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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism isn't seen as anything bad in most countries after the cold war.

I would prefer the term privacy prostitution or data prostitution. You sell your privacy in exchange for getting "free" search, "free" news, "free" maps, "free" email. Of course such services cannot be free of cost.

Traditionally Germany had a law that you are not allowed to give "gifts" when selling something. So when offering a car they were not allowed to give a "free" grill or something like that. The goal was to protect consumers from intrasparent pricing and unfair business practices. Some market-liberalist politicians abandoned the law many years ago, because consumers are "mature enough" to make their own decisions.

So how many consumers decide to pay for the internet services they use instead of being tracked?

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Does paying for a service really mean that the company taking your money stops tracking you?

Not only don't I believe that's ever the case, but when you sign up and pay, they can get some additional details from you that they weren't able to collect on their own.

> So how many consumers decide to pay for the internet services they use instead of being tracked?

Relatively few? Those services are available for people who want to pay for them.

Personally, I use Gmail, Facebook, and a litany of other free services. I'm fine with the exchange.

Are you accusing me of not being mature enough to make this decision?

I use Facebook and Gmail myself. So I am not accusing anybody here. I use containers to isolate my browser sessions, I control my cookies and I somewhat lazily use uMatrix. I don't use an add blocker, because I have a very strong mental add blocker not to buy anything I see on the internet.

So, yes the current model is cheaper for me. Still, I would prefer a world where you pay for what you use without all the tracking and adtech. Selling a lot of useless crap just ruins the planet and makes our life worse in the long term.

> I don't use an add blocker, because I have a very strong mental add blocker not to buy anything I see on the internet.

Ad blocker is never about blocking the ads themselves since five years ago or so. Since then, the point is always to block tracker and fingerprinter scripts in the ads (sometimes these scripts are almost malicious [0]) to reduce the information collected by advertisers (and abusers of the ads system) while browsing the web. I actually miss the plain old banner ads without shenanigans, they need to come back.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20288768

> I actually miss the plain old banner ads without shenanigans, they need to come back.

Of course, once a considerable mass of people started using the internet, these 'plain' browser ads started taking up more screen space than the content itself.

Thankfully Carbon Ads seem to be pretty friendly and non-intrusive (only an image with text is allowed, and I don't think I've seen any GIFs) so I have them whitelisted in UBO.

> I would prefer a world where you pay...

You have that available to you! You can pay for Protonmail or a variety of other email services.

Facebook is a more interesting case, because what you're really asking is for your friends to make the decision to pay instead of be advertised to. They get to have a choice, no? I always feel a little creeped out by sentences that start with "I would prefer a world where..." and end with, basically, everyone does what I want.

For capitalism and free markets to truly work, we need to move the needle more towards perfect information symmetry. People may be mature enough to make that decision, but are they provided the proper information to actually make the decision? Is the gravity of the decision and the implications clearly illustrated to the consumer? There needs to be something more than mindlessly checking a TOS checkbox, a TOS which is likely to be casually updated periodically with nothing more than a simple easily overlooked email saying "something" has changed.

A lot of people seem to think caveat emptor is good for society, but clearly it is consumer hostile.

> Capitalism isn't seen as anything bad in most countries after the cold war.

It’s called “surveillance capitalism” because companies are capitalizing on selling people’s data. It differentiates it from government surveillance.

Surveillance is dangerous, regardless whether it's the KGB, the Stasi or Google who does it.

It’s called “surveillance capitalism" to differentiate it from other forms of capitalism. From this[1] interview with Zuboff:

> So even early on in the theorizing of capitalism it was understood that capitalism takes on different market forms and different eras in the context of different technologies. We’ve had mercantile capitalism, and we’ve had factory capitalism, and mass-production capitalism, and managerial capitalism, financial capitalism. And typically what happens in these new concepts is that modifier, like “mass production,” or in my case “surveillance” capitalism, what that modifier is doing is pinpointing the pivot of value creation in this new market form.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/shoshana-zuboff-q-an...

In a corrupt (nation) state, you could for example buy some information about a person, via the government. Corruptcy is not a black-white definition. There are a lot of shades, wheels in a machine, etc. So a state is not merely corrupt, yes or no.

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