Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product
odysee.com
odysee.com
This is something that is endemic not just to ad-tech companies, but regular brick and mortar stores as well: it isn't enough to just be consuming, to actually be producing value for the business: they must monetize as many seconds of our attention as possible!
If I'm buying gas, I'm being served ads via the little screen. If I'm at the grocery store, there's ads plastered onto my cart. Buy something online? I get ads for unrelated products emailed to me in the weeks after, even if I didn't agree to be marketed to (I never do.)
It makes me feel like I'm going crazy, sometimes. And what's worse is it feels like there isn't an end in sight.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/oovnrj/only_in_miami...
The first time I saw that, my immediate reaction was to hit the screen. My second thought was to pour gas on it and light it on fire. I refuse to use any place that does this unless it is a last resort. It's not terribly common where I live (yet) but I assume it is becoming standard. It's enraging.
If that store goes under or decides to modernize, then I will effectively not have a choice to get fuel without ads.
It's really frustrating. I want to let competition and the market sort it out, but when there's no variation in the options there's no real competition.
The market will always conclude it can extract more money out of us if it shows us ads. It doesn't matter what we do. Paying for stuff just makes us even more valuable to advertisers.
Wish we could just ban this stuff straight up.
(Never tried that out and never will. Hand sanitizer has about 30 percent water and salt water will both short-circuit and corrode circuits.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/health/aduhelm-alzheimers...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw
i guess 81% is the end :P
The degree to which this seems to be the case has me convinced that the only way I will actually have any control of my data is if it's on a hard drive in my physical possession. And frankly I don't have time to maintain my own IT infrastructure.
I don't trust them because I know that they're reporting to their real bosses, who aren't me. If I could have a personal assistant that was completely local and under my control, I'd begin to get interested in them.
When I see that several emails I have not opened are already on my calendar, I am less happy about it.
Sure, for many folks this will be fine. But it seems an unnecessary denial of service attack vector that needs more engineering to protect than makes sense.
That said, I'd also assume that full emails are not sent to my device until I open them, unless I setup something.
Lots of tools and suites like Zimbra and Mdaemon that can self host mail just fine.
Outbound delivery can use a service as well.
Look for options and possibilities and they can be found. Look for reasons not to do something and those will be found too.
One example of not setting everyone from scratch..
IaaS/Paas: Install Proxmox from USB.. 10 minutes from boot to web interface to your own local linode/digital ocean. Redundancy, setup 2 and link them. Disaster recovery, put it off site. Backups, connect it to one of a few built in options.
Network/infrastructure: deploy docker images for VPN (algo), firewalls (pfsense), dns (pihole), proxy (traefik, etc). It can remain an appliance that can be configured to self update if needed.
Storage: make storage into an appliance that you set and forget with a nas.
Next spin up your services/packages. Things like turnkeylinux is a nice way to try out things.
There is a nice self hosting community on Reddit if you’re interested for folks who have setup homelabs.
If you don't like that o365 is scanning your emails for todos and potential calendar events but it would be a non-issue on your Mail-in-a-Box then you have a problem with MS not the scanning.
On Hackernews, they think it's "entitlement" to think that you can use free email
and search engines and expect not to be tracked. The main problem with this line
of thinking is that even if you had the option to pay for your email and for your
search engine, some G**gle executive somewhere would mention during a meeting that
they could add an extra $X million of revenue if they started using data from it
from targeted advertising.
It is quite different to say you have a right to no advertisements on free services, which is not what this is saying, and to say you have a right to expect not to have your every digital action surveilled and studied 24/7 for the purposes of advertisers getting free research subjects who often don't realize they're being used as research subjects, which is what this is saying.
That's part of the context, and pretty much goes in the direction of "I just don't want any advertising at all". I can sympathise, but we need to find a way to pay for services.
The real reason these service's need to extract data from their users isn't that they can't make money any other way, but that predatory pricing has been allowed to kill on the non free competition.
If we all install add blockers, content producers can't make money.
A few companies do this already.
