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Comment by drchiu | Hacker News Reader

I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.

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This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it's not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to pay and be free of advertising.

How would you know if the paid version is privacy respecting or not? If for example FB had a 5$/mo subscription that was ad free, how would you know that access to your database wasn't still being sold?

For me that kind of problem is the blocker, and "oh look nobody paid for for the premium version, therefore people don't value privacy" is a bit disingenuous.

If you are buying a product/service and it says it won't do something (like sell your data) and does anyway, that's clearly wrong. They agreed to protect your privacy. With services that state they will use your data to run targeted ads you are immediately accepting the loss of privacy.

Being ad free is not the same as not tracking though. They are just saying, you get the version with no ads.

"clearly wrong" means nothing if you can't win a law suit against megacorp's carefully worded legalese. "We use this information to improve the Service" means game over.

I don't think that will hold up against GDPR.

It won't, but despite the complaints that the GDPR reaches too far, it still only protects a minority of worldwide users.

What if there were a trusted third-party that periodically audited the business to see if they were protecting your privacy of not. Would people value or trust that? And who would people trust to do the audit?

Here's the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay?

I know that there are several defendants [drugs etc] even in my small area who have had deleted snapchat posts, deleted texts, deleted emails, "anonymous" forum posts etc etc etc show up as evidence in court. Now I'm obviously unfamiliar with the legal and technical means by which police investigators made things like that happen, but the fact that they happen means that we can assume that at LEAST the government has access to a record of most everything we do online. Free or otherwise.

Even ignoring the question of the government surveillance net, once your data is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what's being done with it? By which I mean, they say they don't share it, but how do you KNOW?

So maybe we would get some pretty compelling new features in a lot of our services if we were to pay for them, but I'm not at all certain that ironclad privacy would be one of them.

In fact, I'm fair certain that it wouldn't be.

It works through preservation orders, which LE can issue to companies and mandate they preserve records of something.

"Bad money pushes out good money." Since you can't prove privacy, customers have to assume no-privacy and vendors must exploit that or else get outcompeted by someone who does. Same for any quality that customers want but can't verify, such as quickly long-life or organic ingredients or treatment of workers and animals.

I wonder if it's possible for a watchdog organization to automate trap street accounts.

I don't think paid-for services are going to solve anything. We pay up and out the ass for television, which obviously has ads, but I'm sure they're tracking as much as possible too.

Unless you've been extremely diligent, there's no way you're going to escape a targeted invasion of privacy when someone, or some group, government or not, wants it bad enough. Trying to stop that would be exhausting and futile.

Right now, we're allowing highly coordinated, highly detailed, nearly invisible, for-profit, stalking to take place legally. There's no doubt that's bad for society. We have anti-stalking laws for good reason. It's worth doing something about the current state of things, even if it doesn't bring the tracking down to nothing. The free market and tech has failed to fix it so far. They don't have forever to keep trying. Laws are the next line of defense. Laws might not stop criminals from crimin' but I'm sure the Tim Cooks of the world aren't going to risk their company profits (or personal freedoms, if the laws are strict enough) to get a little extra info on everyone.

Couldn't agree more though I got downvoted for saying more or less the same thing earlier today (still don't understand that but, um, internet).

I'm not going to dig up your earlier post, but discussing up- and down votes like you're doing here is an anti pattern on HN. I think that if you look objectively at your comment, you'll find that it doesn't contribute anything to the discussion, and has the potential to distract from it. Most likely that's why you've been down voted here.

What if there were paid services that promised no ads? Ever? Make it part of their policy?

Naive: instead of serving ads directly, the service would just eagerly sell your data to someone else for possibly worse purposes than ads (e.g. denying you health insurance, mortgages, a job, etc.)

Why? Why wouldn't the income from subscriptions be enough?

There is no such thing as "enough" when corporations seek perpetual growth.

Originally, this was the promise of cable television. Eventually they figured out they could charge you and deliver ads.

Exactly. I'm doing this with the company I've been building [0] and it works. While it's taken a while being completely bootstrapped, we make enough money to grow and focus on our users. No one is obligated to track and stalk everyone online; that's just the prevailing business model (unfortunately).

