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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

by 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.
    - pdpi 5y ago
      GSuite and Youtube play by very different rules, though. Youtube is a consumer product and privacy legislation unfortunately doesn't have much in the way of teeth. GSuite is a business product, and there's many industries they'd like to serve that are fairly strict about data breaches.
      - LegitShady 5y ago
        The ads on YouTube pay for YouTube. If I’m paying for YouTube and not seeing ads, I’m paying for YouTube. Playing semantic word games saying ‘you’re paying to not see ads, the ads that pay for the service’ is just word games. If they have to be legislated into not spying on the users then it just proves the article’s point.
    - HelloNurse 5y ago
      > It’s just semantics and creative structuring. I'd guess Gmail etc. involve lawyers in marketing, so the focus shifts from "what is valuable enough to have a market" to "what is legal enough to get away with it".
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I'm "part of" Workspaces. I have no idea whether I get ads or not, because I have both uBlock origin installed, and a massive /etc/hosts file that blocks just about anything ad-related. But I've seen clear evidence when I visit sites that manage to do self-hosted targetted "presentations" that they are getting data from Google, and given that I have no cell phone, I'm fairly sure one important source for that is my gmail account.
- busterarm 5y ago
  It depends on the host you pay. It's very simple. Don't use email from Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc. Get email from providers who care about the same things that you do. I've been using Migadu happily for over a year now.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > I'm paying, and I'm still the product. Yes, but you're not the only one who is the product. Everyone who sends email to you is as well.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I try to be a nice person. Is paying for my friends and colleagues to be products so wrong?
raxxorrax 5y ago
If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit. I don't need to use any of Googles services to be tracked by Google, although Facebook is probably the largest offender here. In social networks, friends of mine have shared my contact information without me even knowing it. So other people might pay with your data. And I believe the text is correct. You would pay and be tracked. Companies found out that the mass of users is pretty uncritical and if they are allowed to do it, they will do it. Also, websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. A simple policy change and you blow a lot of mostly useless ad company out of the water. I think that would be good.
- asplake 5y ago
  Websites are financed by people and organisations with all kinds of motivations and business models. Websites don’t all have to make a profit! It is totally unfair (not to mention nonsensical) to represent the above argument as leading to the inevitable conclusion that there would be no free websites.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit. This is demonstrably untrue, as demonstrated by the fact that there were tons of useful free sites before advertising was even realistically possible, and there are still quite a lot of useful free sites now. Also, I take issue with calling ad-supported things "free". They aren't free at all -- you're just paying with a different form of currency. > websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. This would remove roughly 95% of my problems with the modern web and online services.
- SCNP 5y ago
  To add to your 3rd point, your friends (and possibly you) may have shared yours and other's contact information without them even knowing it. As you said, Facebook is one of the worst offenders of grabbing all the contacts in a phone without the user's knowledge...
  - 5y ago
nonameiguess 5y ago
That doesn't seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn't saying you should expect totally free services. It's saying you have the right to expect not to be tracked. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research. It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24/7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don't realize they're being used as research subjects, which is what this is saying.
- jamiequint 5y ago
  You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now. You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself). But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.
    - Aboh33 5y ago
      '...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...' Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed
benjaminjosephw 5y ago
Wow, I thought you were about to object to the generalization of an end-usr denigrating HN perspective! Okay, even if it is "entitled" to expect something for nothing, it's dishonest not to be clear and upfront about the costs. In fact, if you think the entitlement is misplaced then it's really a failure of the service providers in educating the users rather than a failure of the users themselves. If you don't agree, it would suggest that you think the average user should be able to read the world the way you do and understand the subtext of "free" services without having to spell it out. Would you be suggesting then that it's okay to take advantage of people who don't understand this the way you do?
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I find it hard to believe in this day and age that people don’t understand the basic business model of these services.
  - travoc 5y ago
    Most people are not aware of the extent that their identities and activity is tracked across the web.
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Well, I don’t find it that much easier to believe just because you assert the opposite.
  - benjaminjosephw 5y ago
    People in technology have a far greater understanding of the depth, breadth and potential consequences of selling data and attention to advertising platforms than the average user. Even then, we still don't necessarily know exactly how normative technology can be. That's like taking payment in the form of a blank cheque and calling it "free". The business model might be clear enough, but the cost and consequences are not.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
hiptobecubic 5y ago
Except not because Gmail (and the rest of Google Apps) has an explicit policy against this.
o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google. IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google. I have internet at home through Spectrum, who offers email service. I don't use it, though, because the experience of ISP email, from my memory, was not good. Syncing up new devices with IMAP always took an annoyingly long time and my client would occasionally seem to forget that it had already got the headers for a message. The webmail was also shit. And then the SPAM filtering in Gmail at the time was miles better. Perhaps things have improved since (this was 15 years ago, so I'd certainly hope so), but what you're remembering here as "the good old days" are etched in my mind as not being so good.
  - o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
