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I also applaud this and personally would prefer to just pay for services instead of being the product, but I'm afraid this is not a popular opinion. People don'

• robertlagrant 3y ago
  Why do you applaud this? What's it got to do with making a pay option?
• latexr 3y ago
  > pay for services instead of being the product That cliché is no longer applicable (was it ever?) and repeating it only helps the worst infringers. You can pay and still be the product. Consider the streaming services which charge you but still serve ads, or physical appliances that you buy but send your usage habits to the manufacturer (like TVs). Paying is not a guarantee that a company will treat you or your privacy with respect.
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  • happytiger 3y ago
    Here here. Paying no longer protects anything. If anything, you’re more valuable as a data brokered account if you’re KYC verified as a real person: so in fact the opposite case is now often the reality. Consider that paying makes you prime rib for Sunday dinner from a data perspective: card verified PII. And do not forget that you can be assigned an ID and disassociated from your data, which can then be tracked anonymously completely legally as a non-personally identifiable account. And let me assure you de-anonymizing a collected dataset is often not a very difficult problem in the modern data brokerage filled era. We cannot pay out way out of this. We need rights to privacy and deletion enshrined in constitutional-style law, and soon. It must become a fundamental human right.
    • guappa 3y ago
      *hear hear
      • aspenmayer 3y ago
        Thank you. The one that always bugs me on HN is folks “pouring” over something when they really mean poring, or to pore over something.
        • seanw444 3y ago
          I don't think I've ever seen that one done correctly.
          • aspenmayer 3y ago
            It’s pretty rare to find a good pour over too, but Peet’s does a decent one. /s
            • MeImCounting 3y ago
              OK but really if you want good coffee dont go to national corporate chains go to your local roaster is is passionate about good coffee. Always better.
              • aspenmayer 3y ago
                Naturally. I’m in full agreement.
        • GrinningFool 3y ago
          Right up there with "weary" being used as an unintentional portmanteau of "leery" and "wary".
          • dmoy 3y ago
            Oh man, that explains a lot of my confusion. I've seen people say weary and I thought they actually meant weary. Like they were tired because of the thing. But it never scanned correctly, so I was just confused. Now it makes sense - they meant wary / leery.
  • brookst 3y ago
    You can wear a seat belt and still die in a crash. Nothing in life is a guarantee. It’s pure pedantry to hear someone say “I would rather pay than be the product” and to choose to interpret that as “I believe that paying always guarantees that the company will never also use indirect monetization”. Preferring business with direct monetization models is risk mitigation, not a naive (and incorrect) belief in a magic bullet solution to a complex problem.
    • HenryBemis 3y ago
      So next time you walk down the street, if someone crosses your path give them you wallet, phone, laptop, sneakers, jacket because "hey they may pull a knife on me"(?) I say that where money can be made, money will be made. But we have laws and regulations, and when the Metas of this world play dirty, you can stick it to them. (in most cases it will be too little - too late)(but the solution is not to roll over)
    • thfuran 3y ago
      No, the naivety is in the belief that paying offers any privacy protection. It's not a seat belt; it's homeopathic snake oil.
  • javari 3y ago
    > Consider the streaming services which charge you but still serve ads I pay for the ad-free experience on every service that offers it, and I still see ads. The 4 second hulu splash screen at the start of EVERY item I stream is still an ad. HBO, sorry MAX, showing 30s ads for other shows EVERY. TIME. I stream something, still an ad. At least those I can skip, but I shouldn't have to. There was no real purpose to my post, I just needed to vent about that part your point.
    • plagiarist 3y ago
      I don't think you should continue using them if paying for them still has ads. We take collective action now or we end up with cable TV all over again.
• nkrisc 3y ago
  You’re always the product, even if you pay. As long as it’s legal and profitable (or perhaps even illegal), you’ll always be the product.