[0] https://write.as/principles

Yes, and when you cash out to enjoy life in the tropics, whoever you sell to will then use any and all information you may have as they see fit, and load up your service with the usual. I won't even blame you for it, this is just how things work. I believe the sincerity of your statement of principles, just as I believe that Sergei and Larry were sincere when they told Google "Don't Be Evil". Everything ultimately has a price, even your principles, and even if it is very high, there is someone out there that will meet it if they can make a profit on it. The guys like Richard Stallman that are religiously committed to their beliefs is vanishingly small, and the odds that a founder such as yourself is one of those people is correspondingly low.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't use your service (which looks cool). It just means that I would have a plan in place for what I'll do when you sell out ;)

Haha well they certainly don't make the covers of magazines very often, but I don't know that they're as rare as you think. The people behind Basecamp, Balsamiq, and tons of other smaller companies are able to build "old-fashioned" businesses that stick to their principles and only answer to their customers. You need a little fortitude on the founder's part of course, but also the right financial incentives -- a key aspect the GP post missed.

As for Write.as, I spend copious time talking about why I built it [0] and making sure people know me personally, to address your exact point. Personally, I'm a simple dude who relishes putting more value on principles than a number in a bank account. And I'd rather have a tent in the woods than Mai Thais on the beach.

But we do have an open API [1] and one-click export to get your data out, so you can be sure :)

[0] https://write.as/matt/who-is-this

[1] https://developers.write.as/docs/api/

Well, if you pay for a service that promises certain privacy protections, then they are legally obligated to fulfill those promises. That’s one mechanism, although obviously you still need watchdogs and a solid legal and court system to protect the promises.

It's possible that the prosecutors in a local drug case got Snapchat data by subpoena, but much more likely is that it was given to them by an informant. Here's the real thing. Anything you do online is not private. If you want to keep something private, don't do it online.

> Here's the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay?

The issue is that the services have to be funded somehow. If they're funded through data mining, you lose your privacy. So if you want privacy, some other funding source is necessary but not sufficient.

> once your data is on that company's server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what's being done with it?

The answer is for it not to be on their server at all. Have it be on your server. Operating a server should be as simple as operating any other home appliance.

> The issue is that the services have to be funded somehow. If they're funded through data mining, you lose your privacy. So if you want privacy, some other funding source is necessary but not sufficient.

That, and there has to be a legal or technical way to prevent them from datamining you anyway. Because seriously, almost no company is going to voluntarily leave money on the table. Why drop old profit source for the new one, when you can have both?

> The answer is for it not to be on their server at all. Have it be on your server. Operating a server should be as simple as operating any other home appliance.

That's an important part of the solution, I believe. Personally, what I'd love to see is the move towards making service providers stop trying to own data. The way SaaS currently works is: I send my data to the service for processing, they basically own it, and I'm lucky if I can even get the data back out and untangled from the service. The way this should be working is that I own and control the data, and I rent their code to be run on it.

Come to think of it, that's how desktop software works, and that's why the abstraction of a file - the one the cloud is desperately trying to kill - is so awesome.

>The answer is for it not to be on their server at all. Have it be on your server. Operating a server should be as simple as operating any other home appliance.

But... operating non-computerized home appliances is difficult, too. Remember all the jokes about the VCR blinking 12:00? This was because every damn thing had it's own completely non-standard, unique interface.

I mean, we've got fewer and fewer clocks we've gotta set, but back in the day, I remember I was the sort of person who would have to jimmy with a friend's car until their in-dash clock was right... and almost nobody I knew had a clock that was right year round, just 'cause they couldn't be bothered to look up or figure out how to set it.

Now, with connected appliances? (as any of your 'social network' appliances would have to be) if you didn't apply the security updates (and maybe if you did) the data would be even more public than it is now.

> But... operating non-computerized home appliances is difficult, too. Remember all the jokes about the VCR blinking 12:00? This was because every damn thing had it's own completely non-standard, unique interface.