There could also be a change in the advertising model, for instance, online newspapers could sell and host ads on their own servers based on the news content of the article instead of by targeting users with tracking cookies. If you're reading an article about a chef you may be interested in cookware, after all.
Well, that's Google's choice, and Google's problem. The fact that they made this choice does not negate my right not to be tracked.
Anyway, if free email providers were impossible without universal tracking (they existed before the web got extensive tracking, so you are wrong), they shouldn't exist. If you want emails for all, and it's not economical, you can always have your government to intervene.
And before anybody claims that it only restricts the government (it doesn't, it tasks the government into guaranteeing it), we have enough evidence that this kind of business model will be exploited to create an all encompassing gatekeeper for our society's communication, and at this point those companies are really paragovernamental entities, what no country should allow to exist.
In my opinion, Facebook is unequivocally harmful to society at large.
I don't think GMail is unequivocally harmful, although the fact that people can use gmail addresses that don't look like gmail addresses is a problem for those of us who really try to never send email to gmail addresses in order to keep our data out of Google's realm.
That's it!
I’m personally with you, by the way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the only valid position.
I'd feel like there's no universal God-given social contract that says they have a "right" to this, so I'd suggest we ban it anyways (just like they're free to suggest to allow it).
You could make the same argument, and I would still argue to ban automated data collection.
That's how we make laws: we choose our sides of the argument, and (if we're lucky to live in a functional democracy) vote for it, or vote others that promote the same ideas.
I would really like to know how many people are actually like this, if they knew the full, total picture. There will be a lot, that's sure, but maybe not the overwhelming majority of uninformed people we have now.
Surely there's some middle ground between no digital tracking of users and North Korea?
If I get a random email from a company with a tracking pixel, am I ‘doing business’ with them?
If a friend shares my name and number with an app, am I doing business with them?
If a friend posts a photo of me on a social media service I don’t use, do they send out a PI to track me down and let me know they’re going to be running facial recognition tech on the photo which could build an album of me?
This is more the Wild West than a free market.
That's like complaining that they are making you pay the balance when you didn't consent to paying off the charges you made.
When you get a credit card you agree to the credit card agreement. I just picked a random credit card agreement I found online (Chase Amazon Visa) and it says:
>We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate.
That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.
For emails, you can’t drop tracking inside that can follow you around, at best you can determine an email was opened (think certified mail, for an IRL analog)
If you don’t want your friends sharing your contact info that seems like a problem between you and your friends. Sharing contact info without direct consent is not a new problem in the internet age. That’s been happening forever.
Aside from growth consultants, importance of privacy will be lost on a large and critical subset of engineers. This is why a huge blame goes on academics who train wave upon wave of new engineers with pathetic levels of ethical training.
Theoretically true, but what happens when all sites engage in spying? We're nearly there right now.
You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do (outside of a small handful of exceptions, such as HN -- and even then, I have to actively put a lot of effort into defending myself).
But, this strikes me as being wrong on so many levels, starting with the fact that it seriously reduces the utility of the web and certain swaths of the internet.
Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed
As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.
My choices are to simply completely disregard a huge chunk of the market, like messengers, I would have to communicate with my family on the other side of the world through some app that my parents or older family members would not use, I would have to train them because the massive corporations bought out all the competition, so I either suffer a massive pain in the ass on every corner of my life or I have to surrender my data. Because I have no other choice: it's my data or death through a thousand cuts over my life due to all the inconveniences when these corps sprawl over more and more markets with their unlimited cash machine coming from the crops of data from all people they sell profiles about.
Either give me regulations to never allow monopolies to ever hint at appearing in a free market or give me regulations about how well my personal data, something that tells a lot about me as a living person, will be treated, marketed, etc. It's a resource being extracted from me, so why the fuck can the free market bleed me out if they are also going to inconvenience my life by taking more and more market share?
The free market is an illusion, it's just an ideology. Not too dissimilar from believing in real communism.
