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Comment by neodymiumphish | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that data collection still wouldn't stop just cause you're paying.

The trackers they build into sites would still exist to track non-paying customers, and they'd have to track the paying customers enough to differentiate from non-paying.

And if you're saying that all of Facebook becomes a subscription, you still end up with the problem that Facebook has pointed out: small sites that earn income from Facebook by implementing their tracking widget would lose that source of income.

I think we should be more vocal about the extensions and products that help block FB (and other) web trackers, to force their model to change, but I think we're a long way away from anything truly effective.

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> The problem is that data collection still wouldn't stop just cause you're paying.

Completely agree! There's cannot be any grey area here. It must be all ad-based or all-subscription. But the move seems impossible

The way FB tracks non-users is one of the parts that bothers me the most. One old article I read talked about a "shadow profile" that would track you across sites, ready and waiting for the day you signed up. That way they would have profile data on you from before you ever consented.

I don't empathise at all with "small sites" that track me or benefit from someone else tracking me.

Nor do I, but it's worth noting that these sites would go out of business or have their revenue severely impacted or force their customer base to offset the financial losses in order to stay afloat.

If you don't browse sites that do this tracking, then you shouldn't care either way about this whole FB/Apple controversy/dispute.

If you do browse these sites, get ready for the potential of a major shift in those sites' business model.

The major shift is exactly the right development

What? Just track the customers that don’t pay. Don’t do anything with paying customers. Where is the problem? This sounds like a false defence.

"Pay up or we'll spy on you" seems like it would have bad optics.

Also, they can't sell privacy, just that they won't track using their network. If your information is being taken by multiple parties and they are all pouring it into the same data soup, the value of paying any particular spy off seems pretty limited. Apple can try to sell privacy, because they are in the position to fight all the spies simultaneously (we'll see how effective it is, seems like a really hard task but it is a good sign that they've got Facebook worried).

AlsoAlso it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.

> Also it is possible that the value of tracking is non-linearly related to the number of people you are tracking (if three people are somehow similar I might be able to apply some insight gleaned from one to the other two). So, they might fundamentally want quite a bit more than any reasonable person would be willing to pay for their service, to stop tracking.

Not my problem. Price it in and be transparent about how they are using data.

"Not my problem" is a funny expression, because there's an implied "to solve" at the end there. Yes, it is your problem to solve. But you do have a problem if you want a transparent and reasonably priced social media service: nobody in the market is willing to sell that, because doing it the shady way instead is more profitable. You've just got an unsolvable problem.

Sounds like Apple is offering a solution.

Which means you have to track the people enough to determine that they pay...

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