Not really. It was because the device is a VCR (or a car) that happens to contain a clock and people didn't care enough about the clock feature to bother with setting it. Even the people whose clocks weren't set could still play a video tape or drive to work.

What it points to is the need for good defaults. The default shouldn't be to blink 12:00, nobody actually wants that. It should be to get the time from a GPS receiver or NTP server or something like that. It's a problem caused by no external connectivity, which is no longer an issue today.

> Now, with connected appliances? (as any of your 'social network' appliances would have to be) if you didn't apply the security updates (and maybe if you did) the data would be even more public than it is now.

Security is an issue but it's a separate issue. Huge organizations get pwned all the time. Yahoo, Target, Equifax, OPM, it's a very long list. If the thing holding your data gets hacked, you lose. That doesn't really depend on if it's in your home or not.

>Security is an issue but it's a separate issue. Huge organizations get pwned all the time. Yahoo, Target, Equifax, OPM, it's a very long list. If the thing holding your data gets hacked, you lose. That doesn't really depend on if it's in your home or not.

For your thing to not get hacked, someone needs go proactively defend that thing, even if defending that thing just means 'install the dang updates' (of course, there's more to it than that, but for most of us, if installing the updates isn't enough, we are compromised and deal with the consequences)

I'm comparing leaving the clock blinking 12:00 to the phone that hasn't been updated in two years. If your data is on devices you control... you need to control the security of said devices, and that's easier said than done.

My point here is that not paying attention to the security of your home appliances has very different and sometimes not obvious consequences to not paying attention to other aspects of home appliance setup.

> The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it's not.

This test doesn't seem to work in practice due to, I imagine, human psychology. When looking at a free vs not free service, most people are just comparing the cost of the service. The implied privacy costs are too diffuse and complex for the brain to properly comprehend them at that moment.

The individual-based solution is to develop a feeling of ickiness towards such services, but I'm not sure how that could be implemented on a mass scale.

Right, you can't just take a free-to-the-user (paid by advertising) product, slap a fee on it, and expect people to pay for it. Instead products need to be user-centric from the start, with business models that align users and the company making the products. It's just rare to see companies thinking critically about this.

Once they've said "let's monetize our free users" they've already lost. What people miss is that free users are incredibly valuable with a digital product -- whether it's seeing how real people use it or the free marketing they give you. Sure, a freemium product will generally have >95% of its users not paying a cent. That doesn't mean you need to sell of their data to generate value from them.

And as a consumer "outraged about privacy and advertising," frankly we're faced with many products that are overpriced for the value they deliver. More companies need to find the middle ground between surveillance business models and gouging consumers.

Websites were "free" from the start when people were hosting them on their own machines. At this point we have the internet access and cheap hardware that would allow us to take control and build distributed solutions that are "free" in the sense that they only cost our contribution of hosting power or something.

Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads.

EDIT: I used Tor as an example because of the contrast with data collection companies like Facebook but there are a lot of people who run Tor relays for free that push quite a bit of traffic around. Things like IPFS, blockchains, Mastodon Project, SETI@Home, etc, are examples of free approaches given our modern hardware proliferation.

> Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads.

Oh an exit node certainly has the capability to collect data. Have enough of them and you can de-anonymize an user.

But not everyone is running exit nodes. And even if they are they get random requests that can't easily be correlated to a source.

My point is that most people run those services for free without the expectation of collecting personal data.

But I think the expectation of free internet services sort of originates in that kind of attitude. Because originally the internet was a bunch of hackers using their spare bandwidth and their spare cpu cycles to host web sites. Perhaps they enjoyed it enough to volunteer the extra cash for dedicated servers and dedicated internet connections.

It's only after that in the second step that people try to monetise. Nowadays of course it's money from the getgo, but things have changed.

There's still plenty of free today. Lots of people run websites with highly interesting information and then distributed it without benefiting from the ads that run on the site (e.g. a Wordpress blog, where the privacy invasion and ad revenue profits go to Wordpress not the blogger).

There are also still plenty of ways to host content that is free to a reasonable point of usage.