    Never said "good old days". POP3 and IMAP were not part of the original design of email. The point of difference between then and now worth considering, IMO, is that the ISP's business plan was not personal data mining and online advertising services, it was internet service. Perhaps it is a mistake to attribute improvements in syncing solely to the existence of a gigantic webmail service run by an online ad services company. There have been vast improvements in computers and networks since then. What was arguably "good" about the "old days" was a relative absence of third party middlemen trying to make money from online advertising, and investing in surveillance as a "business model". As for spam filtering, I agree. However I do not think "webmail" hosted by a third party is the final solution to the problems with email. The original SMTP-to-SMTP design used on a LAN overlay performs very well and attracts no spam, for example.
tomrod 5y ago
Entitlement, or reasonable payback for the employee economic surplus that has driven the technology boom for owners?
winternett 5y ago
That would be fine if the assumption wasn't based upon thousands of content creators, who are also sharing their work for free, most who unknowingly were building Facebook and other sites into popularity through their work for no pay, that now have the rug pulled out from under their ability to be seen. Now, on top of creators that drive Facebook's most interesting content while contributing their music, stories, and videos etc. (for no profit) Creators have to pay to run promo ads for visibility even among people who previously followed them for updates, while Facebook collects the profit from all that work. The model was broken by greed, not by a desire to connect people better nor to do good.
strogonoff 5y ago
> 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. And you can vote with your wallet. Once the user is being charged, the choice becomes not “should I pay?” but “whom should I pay?”. If we imagine some evil exec deciding to sell user data, once that inevitably leaks it is much easier for the users to decide to switch to another search/email provider (which would have much easier time surviving, not having to compete with free). And losing users means losing advertising appeal, so both streams of revenue would be lost simultaneously.
coldtea 5y ago
>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. And that's well understood, and it was supposed to be advertising. Which can be orthogonal to tracking, privacy violations, selling your data, and so on.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
The entitlement argument has always been a strawman. If I could pay Google $30 a month to use Google services without having to send any unescessary tracking info back to their servers AND I was still complaining you might have a point.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  Think of how much money google & fb is leaving on the table by not selling google ad exemptions. "Pay $5/month to google or $10/month for google & fb and they will not track you on signed in browsers & devices" would be a hell of a temptation to buy.
acituan 5y ago
> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement Like open source software? What you’re talking about is not entitlement, it is directed transactionality; “if I am using a service by x, I need to be the one personally compensating x”. X could as well receive some form of compensation from elsewhere. Open source developers can be receiving satisfaction, recognition, even financial compensation without the end user. In fact that’s how charity, in its original sense of a virtue, works. There is no inherent entitlement in assuming non-reciprocal charity. That’s a behavior baked in to humanity. I’d say expecting transactionality everywhere is the truncated, cynical view of human activity.
- Kalium 5y ago
  > Like open source software? Given how poorly people often treat maintainers, I think "entitlement" is precisely the correct word. Your point about charity is well-made. Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity.
  - p_j_w 5y ago
    >Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity. Or anything that requires any sort of non-trivial capital to do. Video hosting/streaming (eg. YouTube), social media, news reporting, etc. I'm guessing the person you're replying to doesn't do their full time job for free and just accepts donations from their employers, either.
    - acituan 5y ago
      > I'm guessing the person you're replying to doesn't do their full time job for free and just accepts donations from their employers, either. Eh, this is a false dichotomy of one can either be charitable or transactional in the entirety of the interactions in their lives. In other words, your guess happens to be correct (gainful employment is not a mathematical rarity after all) but still provides no counterargument. OPs claim was expecting anything with value without transacting something back was entitlement. My counterargument was that there exists charity and non-transactionality in many contexts. The condition of anything requiring non-trivial capital is also wrong. We often pool tax money to render capital and services for things we don’t have direct, personal use of. And I am not saying this is necessarily charity, after all it is an obligation, but most folks don’t go after the particular line items of how their money is spent.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
"Commoditize your complement" means that cheap-to-provide yet valuable services will be offered for free, simply because it drives down the total cost of buying from their main profit center. Regardless of how valuable Amazon's open-source AWS-related tooling is to developers, it's still not in Amazon's interests to charge for the software.
bachmeier 5y ago
> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. Suppose an old couple had some gold stored in the backyard. I offer to cut their lawn for free. They gladly accept. In return, I grab eight ounces of gold after every mow. Their son finds out what I've been doing and calls the cops. Would I be able to get away with this by claiming it's entitlement to expect me to cut someone else's lawn for free? Or would I be told that my fee needs to be based on an agreement by both parties and then sent to jail?
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I don't think it's entitled at all. Giving and receiving freely, without expecting anything in return, is built into human nature from before we were even human, and is still practiced everyday by many. To give something away with strings attached, and then act entitled to those strings, THAT is entitlement.
mindslight 5y ago
Talking about "entitlement" is generally a red herring because it ignores talking about why expectations are a certain way. On this topic, useful services in exchange for absolutely no consideration is exactly what the surveillance companies are marketing. When you go through the sign up flow, there is no attempt to inform users of what they're actually exchanging. And no, boilerplate legalese that nobody reads doesn't count for anything. To have an actual meeting of the minds, there should be at least one page of friendly infographics showing the extent of what data they're capturing, where they're using it, and how long it will be stored.