It certainly makes sense in a space that is one - if you don't want to be tracked by e.g. an online newspaper, there are certainly plenty of alternative offerings on the market. But what if Comcast wanted to track you? Depending on where you live you may not have the choice not to do business with them, which means your desire not to be tracked gets steamrolled by your only available option - you're forced to accept tracking or be denied access to the internet.
Said free market tends to create weird customs that are not necessarily good for the most of us.
Someone once said radiation has healing properties and last radioactive items for healing appeared, oh well, on Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0
and before that, there's a museum of the same stuff
https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/radioa...
Note that I am not saying the regulator can not or will not abuse their rights. This is a big issue and I'm not competent enough to say where I'm leaning there.
I only disagree with "free market will lead to the best solution by itself".
> right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking
I don't get how looking at this as rights and intent does any good.
- Getting legalistic about intent immediately makes for more arguing.
- Asking for a right to know about someone's "intent to block" is... odd, and seems to set the stage for all sorts of messy shenanigans. How is that supposed to work, exactly? If you want to go this way, contracts seem so much more straightforward.
- If you're concerned with a "free market", trying to layer on all sorts of external rules about 'rights to know' just doesn't work. Asymmetric information is the nature of the market, and here we are, right now. If you want "freedom" in that sense of the word, be happy, you've arrived.
- users should know of they are going to be tracked (part of the value exchange)
- companies should know if ads/tracking are going to be blocked (part of the value exchange)
Both parties should then be able to decide how to proceed accordingly.
Who is responsible for telling users they are going to be tracked? Further more, whose responsibility is it to ensure the user understands the implications of that tracking? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that tracking is not abused?
Secondly, who is responsible for telling companies that their ads/tracking are going to be blocked? The user? If so, why? I don’t care one bit about the business model of the websites I visit. As a user, my attention has been manipulated for years, my behavioral data has been harvested, resold, abused… to be totally blunt, I don’t trust a single one of you any further than I can throw you. If you go under, I’ll find something else that meets my needs. I’ve already had to do that dozens of times in my life because it’s not like companies have any commitment to me as a customer in the first place. I’m just a big ol’ bag of potential sales determined through my data.
You’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical of these simplified terms, wherein you appear to propose me and giant mega corporations, who I can’t see, can’t sue, and don’t even know I’m doing business with, are on a level playing field. The information asymmetry is and lack of equal recourse are a bit hard to overcome in your simplified world.
As a notion user I’m now concerned with the data that application is harvesting from me, given the stance on privacy you gave here.
You're just repeating that you think some things "should" be the case. If they were, how would that work, how could it go wrong, what are the costs and benefits relative to other ways of achieving the same goals?
Policy is more than random assertions that feel right.
And indeed, I pay Google for gmail because some years I somehow slipped out of the free tier and had to start paying. At the same time, my email is unequivocally used by Google for tracking. I'm paying, and I'm still the product.
You can't pay for GMail unless you're part of Workspaces (GSuite). Am I still the product in GSuite? Well I don't get ads so... maybe not?
I have no idea whether I get ads or not, because I have both uBlock origin installed, and a massive /etc/hosts file that blocks just about anything ad-related.
But I've seen clear evidence when I visit sites that manage to do self-hosted targetted "presentations" that they are getting data from Google, and given that I have no cell phone, I'm fairly sure one important source for that is my gmail account.
You’re not paying for gmail, you’re paying for removing ads in gmail, so you can still be analyzed and tracked, etc.
It’s just semantics and creative structuring.
If they have to be legislated into not spying on the users then it just proves the article’s point.
I'd guess Gmail etc. involve lawyers in marketing, so the focus shifts from "what is valuable enough to have a market" to "what is legal enough to get away with it".
Get email from providers who care about the same things that you do. I've been using Migadu happily for over a year now.
Yes, but you're not the only one who is the product. Everyone who sends email to you is as well.
I don't need to use any of Googles services to be tracked by Google, although Facebook is probably the largest offender here.
