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Comment by yborg | Hacker News Reader

That will do nothing. They will take the sub revenue and keep the current privacy monetization too. The only way to stop it is legislation.

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Exactly. This blog clearly showed that tracking remained even after switching to a paid plan. These companies have tasted the forbidden fruit of surveillance capitalism and they won't roll back voluntarily.

The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.

I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.

There's an excellent example in this very thread on how politics (i.e. democracy) can trump capital.

Read here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131

More on this:

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt...

> The market-based approach wouldn't have these companies rolling back their surveillance, but consumers en masse moving over to paid, privacy-focused alternatives.

I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.

"What has happened is all that could happen" is surely not the best line of argument you have?

If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS.

If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive.

The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.

> If a service is paid while allowing itself to engage in data mining and monetisation, it will lose most of its paying users

Will it lose some users? Sure. Most? No.

You can buy a tv costing 4 digits that happily will harvest data and show you ads.

First, could you name this TV set so that others don’t make the same mistake? TV prices decreased a lot over past years (50 inch 4K units go for below $500 I think), in fact I suspect that the hardware is sponsored by ad revenue in some cases.

Second, context matters. Buying a TV is different from setting up a commenting system for your site. In one case you want to consume, in the other to be a service provider (you have a website, possibly generate profit from it, probably know what JavaScript is). Moreover, you are unlikely to be able to make your own TV, but you are much more likely to be able to set up your own commenting system if you can’t find a company to handle that responsibly.

>it will lose most of its paying users to a more ethical competitor as soon as someone bothers to read the ToS

So never? People don't read the ToS and certainly don't judge services by it. It seems people have come to accept surveillance capitalism as a fact of life

And where do they get this information from.. only a few news sites pick stuff like this up. Do the relevant users have this news site open at the correct hour to catch it? Likely not.

Most news is not actionable for the person reading it, except for popular apps where there are most users. The information needs to get to the right people at the right time to be actionable.

People do and people do. The first person to jump on this will get thousands of retweets in publicity as others pile on to get justice.

Of course, there’s no “justice” to speak of if you get stuff for free, so paid social is where it’s at. Paying customer to service provider relationship is radically different from one of a product-to-dealer.

Normalising free service is exactly what incumbent de-facto monopolies want, it empowers them and destroys any potential for competition. They hate paying users because that’d mean actual responsibility and people voting with their money.

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