by pdpi 5y ago

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.
  - pdpi 5y ago
    GSuite and Youtube play by very different rules, though. Youtube is a consumer product and privacy legislation unfortunately doesn't have much in the way of teeth. GSuite is a business product, and there's many industries they'd like to serve that are fairly strict about data breaches.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      The ads on YouTube pay for YouTube. If I’m paying for YouTube and not seeing ads, I’m paying for YouTube. Playing semantic word games saying ‘you’re paying to not see ads, the ads that pay for the service’ is just word games. If they have to be legislated into not spying on the users then it just proves the article’s point.
  - HelloNurse 5y ago
    > It’s just semantics and creative structuring. I'd guess Gmail etc. involve lawyers in marketing, so the focus shifts from "what is valuable enough to have a market" to "what is legal enough to get away with it".
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I'm "part of" Workspaces. I have no idea whether I get ads or not, because I have both uBlock origin installed, and a massive /etc/hosts file that blocks just about anything ad-related. But I've seen clear evidence when I visit sites that manage to do self-hosted targetted "presentations" that they are getting data from Google, and given that I have no cell phone, I'm fairly sure one important source for that is my gmail account.
busterarm 5y ago
It depends on the host you pay. It's very simple. Don't use email from Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc. Get email from providers who care about the same things that you do. I've been using Migadu happily for over a year now.
JohnFen 5y ago
> I'm paying, and I'm still the product. Yes, but you're not the only one who is the product. Everyone who sends email to you is as well.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I try to be a nice person. Is paying for my friends and colleagues to be products so wrong?

raxxorrax 5y ago

If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit. I don't need to use any of Googles services to be tracked by Google, although Facebook is probably the largest offender here. In social networks, friends of mine have shared my contact information without me even knowing it. So other people might pay with your data. And I believe the text is correct. You would pay and be tracked. Companies found out that the mass of users is pretty uncritical and if they are allowed to do it, they will do it. Also, websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. A simple policy change and you blow a lot of mostly useless ad company out of the water. I think that would be good.