In social networks, friends of mine have shared my contact information without me even knowing it. So other people might pay with your data.
And I believe the text is correct. You would pay and be tracked. Companies found out that the mass of users is pretty uncritical and if they are allowed to do it, they will do it.
Also, websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking. A simple policy change and you blow a lot of mostly useless ad company out of the water.
I think that would be good.
This is demonstrably untrue, as demonstrated by the fact that there were tons of useful free sites before advertising was even realistically possible, and there are still quite a lot of useful free sites now.
Also, I take issue with calling ad-supported things "free". They aren't free at all -- you're just paying with a different form of currency.
> websites could be financed through advertising that doesn't rely on tracking.
This would remove roughly 95% of my problems with the modern web and online services.
Now, on top of creators that drive Facebook's most interesting content while contributing their music, stories, and videos etc. (for no profit) Creators have to pay to run promo ads for visibility even among people who previously followed them for updates, while Facebook collects the profit from all that work.
The model was broken by greed, not by a desire to connect people better nor to do good.
Okay, even if it is "entitled" to expect something for nothing, it's dishonest not to be clear and upfront about the costs. In fact, if you think the entitlement is misplaced then it's really a failure of the service providers in educating the users rather than a failure of the users themselves.
If you don't agree, it would suggest that you think the average user should be able to read the world the way you do and understand the subtext of "free" services without having to spell it out. Would you be suggesting then that it's okay to take advantage of people who don't understand this the way you do?
The business model might be clear enough, but the cost and consequences are not.
Like open source software?
What you’re talking about is not entitlement, it is directed transactionality; “if I am using a service by x, I need to be the one personally compensating x”.
X could as well receive some form of compensation from elsewhere. Open source developers can be receiving satisfaction, recognition, even financial compensation without the end user. In fact that’s how charity, in its original sense of a virtue, works.
There is no inherent entitlement in assuming non-reciprocal charity. That’s a behavior baked in to humanity. I’d say expecting transactionality everywhere is the truncated, cynical view of human activity.
Given how poorly people often treat maintainers, I think "entitlement" is precisely the correct word.
Your point about charity is well-made. Though it may perhaps strain credulity to expect email services on a truly massive scale to be offered as non-reciprocal charity.
Or anything that requires any sort of non-trivial capital to do. Video hosting/streaming (eg. YouTube), social media, news reporting, etc. I'm guessing the person you're replying to doesn't do their full time job for free and just accepts donations from their employers, either.
Eh, this is a false dichotomy of one can either be charitable or transactional in the entirety of the interactions in their lives.
In other words, your guess happens to be correct (gainful employment is not a mathematical rarity after all) but still provides no counterargument.
OPs claim was expecting anything with value without transacting something back was entitlement. My counterargument was that there exists charity and non-transactionality in many contexts.
The condition of anything requiring non-trivial capital is also wrong. We often pool tax money to render capital and services for things we don’t have direct, personal use of. And I am not saying this is necessarily charity, after all it is an obligation, but most folks don’t go after the particular line items of how their money is spent.
And you can vote with your wallet. Once the user is being charged, the choice becomes not “should I pay?” but “whom should I pay?”. If we imagine some evil exec deciding to sell user data, once that inevitably leaks it is much easier for the users to decide to switch to another search/email provider (which would have much easier time surviving, not having to compete with free). And losing users means losing advertising appeal, so both streams of revenue would be lost simultaneously.
If I could pay Google $30 a month to use Google services without having to send any unescessary tracking info back to their servers AND I was still complaining you might have a point.
"Pay $5/month to google or $10/month for google & fb and they will not track you on signed in browsers & devices" would be a hell of a temptation to buy.
Suppose an old couple had some gold stored in the backyard. I offer to cut their lawn for free. They gladly accept. In return, I grab eight ounces of gold after every mow.
Their son finds out what I've been doing and calls the cops. Would I be able to get away with this by claiming it's entitlement to expect me to cut someone else's lawn for free? Or would I be told that my fee needs to be based on an agreement by both parties and then sent to jail?
