Hacker News Reader

Comment by max_hammer | Hacker News Reader

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Few years back you could easily root your android device and get custom ROM installed. Now, only solution is use a feature phone without gps and wifi and have a separate device for connecting to internet.

IPhone is also a good alternative but I don't agree with thier walled garden development philosophy.

Edit: You pay a separate fee for using Microsoft windows but for Android thier is no separate fee hence the product reference. Downvoting won't change the fact.

View on HN

> If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Full price TVs from eg. Samsung comes with ads and spyware nowadays. I would say the saying has stopped being accurate. Also, phones are paid for.

TVs are so cheap now because of ad subsidies. That 42” panel wouldn’t cost $199 if it weren’t for ads.

That'd be a good point if there were companies offering the full price model, but unless you want to buy a commercial panel and do a bunch of hoop jumping yourself, you literally cant buy a TV without adware in it.

It would be great if we, the customers, were actually given a genuine, competitive choice. As you say, right now you literally don’t have a genuine choice.

There is precedent for this too. Amazon Kindles came (come?) with two options - one with ads and one without. The latter cost something like $20 more. That was good!

Having said that, I bought the one without ads and they increasingly, with software updates, devoted greater and greater screen space to the Amazon ebook store. I consider that to be an ad too (and arguably worse because of anti-competitiveness reasons).

That's fine, maybe the trade off in increased price is worth it to some people.

Source? That sounds like bullshit.

Or it would be that cheap but ads and spyware just give them more money for free now.

Nonsense.

The same surveillance capitalism runs on a multi-thousand dollar OLED panel.

Then it would cost multi-thousand dollars + extra without the ads in order for the manufactures to maintain their thin margins.

> I would say the saying has stopped being accurate.

I wouldn't say so. The saying states that not paying implies being the product. Your example shows that being the product does not imply not paying. The two are independent and can be true at the same time.

You are still able to root android phones and install custom ROMs. Note that even then though, even if you don't have any gapps installed, it sends your approximate location to google by querying its AGPS services.

I didn't pay for the OS on my pinephone, but for some reason the vendors decide not to use that as an opportunity to create a mass surveilance campaign.

Eh? I certainly paid for my phone so I don't see the applicability of that soundbite here.

You paid for Google maps - weird

They paid for a phone advertised to include this service, so, in a way, yes, they did.

I'm afraid you don't understand the flow of money here at all.

Google or others pay to be the default app for maps / search etc on things like iPhone.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/google-...

Yes, I'm aware of that, but that's search on iOS, nothing to do with Google Maps, which I'd say is a much much much smaller problem on iOS compared to Android, and getting more and more irrelevant as Apple Maps gets better. There's is a very large number of Android phones though, many of which at least historically have been advertised to include these Google services. Hence the "in a way" – whether or not there is money flowing into Google Maps directly or indirectly from that purchase, buyers of such phones pay for a device with that service. If that service isn't there, I can return it in most jurisdictions. I'm sure a large part of such users would have the expectation of not being producticized by that service on a phone they paid for, and I doubt anyone cares how exactly Google shuffles money around to make that happen.

Almost no services are guaranteed on the phone you buy. They can and do change. And if a service does remain free - then you are the product.

In some ways, it sounds like you didn't pay enough, if the cost is subsidised by data collection and advertising.

Regardless of how much you pay, what is their incentive as a large organization not to get more money out of you, if they know they can get away with it?

Apple just charges a lot more upfront for their products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com