• globalise83 3y ago
  The personal data of a user who pays is more valuable than that of a user who doesn't pay ;)
  • bonton89 3y ago
    Especially since you have to dox yourself in order to pay. They might have a pretty good idea exactly which individual you are before you pay but they definitely do after.
• Someone 3y ago
  > People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly That’s fairly recent. It was (and is) normal to pay for having a phone number. Paying more for making a phone call was normal, too, as was paying for such services as a phone line that told you the current time or a weather prediction. It was also normal to pay for having an email address, and most people, to this day, pay for having internet connectivity. I think it’s more that people object to moving from ‘free’ to paid. If most people pay for a service, they’ll accept that as the way it is. For example, I think people would happily pay $1 of more a month for GPS, if it never hadn’t been free.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    > That’s fairly recent. No, it's not. In the early days, everything on the internet was free. Before 1996, commercial activity on the internet was forbidden.
    • vidarh 3y ago
      I ran one of many commercial ISPs in 1995 and we founded ours out of frustration with the available commercial ISPs before us. AFAIK the first commercial ISP dates to around '89. But I don't think the fact the internet once had restrictions on commercial activity really makes much difference to the argument above other than in the details, given the argument was broader than about the net.
      • denton-scratch 3y ago
        Oh, by "on the internet", I meant internet services. Sure, it cost money to get connected! So I read the argument above as being about internet services; not hardware or connectivity, that would make it hard to understand.
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        • vidarh 3y ago
• afsag 3y ago
  Since running a business costs money, the only result that will satisfy organisations like noyb is that companies like Facebook disappear from the EU. You will read many people here in HN openly saying how they would like social media to disappear, not only for themselves, but for everybody else, including those who enjoy it.
  • latexr 3y ago
    > Since running a business costs money They should charge a fair price for their product and deliver something good to customers. No one is forcing Facebook to not charge for their service. They just can’t do it without slurping your data. If they can’t have a business without invading people’s privacy, they shouldn’t have a business. It is baffling that people still shill these practices from big corporations. It’s like saying “I can’t make money without robbing you, so it should be legal for me to rob you”. > the only result that will satisfy organisations like noyb is that companies like Facebook disappear from the EU. This is absolutely not true and frankly reads like an argument in bad faith. noyb’s position is clear: don’t invade people’s privacy.
    • FinnKuhn 3y ago
      There is the option to pay for Instagram (and probably also Facebook I assume, but not sure) instead of sharing your data in the EU. https://glamsham.com/world/technology/meta-faces-new-eu-complaint-over-pay-for-privacy-consent https://glamsham.com/world/technology/meta-faces-new-eu-comp...
      • latexr 3y ago
        As per the article (in the bold part at the top): > This is illegal, as the GDPR clearly states that withdrawing your consent must be “as easy as” giving it. The whole point of the article and this discussion is precisely that you can’t make privacy protections a separate “feature”.
  • roelschroeven 3y ago
    NOYB is not inherently opposed to Facebook and other social media. It does fight against unlawful (and arguably unethical) tracking. If a company can't find a solid business model that works within the bounds established by law, that's not NOYB's problem. NOYB is perfectly fine with companies making money by placing ads (as long as they preserve your privacy).
• pmontra 3y ago
  I pay for a lot of services and I don't pay for many more of other ones. I also don't use a lot of free services. I'm sure that I'm a product of a lot of services I pay for, despite I'm paying for them. They are probably selling my data with or without my consent. There are so many fine prints and different ways to interpret the terms of contract.