And that's well understood, and it was supposed to be advertising.
Which can be orthogonal to tracking, privacy violations, selling your data, and so on.
Giving and receiving freely, without expecting anything in return, is built into human nature from before we were even human, and is still practiced everyday by many.
To give something away with strings attached, and then act entitled to those strings, THAT is entitlement.
IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.
I have internet at home through Spectrum, who offers email service. I don't use it, though, because the experience of ISP email, from my memory, was not good. Syncing up new devices with IMAP always took an annoyingly long time and my client would occasionally seem to forget that it had already got the headers for a message. The webmail was also shit. And then the SPAM filtering in Gmail at the time was miles better.
Perhaps things have improved since (this was 15 years ago, so I'd certainly hope so), but what you're remembering here as "the good old days" are etched in my mind as not being so good.
Perhaps it is a mistake to attribute improvements in syncing solely to the existence of a gigantic webmail service run by an online ad services company. There have been vast improvements in computers and networks since then.
What was arguably "good" about the "old days" was a relative absence of third party middlemen trying to make money from online advertising, and investing in surveillance as a "business model".
As for spam filtering, I agree. However I do not think "webmail" hosted by a third party is the final solution to the problems with email. The original SMTP-to-SMTP design used on a LAN overlay performs very well and attracts no spam, for example.
Well maybe, if this whole sorry ediface wasn't built on top of free software.
If you're not running the software, but instead using an API to the server where I'm running it, then of course you're not in control; you're trusting my word I'm actually running the software!
Many of the free software success stories involve a bunch of compeitors trying to dethrone a monopolist. Since the other conpanies are already excluded from being the king, they work together to avoid veing totally crushed. Regulation could encourage this too.
I would rather be the product and get a great user experience than a shitty user experience that sells itself based on some ideal that probably will not work economically in the long run. If a decentralized network you invested a lot of your life in becomes irrelevant, it’s worse than using a centralized network that actually stays around. And most “decentralized” networks have failed to show enough traction for me to feel secure about their future.
I am often using LBRY on an ADSL modem and it's fast with all the network issue I see elsewhere.
UPD: nevermind, Odysee frontend seems to crash, but LBRY app itself works immediately with this article.
Well that depends on how many sheep we get. People don't care about principles until they are the ones being deplatformed, and abused. I sincerely hope that eventually you will figure out that the only way to have good things in a capitalistic society is to have competition. Odysee is that. Considering it has some high-profile you tubers switching over, I'd say it has potential to make Youtube irrelevant: it makes just as much money, and a decentralised system, means there isn't a single entity to bring it all down.
There have been plenty of studies and I've even done my own studies. Most people don't read prompts. Most people don't even register consciously that a prompt even appeared. They have gotten so used to clicking through prompts that they have become blind to them.
Prompts are the wrong way to do almost anything, unless the user is expecting the prompt to appear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
The advertising industry has probably some counter measures.
That means that if I need to jot down a quick note and some designer has decided that I should be forced to go through a set of prompts about how to use the interface then I have to close them without reading them so that I can still remember what it was I should write down.
The same thing happens pretty much with all other prompts, though to a lesser extend. If you feel like adding a prompt to the software, make sure I can minimize it, do my work and then come back.
In practice, the fact that you are paying for a service makes you much more attractive to advertisers because it says you’re willing to spend money online.
If you believe you are a stakeholder by paying you should believe you are a stakeholder because they make money from you through ads.
You are not a stakeholder in either case.
The problem nowadays is that tracking and ads are pretty much a mutual thing today. And the worst about it is, to this day I still have to find an ad which seems relevant to me…
https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/tracking-technolo...
What does it say about our society that this is now an *old* adage?
Someone yesterday commented here that this is the most repeated quote on HN:
> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
Everything we as a society today see as categorically wrong and repugnant was at one time in the not far past actively and passively accepted by the mainstream, with nearly everyone looking the other way and going with the flow. Yet even back then our societal conscience knew the very inconvenient truth. Those who repeatedly tried to wake society's conscience, to unbury the truth were invariably branded as radicals or crazies, doomed to be modern day Cassandras.
