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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly.

I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

I don't know how much money in ad revenue I earn google, but I'd probably happily pay it for a more transparent, less sketchy, and more commonly-aligned product. (This would also give me recourse for all the times the google services I rely on go down....)

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> I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

You do have the ability to pay for some of them (G Suite aka Google Apps for Business), but even then you might not get what you want, since 99% of their users like you are still products. I'm reminded of this quote from Josh Marshall:

> One thing I’ve observed with Google over the years is that it is institutionally so used to its ‘customers’ actually being its products that when it gets into businesses where it actually has customers it really has little sense of how to deal with them. (https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-serf-on-googles-farm)

I'm pretty sure this doesn't let you opt-out of ad targeting for search nor does it prevent them from using your maps and other data in their b2b offerings.

Exactly my point, actually.

2016 had $90B revenues and 1.5B 30d active users (for YouTube) so $60 per year would be a good guess.

(Disclaimer: I'm a Googler but I just got these numbers from public statements. No way I'm well paid enough to be able to see more detailed numbers. :-D )

Personally I'd happily pay $5/mo for all of my google services if it meant I was entirely removed from the whole advertising/"customer-is-a-product" offering and I could have confidence that I wasn't being sold as a product in other regards.

gSuite is exactly that: $5/month/user for the basic package, and does exactly what the grandparent wants.

sure, it's nice to be outside of adverts... but using gSuite always feels like pretending I'm not being farmed out to the gov't

"Ultimately the problem is that their incentives aren't really aligned with yours. They're only incentivized to do the absolute minimum it takes to keep you around. As they control more and more of your world, they've increased your cost to leave and they can do even less to benefit you explcitly."

Are you criticizing Google or companies in general? Because your criticism applies to any company in the world.

> I like google's services. What I want is the ability to pay for them and not be a part of the product they sell in ads. Basically a freemium model.

Get a corporate gSuite account, they have been around for quite a while.

I prefer companies whose products and services I pay for directly. They're incentivized to keep me happy and paying. The more they invest in me, the more attractive they become to me and the more I may be willing to pay. Google and FB invest more and more in their ad business and can let the consumer products slide for a very long time in a way that would never fly if they charged real money and didn't have ad revenue to fill in the gap. (Case in point is google calendar - it just got a revamp but it was what like 10 years of garbage before that?)

I don't think corp gsuite lets you opt out of ad targeting and general tracking (I could be wrong).

> I prefer companies whose products and services I pay for directly.

Then pay for it, stop using free services.

> I don't think corp gsuite lets you opt out of ad targeting and general tracking (I could be wrong).

AFAIK it doesn't use any info from the services you pay for to target you.

But remember, ads on websites aren't a form of paying for Google's services, but for the website content.

Do you read Ars Technica? Instead of seeing the ads you just subscribe to them. Read news online freely? Stop and pay for a few newspapers and only read them.

People knowingly choose free services that come with the tradeoff of ad targeting. That's how those services are paid. Using those services is your choice.

You can opt out of Google ad targeting and general tracking for free

https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/privacy

I'm not sure if you really can. Yes, I know you can opt out of the more open parts of it, like the web history they show you, but I'm skeptical that they aren't still doing stuff behind the scenes.

It doesn't apply to all companies.

Apple, for example, has very strong incentives to maintain your privacy, to the point that they have made it a selling point for their devices and are also suffering in the realms of machine learning because they are not leveraging your data the way Google or FB would.

> has very strong incentives to maintain your privacy

> their incentives aren't really aligned with yours

No, they have a very strong incentive to appear to maintain your privacy. And that's only temporary.

Don't fall for any company saying that they're doing something in the user's interests. They aren't. Companies exist to make profits, if for a brief period of time that means helping users in some way, it's only a coincidence, and you're being fooled by it.

Take a look at China, Apple didn't even blink before deciding to hand over all data to the Chinese government.

I trust companies, because I know exactly what matters for them: profits. I trust them to follow profits and act on their best interest.

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