See Firebase Hosting [a sister team of mine]: 1GB hosting and 10GB xfer monthly without even dropping a credit card.

And the problem too is that even paid products like my NYT subscriptions have ads. If the point is privacy, I don't have an option to buy it.

The newspapers and magazines have had advertisements for at least the last two centuries to help subsidize the cost of the subscription. If you had to pay full price for a subscription, you probably wouldn't have it because the publisher couldn't afford it.

And likely even if you paid for a subscription to a magazine, your name and address was sold to marketers to sell you direct mail. And this ended up in someone's database, who resold it to advertisers time and time again.

Cook's Illustrated is an example of a magazine that doesn't sell ads. But the cost per issue is higher and the number of pages is lower. Also most of the magazine is usually printed in black and white to save publishing costs.

The question I ask myself constantly, is do I want to end up being advertised to (Google, Facebook), or do I want to end up being part of someone's brand (Apple, Nike)?

One model, in the UK at least, is to use an agent for purchasing of subscription publications.

This newsagent delivered the papers and magazines to your door before you left for work in the morning, didn't send your data to organisations and allowed flexible purchasing options (monthly, weekly, etc). Many people still use news agents for their subscription delivery mechanisms.

Perhaps we can see an online agent, where we pay a trusted third party that negotiates transactions on all our online activites on our behalf, and protects our privacy, location, when else we buy, etc. That digital agent would collect a small (1% of transaction cost) as fee, to continue it's operations.

Subscription services are such a pain, because so many companies do their best to trick you with deceptive pricing models and service agreements.

I often don't want to haul out the credit card because it takes so much energy to evaluate a service.

I deliberately chose to buy ADSL service from the only company I found that instead of billing automatically and renewing the contract implicitly requires a fax with proof of advance payment and eagerly disconnects me if I'm late.

I pay for a VPN, Cloud Storage, VPS hosting, and Encrypted Email; I'd probably pay for Maps if Open Street Map weren't sufficient.

The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?

> The total comes to just over $300/yr. That's... really not that much, is it?

I'd imagine for minimum mage workers, that's obscene.

I agree, but this is HN; isn't it safe to assume a certain income among most commentators?

I know of at least two homeless HN commentors, and more than that who are unemployed.

I'm quite poor and was homeless until a few months ago. I am quite open about that and I get told bluntly to stop talking about myself here at times. I have seen evidence that suggests other poor people here are reluctant to stick their neck out as much as I do. So the number of poor people here is probably more than it seems.

That's a shame; but perhaps I can understand why? The get-rich-quick, or how-I-got-rich stories that bubble up to the top nigh daily are intimidating as hell, as is the discussion similar to such that abounds around here.

I'm not a fan, and I apologize for contributing to it. I'll try to be more thoughtful in the future.

Thank you.

I suspect most poor people hide it in part because the stigma can impede their ability to escape poverty. Classism is alive and well.

Ideally, I would like to see a culture where "rich" people help poor people figure out how to solve their problems. That's all I have ever asked and it doesn't really get taken seriously. I get a lot of flak about just being a charity case, not worth real money, and that I should get a real job instead of trying to figure out how to make money online. Meanwhile, almost everyone else on HN is trying to figure out how to make money online in some sense.

Most people don't "stick their neck out" as much as you do. I'm a casual browser and I feel like I've seen you discussing your life situation enough to the point where I know your circumstances better than that of some people I consider friends.

It's good to have you here! HN benefits from the perspective that you bring.

Plenty of other people must value your comments too, because you've accumulated a karma of over 5000 points in about 4 months - say 15,000 points a year, which is definitely a lot - cf HN leaders. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Just to add to this, DoreenMichele herself was on the leaderboard with her previous handle and would certainly still be there if she hadn't moved to her current one, so clearly folks here appreciate the perspective she brings to conversations!

Four person home, annual shared income is ~20k in the rural Midwest. Not exactly rich, but semi-affordable given they have a house already.

The line gets a bit blurry when you consider that there are a few high school-aged people on HN who can't legally get a full time job.

Not really.

A couple of years back I was so poor I was sleeping on my brother's couch.

