Nothing wrong with charging for access to a service. If the web service isn't free, then don't give access to people who haven't paid for it. If the site isn't free, then require payment before serving the web page. This is reasonable.
What happens instead is:
1. I make an HTTP request
2. The server sends me the page with the content I want for free
3. The page comes bundled with ads and tracking malware
They don't want to do the reasonable thing because they'd make less money that way. That's not our problem though. They need to deal with it and stop abusing our trust or one day people will make laws to criminalize it.
> why should data be different as long as you're aware up front of what is collected and that it's the method of payment?
Because nobody knows what that data is going to be used for once it's in a database and up for sale. Nobody is made aware "up front" of the risks of data collection. It's impossible to determine the long term impact of this. It could amount to nothing. It could end up being leaked because of some intermediary's poor information security practices. A government could get access to it and start building dossiers on people or share it with other governments.
I'd gladly pay $15/yr to use that service if I knew they weren't tracking my personal info and the service was ad-free. As it stands, I haven't been on the platform for nearly a decade now, and I'd return tomorrow if this were truly an option (and I actually knew I could trust them to honor the agreement).
IMO, that's how you strike a balance - use for free and we exploit your privacy, or pay a fee (preferably regulated to be similar to the average profit made on a user's private information) and no data will be collected or stored on you, except as is necessary to make the site work (for instance, setting times to your local timezone).
Is it? How do you know? Most people don't have even a partial understanding of the risks associated with personal information collection. Most people don't even read terms of service and privacy policies. How many users even know what a cookie is?
The fact is people trust the service providers with the data. They assume that their data will be used responsibly for their benefit. Recent history shows that this assumption is completely unfounded.
> Why should they have to suffer for your desire. You could use privacy oriented services instead.
The fact is the vast majority of services are not and never will be privacy-oriented. Paid service or not, they'd make more money if they sold people's private information. Not doing that is a wasted opportunity to them, it's as if they were actively choosing to make less money. So instead of excluding people who don't agree with surveillance capitalism, it should be impossible to collect any information to begin with.
Besides, we should not be ostracized and be forced to live off-grid as if we were in some cyberpunk story just because we value our privacy.
I think they should be allowed to. I just think companies should be required to provide consumers a choice.
>why shouldn't services be allowed to cater exclusively to them?
Because many of the companies that exploit their users are monopolies. There are no real competitors to YouTube, Facebook, Google, etc. (yes, I know alternatives exist, but when you have 99% of users on your platform, the others don't quite matter).
Since there's yet to be any regulation to stop this monopolistic aspect, the next easiest thing would be to force them to adopt a slightly different, relatively painless business model.
I don't think you came off as aggressive - don't worry. People should, imo, be free to choose how they want to transact. On the flipside, though, a standard business model would be a benefit to all - those who care about privacy get what they want, those who don't see zero changes. The companies will make the same money off of either, so the only real cost is in developing the tools necessary to accept payments. Those aren't particularly hard to integrate into most websites, though.
>isn't that really just an indication that the traditional business model has been thoroughly outcompeted and should be moved away from since it's nonviable by comparison?
I'm not so sure. I've never seen a YouTube alternative with even 1/50th as many videos which has some kind of cash-based revenue model. I've NEVER seen a search engine which does that, and the same is true for social media (among other things, this isn't meant to be an all-inclusive list, of course).
I'm a bit of a privacy nut, so feel free to disregard this next part, but I honestly think targeted advertising is the source of a huge number of problems. For instance, it's used for highly targeted political ads, which I believe is the root of a lot of the division in the US political scene. This got so bad that Google felt the need to ban their tools being used for highly-specific targeted political ads. Unfortunately, others have not followed suit here.