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Comment by fouric | Hacker News Reader

Most internet service companies, including Facebook and Google, don't give you the option of paying for privacy even if you wanted to.

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I think that if it's possible to define a way of operating businesses in a way that doesn't harvest data in a way that's nonessential to the services, then there should be a law requiring this option: to pay out of your pocket directly the amount of revenue the company would have expected to make, in exchange for the company not doing this data collection. But it seems difficult to get to such a definition. I think this law would be very popular.

Indirectly GDPR does this. All data collection must be either opt in, or necessary to provide the service.

Oh, I forgot an important detail. I should have added another aim I would want is that as a result of paying this money, you wouldn't receive any advertisements from the service.

We're trying to build the idea of "paid for storage" that doesn't look at your stuff, but getting people to pay fora service that others provide with advertising for free is hard.

Any company being truthful about what their customers want can't be tracking them 24-7 and sifting everything they type. Almost no-one wants that level of invasiveness. We just put up with it because there are no real (easy) alternatives or aren't aware.

But does GDPR really allow this business model at all? A website cannot as per GDPR say "accept tracking or we refuse service", if tracking is not necessary to provide the service. Can they say "pay or accept tracking or we refuse service"?

That's exactly what The Washington Post does. They have a free option where "You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads" and a "Premium EU Ad-Free Subscription" with "No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/

I happily pay for YouTube Premium, just to avoid ads. I wish I could do the same with Facebook

Do you still get tracked and your data collected if you pay?

Of course, but you don't get served ads.

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