• dathinab 3y ago
  Yes me too, mostly. Through it should be noted that GDPR requires no tracking but not no ads, and companies try to lump that together to pretend there is no reasonable solution. E.g. a lot of newspapers use approaches similar to Meta (and similar not lawful) i.e. either you get tracked and ads or you pay and get neither ads or tracking. But this is illegal as opting out is noticeable more complex then opting in (account creation requirement is already illegal, money requirement more so). What would be legal would be a choice between "ad(personalized with tracking)" or "ad(no tracking)" and "no ad but account + cost money". You also still can choose ads based on the article/site content etc. (Also another problem with account requirement for no adds is that it often deceptively sneaks in the permission to track when creating the account making it de-facto no option to not be spied on!) Another problem is that it can be easily too expensive for many people (not just very poor ones). Especially if like currently there are no "supper cheap but also very limited accounts". I mean consider YT Premium Lite is 5.99€, no ads but you still get tracked. Twitch has no Lite version (and some non YT-lite premium features are actually for free) cost 11.99 (YT non lite is 12.99). Most news papers and similar are between 3€ and 8€ or so, commonly 5€. Of most of them I only read ~1 article per moth or so, often less and often not even the whole article sometimes I just look for a link to the original source and often I realize I just got click baited and bail out. Like you could easily end up 80+€ a month that's just ... to much for many. And in pretty much all case paying means no ads but not no tracking/selling your information, at best a bit less tracking.
• pnt12 3y ago
  I think the price point was meant to discourage people from paying. It's on par with streaming services, but with the content produced by the users. Do they get 200+ dollars in ads for the average user? For example, I considered paying but I have a semi-inactice Facebook account which isn't worth that to me. I'm also not convinced of Facebook's integrity to honor the deal and not process the data anyway.
  • PeterisP 3y ago
    The price might actually be adequate - they're not getting 200+ dollars in ads for the average user (IIRC it was something like 50+), however, these aren't average users; if someone is the type of person who's willing to pay 200+ dollars for Facebook, then showing ads to them can easily be worth 4x as much as the average user, that is the kind of disposable income for random conveniences that many advertisers want to get and are willing to pay a premium for.
• abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  People pay for lots of social gathering type places - community centers, libraries, gyms, clubs and such. But they only do so if the prices are reasonable. And prices are usually reasonable because the club in question is not trying to grow till it takes over the world. It is a roughly fixed size place, where subscription fees pay for keeping the place running. The cost of running most social media is only about a $1/year (yes year not month) [1]. Social media companies when they want to charge $50-100/year. People are not stupid. Why would they pay more than $2/year. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427
• avgcorrection 3y ago
  I know this is a startup incubator (whatever that is) forum, but I’m tired of this Market Strategy-first framing.[1] Companies like Meta clearly gave away access to their platform in order to build an effective monopoly in some niche.[2] And companies will do whatever within the Law to increase profits. I’m sure all the CEOs here will agree. Anything less is leaving money on the table. This worship of the Market Strategy was bad enough before when there wasn’t much talk of actual laws defining how much of a “product” they can make their users. But now there are! And this submission is about unlawful practices. And we’re still going to frame this as Meta just being effectively forced by the horrible consumers who refuse to “pay for services”? Ridiculous. And I haven’t even really gotten into how much of a fallacy the specific belief is that if you just “pay for services” then you won’t become a “product”. But thankfully there are a lot of other reasonable posters on this forum about tech company profit-maximization. [1] The Company’s perspective is the prime one. The Company doing shady stuff is merely because the consumer’s are stingy or difficult in some way. If the consumers are inconvenienced by the Company then that is just because the Company had to adopt a market strategy which is not as wholesome as the one they could have used if the consumers were better in some way. [2] And do we have to retread the hopelessness of making a social network where you have to pay to use it when no one else is using it (at the start)? That’s a complete dead-end.
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  If you pay them, you don't cease being the product, you actually become an even better product. Now they know you have more than enough disposable income to pay them not to annoy you with advertising and tracking noise. That's actually the exact sort of person whose attention advertisers want. People with surpluss money and the willingness to spend it on stuff they don't actually need. The answer to advertisers and suveillance capitalists is technological blocking of their monetization attempts while simultaneously leeching their "free" services. You want the value they extract from you to be zero or negative. It should cost them money until they cease and desist.