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Comment by cloakandswagger | Hacker News Reader

The original comment said:

"[...] with strong guarantees that the data of end user who has opted for paid service is kept private and not monetized anyhow."

As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement. The data is somehow segregated so that it's excluded from being sold to advertisers in any form. The user can have their data deleted permanently at any time.

It obviously wouldn't prevent someone from authorizing a 3rd party app to all of my Facebook data, but that is more about Facebook educating people about what they're consenting to rather than a philosophical debate about ownership of data.

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> The data is somehow segregated so that it's excluded from being sold to advertisers in any form.

That doesn't mix with there being free users whose data is sold to advertisers, because it's the same data. You share your photo with another user who in turn shares it with another user etc. That's what a social network is.

So what happens when the vast majority of everything is shared with both types of users? If touching a free user means it can be subject to facial recognition and tagging and everything else for advertising then there is little point in paying. If touching a paid user means it can't then it destroys the revenue model for free users and the price of paying would be high enough to discourage everyone from doing it, because you're de facto paying for all the free users you share anything with.

> As an "actual programmer" myself, I don't see how that would be so burdensome to implement

Oh, but you will see, when your manager (who doesn't really understand the implications of various technical decisions, by the way) will order you to do something completely meaningless (in your opinion), because the regulatory documents (made by people who understand and care for the implications of technical decisions far, far less than your manager) say something meaningless, contradictory and hard to interpret in the first place. If you aren't familiar with such situation it's probably because you are not working in a regulated industry, not because these things "solve themselves" in practice. No, in practice they don't.

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