A lot of this tracking nonsense is enabled by services which rely on server side processing.
For example somewhere lower down someone mentioned an AI assitant to extract todos from your emails.
This might not be so bad if the AI was running on your machine. But of course it’s always running on some cloud server.
For another example, any of those Alexa like devices have to analyse your voice input serverside. If it could do text to speech with local processing then it would be possible to make the device much more respectful of your privacy.
If you want total contol over your data, you have to use programs that can be used totally offline.
Regrettably everything is subscription now. Hold on to your perpetually licenced software if you still have any!
In conclusion, the general public's privacy is only important to the general public. The other entities are struggling for the opposite of privacy, and this is why I think we're seeing such an invasion on privacy.
If you are paying, you're the rube who's dumb enough to actually pay for stuff. :-P
I can't comment on their opinions because all i get is a pretty loading animation...
Their content is good sure but they sure are milking that on all fronts
Also, while I understand the general aversion to tracking. If one believes that any advertiser cares about tracking their behavior individualy - rather than in aggregate - they are suffering from delusions of grandeur.
Maybe advertisers themselves don't care about tracking people individually, but the advertising industry builds & funds a tracking infrastructure that can be (and sometimes is) co-opted into tracking people by other nefarious actors, whether private or state-sponsored.
Perhaps they should have.
- Ads create desire, which is then possibly sated by a purchase. The net increase in happiness is negative. - Brand advertising is clearly a zero sum game which creates no value - Even if ads can create value, it doesn't make up for the bad things about them
Well, it could, but what if it showed the opposite?
I agree that tracking is oversellign itself, and sadly, the monopolization of ads has led to more and more, and worse ads being shown on websites. I do however want the sites i visit to make money, through advertising if possible. It's the most direct and easy way, since we are not yet allowed to have direct peer-to-peer payments on the web without 17 rent-seeking middlemen eating them up. As much as advertisers are to blame for pushing tracking vs other advertising channels, the payment gatekeepers are worse
Being expensive is, usually, a necessary criterion for being "good", whether that means "privacy-friendly" or "durable", but it's not sufficient. Being cheap IS a sufficient criterion for being cheap.
If you can prove your expensive, but good product actually lives up to the claim, I might buy it. Ironically, it's an advertising problem.
Maybe the price would be stupidly high. Maybe 99.9% of people wouldn't pay. But at least the option would exist.
We could even require providers to link the price to the advertising etc revenue missed.
Businesses make money in all sorts of ways. Most big companies blend these together. NYTimes charges users AND sells ads. Enterprise SaaS sells licenses AND charges for installation and configuration services. App store widgets charge for download AND sell aggregate data.
Brand gets undersold in a lot of tech/startup communities, because those communities are frequently organized around doing new things, which necessarily don't have brands. But the answer to a lot of these problems IS brands, because brands are a proxy for trust.
At some point, if you want a service, you have to decide which company you trust the most to deliver it without misleading you or doing things you disagree with. Most businesses run without constant lawsuits keeping them in line, because trust and word of mouth and reputation matters.
If you can't trust anybody, then don't use computers, I guess. But the world is shades of gray, and I do think it's worthwhile to figure out which companies you do trust.
I have yet to see a for-profit business that I "trust" in a widespread sort of way, although small mom-and-pop ones can come close.
The problem is that companies tend to have a strong desire to make as much money as possible by any means that they think they can get away with. That makes anything like actual trust impossible.
Presumably a slip on the part of the author, rather than facetious. Regardless extremely unfortunate.
Silly author.
Yes a paid service or application can still track you, but without payment companies don't even have the option of respecting privacy. Without payment the only possible financial model for software and services is surveillance capitalism or ads, with the latter usually leading directly to the former.
milkman: "Hey, you guys happy with the milk?"
customer: "Yeah!"
milkman: "Great!"