asplake 5y ago
Websites are financed by people and organisations with all kinds of motivations and business models. Websites don’t all have to make a profit! It is totally unfair (not to mention nonsensical) to represent the above argument as leading to the inevitable conclusion that there would be no free websites.
JohnFen 5y ago
> If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit. This is demonstrably untrue, as demonstrated by the fact that there were tons of useful free sites before advertising was even realistically possible, and there are still quite a lot of useful free sites now. Also, I take issue with calling ad-supported things "free". They aren't free at all -- you're just paying with a different form of currency. > websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. This would remove roughly 95% of my problems with the modern web and online services.
SCNP 5y ago
To add to your 3rd point, your friends (and possibly you) may have shared yours and other's contact information without them even knowing it. As you said, Facebook is one of the worst offenders of grabbing all the contacts in a phone without the user's knowledge...
- 5y ago

nonameiguess 5y ago

That doesn't seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn't saying you should expect totally free services. It's saying you have the right to expect not to be tracked. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research. It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24/7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don't realize they're being used as research subjects, which is what this is saying.

jamiequint 5y ago
You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  > You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now. You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself). But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.
  - Aboh33 5y ago
    '...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...' Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed

benjaminjosephw 5y ago

Wow, I thought you were about to object to the generalization of an end-usr denigrating HN perspective! Okay, even if it is "entitled" to expect something for nothing, it's dishonest not to be clear and upfront about the costs. In fact, if you think the entitlement is misplaced then it's really a failure of the service providers in educating the users rather than a failure of the users themselves. If you don't agree, it would suggest that you think the average user should be able to read the world the way you do and understand the subtext of "free" services without having to spell it out. Would you be suggesting then that it's okay to take advantage of people who don't understand this the way you do?

emodendroket 5y ago
I find it hard to believe in this day and age that people don’t understand the basic business model of these services.
- travoc 5y ago
  Most people are not aware of the extent that their identities and activity is tracked across the web.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well, I don’t find it that much easier to believe just because you assert the opposite.
- benjaminjosephw 5y ago
  People in technology have a far greater understanding of the depth, breadth and potential consequences of selling data and attention to advertising platforms than the average user. Even then, we still don't necessarily know exactly how normative technology can be. That's like taking payment in the form of a blank cheque and calling it "free". The business model might be clear enough, but the cost and consequences are not.
- JohnFen 5y ago

hiptobecubic 5y ago

Except not because Gmail (and the rest of Google Apps) has an explicit policy against this.

o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago

Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google. IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.

p_j_w 5y ago
>Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google. I have internet at home through Spectrum, who offers email service. I don't use it, though, because the experience of ISP email, from my memory, was not good. Syncing up new devices with IMAP always took an annoyingly long time and my client would occasionally seem to forget that it had already got the headers for a message. The webmail was also shit. And then the SPAM filtering in Gmail at the time was miles better. Perhaps things have improved since (this was 15 years ago, so I'd certainly hope so), but what you're remembering here as "the good old days" are etched in my mind as not being so good.
- o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
  Never said "good old days". POP3 and IMAP were not part of the original design of email. The point of difference between then and now worth considering, IMO, is that the ISP's business plan was not personal data mining and online advertising services, it was internet service. Perhaps it is a mistake to attribute improvements in syncing solely to the existence of a gigantic webmail service run by an online ad services company. There have been vast improvements in computers and networks since then. What was arguably "good" about the "old days" was a relative absence of third party middlemen trying to make money from online advertising, and investing in surveillance as a "business model". As for spam filtering, I agree. However I do not think "webmail" hosted by a third party is the final solution to the problems with email. The original SMTP-to-SMTP design used on a LAN overlay performs very well and attracts no spam, for example.

tomrod 5y ago

Entitlement, or reasonable payback for the employee economic surplus that has driven the technology boom for owners?

winternett 5y ago

That would be fine if the assumption wasn't based upon thousands of content creators, who are also sharing their work for free, most who unknowingly were building Facebook and other sites into popularity through their work for no pay, that now have the rug pulled out from under their ability to be seen. Now, on top of creators that drive Facebook's most interesting content while contributing their music, stories, and videos etc. (for no profit) Creators have to pay to run promo ads for visibility even among people who previously followed them for updates, while Facebook collects the profit from all that work. The model was broken by greed, not by a desire to connect people better nor to do good.

