way. I bought a toilet seat last year and got nothing but toilet seat ads for months. Because if you just bought a toilet seat you must need 10 more!? It surprises me they don't have a list you can at least cross things off...
enumjorge 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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-technology/ https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/tracking-technolo...

LatteLazy 5y 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.

s17n 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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!

npteljes 5y 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 5y 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 5y ago

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

cblconfederate 5y 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 5y 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.