Have never understood EFF's objection to 'pay for privacy' (covered in the middle of this article). Being able to pay for privacy is better than not being able to. It creates the beginning of accountability for cos and optionality for users.
Well...what did you think would happen?
privacy as a legal right is complex and ill-defined -- if you look just at CCPA or GDPR, these are big laws with large compliance costs with the risk of benefiting incumbents like FB/G
if your goal is to develop a robust case law for privacy in the united states, pay for privacy accomplishes that because if I pay a dollar for 'private mode', and the vendor breaks our contract, I can absolutely sue.
we also don't know which privacy features users want. hard to write laws without market research, and you can't do market research if there's no market for a good.
another issue is that if privacy laws 'demonetize free tiers', you're effectively paying for privacy anyway. 'pay for privacy' vs 'privacy as right' may be a false choice.
I'm not saying market privacy is fair on the face of it, but it may be more effective than the alternatives.
Whether it's a right has nothing to do with whether you have to pay for it.
I wonder if people would accept to have to give up a gun they already had and then get paid to not have one anymore, while they have a right to have a gun.
A milkman knew where you lived, a plumber knows what your interiors looked like. You sacrifice your privacy for service.
Google is no different. You used their services in exchange for your information. It costs you nothing to not use these services.
The deal with google is their spying goes beyond any business relationship.
When you use their service, they know about you. When they filter our spam for you in Gmail, their software reads your emails. When you look up in Maps where you are, their service tracks where you are. By the way, you can delete your data and stop tracking anytime while continuing to use the service (something you could not do with your milkman or your plumber). They could always continue doing it behind your backs, but the milkman could also poison you. You have to trust them and take legal action if you catch them doing something that they are they aren't.
When advertisers want to use Google, they tell Google where they want their ads. For example, a dental clinic can tell Google something along the lines of "Show my ads in search engines to people in my area who are searching for 'affordable dentist'" and pay Google when people click the ads. The dental clinic never gets any user data from Google.