Not to mention that there are people on HN who are from developing countries, where even relatively well paid jobs don't pay a lot by Western standards.

I currently live on SSDI due to unfortunate medical problems that made driving impossible. Three doctors independently looked at a particular lab result and said, "How are you still alive?". (Previously I had a decent engineering salary writing embedded firmware)

SSDI pays very close to the federal poverty level. Even with the benefit of receiving Medicare, the monthly cost of very-necessary medication plus very frugal living expenses usually leaves me with up to ~$(40 +/- 40) each month in "discretionary spending" that I can use to buy anything beyond rent/medication/food. (e.g. clothes, household cleaning/repair/etc, very rarely travel expenses)

I'm lucky that my interest has always involved computers, which I can use for free for many different purposes. Well, as long as nothing happens to my old desktop (Core 2 Quad Q9650, nForce 790i, RAID-1 of ancient SATA disks). An extra $300/yr would would mean buying new boots and some new shirts. Paying that would mean dropping on of my medications (maybe fatal in the short term, defiantly fatal within a year or two), or skipping a few months of food.

For the record, I'm fine living frugally. I simply suggest that it's important to avoid falling victim to a filter bubble or survivor bias[1], because there are a lot of people - even engineers in Silicon Valley - that have an even worse[2] situation that mine.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w

[2] I'm fortunate to have the privilege of being male and white. My friends without those privileges have only recently been able to start leaning math/software/etc. They are hackers at heart, but a math/CS/engineering education and SV startup opportunities were not available to black women in the 80s/90s.

Is it not possible to work without driving ?

That's not the only problem, unfortunately. The results that prompted that comment from 3 different doctors was the results from two sleep studies at different locations that indicated an AHI[1] of 152 an 148. Hypoxia and no stage 3/4/REM sleep for >10 years does bad things too your heart, endocrine system, memory (and other conative functions), etc.

(Don't sit at desk ~100% of the time for multiple decades, and get minor problems checked out before they accumulate damage and become major problems)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apnea%E2%80%93hypopnea_index ( >30 is usually "severe" apnea. 150 is "how did you survive the severe drops in blood O2 every night?!". The hospital delivered emergency O2 to my house within hours of reading the results of that sleep study)

Are you overweight ?

[Note: This comment is not related to the current discussion thread]

hi pdkl95,

I'm somewhat new to HN, so sorry if this is bad form, but I couldn't find a way to send a private message.

I've been doing a lot of research on systemd because a lot of the developer practices behind it frankly scare the shit out of me.

I thought you had some excellent comments (these were threads from like 2015/2016) - is there anywhere we could discuss the current state of systemd if you're okay with that? Basically I want to see if any of your opinions have changed, or if systemd still seems like a giant ugly tightly-coupled octopus that attempts to subsume too many features.

tl;dr: I've been playing around with arch linux and I've been loving it, but something about systemd rubs me the wrong way and it feels like an obvious target for security compromise if I were the NSA or [insert evil org] since systemd is present on so many linux distros

50 USD/month for a bundled infotainment package (cable+internet) comes to 600 USD/yr. I think most urban Americans are going to spend at least that much.

well great you just added $300 to that which was previously $0

I'm concerned about this wording. Internet is very important to pretty much everyone in the modern developed world. Cable is often bundled into internet whether you want it or not - when people can get rid of cable for a cheaper plan, they often do. "Infotainment" sounds like a disparaging term here, it's inappropriate.

The internet is effectively a need, on the level of electricity, so it's closer to being an assumed cost. Nonetheless, some people probably can't afford it, and for those that do but struggle financially, adding more on top of it doesn't at all help. The idea that these people should be concerned about a diffuse danger of privacy violations compared to the very real danger of not being able to afford important things is completely preposterous.

Stop passing the cost to the consumer. Companies that abuse privacy should be regulated. If you're expecting this task to be done by people of low socioeconomic status, whom your own system has deemed as people deserving of less power, you're looking at the whole thing completely backwards.

$300 is around ₹20k. Certainly not much for me. But if I have a choice between free and ₹20k I'll almost always choose free.