strogonoff 5y ago

> 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. And you can vote with your wallet. Once the user is being charged, the choice becomes not “should I pay?” but “whom should I pay?”. If we imagine some evil exec deciding to sell user data, once that inevitably leaks it is much easier for the users to decide to switch to another search/email provider (which would have much easier time surviving, not having to compete with free). And losing users means losing advertising appeal, so both streams of revenue would be lost simultaneously.

coldtea 5y ago

>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. And that's well understood, and it was supposed to be advertising. Which can be orthogonal to tracking, privacy violations, selling your data, and so on.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

The entitlement argument has always been a strawman. If I could pay Google $30 a month to use Google services without having to send any unescessary tracking info back to their servers AND I was still complaining you might have a point.

BizarroLand 5y ago
Think of how much money google & fb is leaving on the table by not selling google ad exemptions. "Pay $5/month to google or $10/month for google & fb and they will not track you on signed in browsers & devices" would be a hell of a temptation to buy.

acituan 5y ago

> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement Like open source software? What you’re talking about is not entitlement, it is directed transactionality; “if I am using a service by x, I need to be the one personally compensating x”. X could as well receive some form of compensation from elsewhere. Open source developers can be receiving satisfaction, recognition, even financial compensation without the end user. In fact that’s how charity, in its original sense of a virtue, works. There is no inherent entitlement in assuming non-reciprocal charity. That’s a behavior baked in to humanity. I’d say expecting transactionality everywhere is the truncated, cynical view of human activity.

Kalium 5y ago
> Like open source software? Given how poorly people often treat maintainers, I think "entitlement" is precisely the correct word. Your point about charity is well-made. Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity. Or anything that requires any sort of non-trivial capital to do. Video hosting/streaming (eg. YouTube), social media, news reporting, etc. I'm guessing the person you're replying to doesn't do their full time job for free and just accepts donations from their employers, either.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > I'm guessing the person you're replying to doesn't do their full time job for free and just accepts donations from their employers, either. Eh, this is a false dichotomy of one can either be charitable or transactional in the entirety of the interactions in their lives. In other words, your guess happens to be correct (gainful employment is not a mathematical rarity after all) but still provides no counterargument. OPs claim was expecting anything with value without transacting something back was entitlement. My counterargument was that there exists charity and non-transactionality in many contexts. The condition of anything requiring non-trivial capital is also wrong. We often pool tax money to render capital and services for things we don’t have direct, personal use of. And I am not saying this is necessarily charity, after all it is an obligation, but most folks don’t go after the particular line items of how their money is spent.

ThrustVectoring 5y ago

"Commoditize your complement" means that cheap-to-provide yet valuable services will be offered for free, simply because it drives down the total cost of buying from their main profit center. Regardless of how valuable Amazon's open-source AWS-related tooling is to developers, it's still not in Amazon's interests to charge for the software.

bachmeier 5y ago

> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. Suppose an old couple had some gold stored in the backyard. I offer to cut their lawn for free. They gladly accept. In return, I grab eight ounces of gold after every mow. Their son finds out what I've been doing and calls the cops. Would I be able to get away with this by claiming it's entitlement to expect me to cut someone else's lawn for free? Or would I be told that my fee needs to be based on an agreement by both parties and then sent to jail?

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I don't think it's entitled at all. Giving and receiving freely, without expecting anything in return, is built into human nature from before we were even human, and is still practiced everyday by many. To give something away with strings attached, and then act entitled to those strings, THAT is entitlement.

mindslight 5y ago

Talking about "entitlement" is generally a red herring because it ignores talking about why expectations are a certain way. On this topic, useful services in exchange for absolutely no consideration is exactly what the surveillance companies are marketing. When you go through the sign up flow, there is no attempt to inform users of what they're actually exchanging. And no, boilerplate legalese that nobody reads doesn't count for anything. To have an actual meeting of the minds, there should be at least one page of friendly infographics showing the extent of what data they're capturing, where they're using it, and how long it will be stored.