I think if you divide the money brought in via web advertising across all users of the web it comes out to like $150/month/user.

Would you pay $150/month to not have ads ever again? I definitely would but considering how much people complain about $3/month for no-ad hulu...

I might want it now, but if that was the condition when I was a kid, I'd probably not be computer-proficient right now. In my childhood, unless you came from a rich and computer-interested family, everything you used was a combination of free software and pirated software.

I'm all for getting rid of all advertising in any (humanitarian) way possible, but that's the one thing that still bugs me - how to ensure kids with no disposable income will be able to work with the software used by pros?

If advertisers are spending $150/month on users they are probably earning at least $50/month from users. But it's not distributed evenly - a lot is probably for big ticket items.

My point is, people are paying it anyway.

I live in a country where $300 is the average monthly wage.

Is paying 1/12th of your total annual income just to get 4 services worth it?

That would be, what?, like you paying $10,000 a year for those services?

subsidized currently by an advertising model

It's only an ad model at the moment because we're only just getting started with ways to utilise massive amounts of data. Give it time and, unless we're vigilant and guard against it, it'll be an insurance model, a career model, a justice model, etc. Anything you can imagine turning big data to will become a business model if we let it.

Ads are an incredibly tame use of the data corporations have access to. It could be much, much worse. That's why we need to work out an alternative now.

How can it be possible for the "buyer" to assess the cost of something if it was never offered for a price other than 0.00

Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" if that which is "free" has never before been offered for a price greater than zero

Can the "alternative to free" be "considered" when there is no such alternative (e.g. because alternatives have been acquired or blocked by a monopolist)

What if companies exist to serve advertisers and other customers and are not actually "serving" users

What if it was shown that many users do not actually require storage of data in data centers

What if the needs of users and the needs of data collectors are truly not aligned

What if users' "choices" are nonexistant or illusory

What if you could pick a bundle? A $1/mo, $10/mo, $100/mo bundle? You get whatever those bundles allow for whatever time window is set. Not the same as free and choice-wise is restrictive (but then the tyranny of choice).

While not "the" answer, it could be an option so that you're not paying for each and every content driven website independently.

Of course, the downside is this harkens to the time when we had limited sources of information (newspaper sub, broadcast TV, cable TV and radio).

If micropayments is not working (yet?) and advertising is proving too invasive but we're also not willing to pay underutilized individual subscriptions, what else is there?

If we're going to talk about a hypothetical internet where Google and Facebook have no ability to siphon all our data, we might as well propose IPv6 for everyone and NAT for no one. Then we could have high quality peer to peer services for things like instant messaging and email and social networking. We'd have the best of both worlds.

Oh, and ISPs would be regulated as utilities so their services would be dumb pipes with high bandwidth, low latency, and no caps or throttling of any kind!

It looks like there are no alternatives. You pay or lose privacy. I think you can have advertisements without targeting single people and without selling data. Single person targeted ads are bullshit. You still can count clicks to your ad without need to know personal details. I do not think anyone in adtech is keeping that data to check later if click caused actuall buy. They just keep it as reference to spam you with the same crap and have some points when they prove clicks were kind of legit.

This seems to be a very constrained limited way to frame the issue. It is a false choice.

Just because you pay for something doesn't mean you are also not the product. Businesses will maximize value and then they will draw revenue from both subscriptions and advertising. So simply paying will not solve the problem.

Negative externalities are usually handled by regulation in a civilized society as markets are a race to the bottom and cannot account for them. So safety standards, environmental protections, child labour, drugs all have to be regulated and enforced.

In this case the potential for micro targeted propaganda and misinformation are negative externalities. In this specific case its easy to tackle the problem at source by banning micro targeting by advertisers and platforms. Only textual context and immediate location can be used. This protects revenue streams and the current model. But removes the incentives to stalk everyone and hoover up incredible amounts of data to build profiles for micro targeting.

That's something most people think and do. The problem is that they assume that all this targeting will work in future as it is now.

My wild guess is it will not, it will get much clever, it will be able to figure out if a given person is "worth being targeted" (buys expensive goods and services and does this often, has big credit on his card, etc.).

Soon or later those who does not qualify will get nothing or will have to pay a lot to access given service since not being part of it will be considered suspicious (by government, employers, shops). US gov wants people to give their "social" username at the border, Chinese government is working on system to "rate" citizens, companies are setting the prizes in online stores on the base of knowledge they have about incoming customers.

Traversing a saying about communists and capitalists it seems that social networks are giving away a rope they will hang its users someday.

The frustrating part is that there is no "pay what they get from advertisers" price point. Facebook gets $5 per user per year last time I checked. But if FB were a paid service, it would probably be like $10/mo... And I wouldn't pay that much for it.

$6.18 per user per quarter in 2017 Q4, and $26.76 per user per quarter for US/Canadian users. So nearly $25 per year, and over $100 per year for US/Canadian users assuming earnings per user stays constant or continue to rise

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

Would I be willing to pay the pennies a day that free services get from advertisers on my behalf? Yes.

Would I be willing to pay 10x-1000x times that for a half dozen $10/mo subscription? No.

The problem is is that (lack of) apathy is a strong signal, ripe for price-grading, and boy do they price grade!

And this is sort of the problem. In order to overcome freeriders subscription prices are always exorbitant compared to the ad revenue. I can't afford even 1 dollar a month for every site I visit, I could however almost certainly beat the cpm price those sites earn from ads... But we have no way to ensure every one pays and we have no way to distribute even if we did.

There is a way, actually. Browser crypto mining. People just seem to (IMHO irrationally) hate it even more than surveillance and data gathering.

I'm not personally opposed to it actually but A) does it actually work? B) until people can pay rent in arbitrary coins it very much relies on mining the "right" coin to be able to get any useful USD, SEK, ZAR... Whatever out of it. C) because A is reliant on the cost of mining and established crypto-asset-ma-bobs are expensive to mine trying to get value off the small amount of cpu you can grab via JavaScript mining it incentives ScamCoins.

I think the hate is rational, but more importantly the math really doesn't work. It pays far less than advertising on all but the very least desirable sites.

Pennies on the day is a significant underestimate of how much value you are providing to the company that provides the service. That would be ~$7.30/year.

Actual revenue per user for Facebook in the US and Canada is $26+ / quarter or over $100/year... That is on the order of $10/month [1]. So if a company wanted to be as profitable as Facebook, and not make money from advertising, they would have to charge $10/mo. That is more than I am willing to pay for Facebook -- my friends have my phone number.

If you think profit of providers like Facebook should be limited then that's a regulation issue. Personally I don't think that should be the case.

It is possible to provide the service Facebook provides in a fully encrypted manner. Individual companies would require subsidies and audits to ensure encryption. Essentially regulation.

Another alternative is fully encrypted, distributed services where personal CPU and storage are used to support the service. This is possible through systems like Diaspora or Mastadon, but there is an ease of use / network effect issue there.

I just don't think it is as simple or inexpensive as pennies a day. Or to push a company to charge that little would require regulation.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/01/31/fac...

There's the Amazon Prime / Apple iCloud whatever model: you pay a single monthly fee and you get access to a wide range of services. Amazon even has their Appstore whatsitcalled library where 3rd party apps are no-added-cost and they pay the app publishers on some kind of spotify like pay-per-use model.

Its a very slight variation on the middleman problem that doesn't really fix much, you just get a slightly different financial model for a creepy invasive middleman not much different than social media and advertisers.

TV model: I am paying for basic channels. Yet I am paying for selected channels, say National Geographic or BBC Earth if I want to get those.

Will this schema work with Internet? Like if I want FB I will pay for facebook's dedicated TCP/IP port access.

Sounds crazy of course but could it be something along these lines?

What about services that run on a P2P cloud? No fees, no ads, no tracking?

There is tracking on most p2p networks, and there aren’t really any p2p networks where the service is free, as in free beer.

I mean, the whole concept of the most widespread p2p networks is piracy, or the act of paying for bandwidth and electricity to save money on the movies that you steal.

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