I also applaud this and personally would prefer to just pay for services instead of being the product, but I'm afraid this is not a popular opinion. People don't want to pay, at least not knowingly. I'm curious how this will play out.
That cliché is no longer applicable (was it ever?) and repeating it only helps the worst infringers.
You can pay and still be the product. Consider the streaming services which charge you but still serve ads, or physical appliances that you buy but send your usage habits to the manufacturer (like TVs). Paying is not a guarantee that a company will treat you or your privacy with respect.
Consider that paying makes you prime rib for Sunday dinner from a data perspective: card verified PII.
And do not forget that you can be assigned an ID and disassociated from your data, which can then be tracked anonymously completely legally as a non-personally identifiable account. And let me assure you de-anonymizing a collected dataset is often not a very difficult problem in the modern data brokerage filled era.
We cannot pay out way out of this. We need rights to privacy and deletion enshrined in constitutional-style law, and soon. It must become a fundamental human right.
Now it makes sense - they meant wary / leery.
Indeed. A mistyped phrase missed by both my sleep addled self and my annoying spell checker.
Rather than be defenseive (fore I gaudere gehrehte), let’s reflect on this moment to enjoy the fact that “we have over two thousand years of records of old people claiming that language has already peaked.”
Nothing in life is a guarantee. It’s pure pedantry to hear someone say “I would rather pay than be the product” and to choose to interpret that as “I believe that paying always guarantees that the company will never also use indirect monetization”.
Preferring business with direct monetization models is risk mitigation, not a naive (and incorrect) belief in a magic bullet solution to a complex problem.
I say that where money can be made, money will be made. But we have laws and regulations, and when the Metas of this world play dirty, you can stick it to them. (in most cases it will be too little - too late)(but the solution is not to roll over)
I pay for the ad-free experience on every service that offers it, and I still see ads. The 4 second hulu splash screen at the start of EVERY item I stream is still an ad. HBO, sorry MAX, showing 30s ads for other shows EVERY. TIME. I stream something, still an ad. At least those I can skip, but I shouldn't have to.
There was no real purpose to my post, I just needed to vent about that part your point.
That’s fairly recent. It was (and is) normal to pay for having a phone number. Paying more for making a phone call was normal, too, as was paying for such services as a phone line that told you the current time or a weather prediction.
It was also normal to pay for having an email address, and most people, to this day, pay for having internet connectivity.
I think it’s more that people object to moving from ‘free’ to paid. If most people pay for a service, they’ll accept that as the way it is.
For example, I think people would happily pay $1 of more a month for GPS, if it never hadn’t been free.
No, it's not. In the early days, everything on the internet was free. Before 1996, commercial activity on the internet was forbidden.
AFAIK the first commercial ISP dates to around '89.
But I don't think the fact the internet once had restrictions on commercial activity really makes much difference to the argument above other than in the details, given the argument was broader than about the net.
So I read the argument above as being about internet services; not hardware or connectivity, that would make it hard to understand.
The cost of running most social media is only about a $1/year (yes year not month) [1]. Social media companies when they want to charge $50-100/year. People are not stupid. Why would they pay more than $2/year.
This worship of the Market Strategy was bad enough before when there wasn’t much talk of actual laws defining how much of a “product” they can make their users. But now there are! And this submission is about unlawful practices. And we’re still going to frame this as Meta just being effectively forced by the horrible consumers who refuse to “pay for services”? Ridiculous.
And I haven’t even really gotten into how much of a fallacy the specific belief is that if you just “pay for services” then you won’t become a “product”. But thankfully there are a lot of other reasonable posters on this forum about tech company profit-maximization.
[1] The Company’s perspective is the prime one. The Company doing shady stuff is merely because the consumer’s are stingy or difficult in some way. If the consumers are inconvenienced by the Company then that is just because the Company had to adopt a market strategy which is not as wholesome as the one they could have used if the consumers were better in some way.
[2] And do we have to retread the hopelessness of making a social network where you have to pay to use it when no one else is using it (at the start)? That’s a complete dead-end.
For example, I considered paying but I have a semi-inactice Facebook account which isn't worth that to me. I'm also not convinced of Facebook's integrity to honor the deal and not process the data anyway.
Through it should be noted that GDPR requires no tracking but not no ads, and companies try to lump that together to pretend there is no reasonable solution.
E.g. a lot of newspapers use approaches similar to Meta (and similar not lawful) i.e. either you get tracked and ads or you pay and get neither ads or tracking. But this is illegal as opting out is noticeable more complex then opting in (account creation requirement is already illegal, money requirement more so). What would be legal would be a choice between "ad(personalized with tracking)" or "ad(no tracking)" and "no ad but account + cost money". You also still can choose ads based on the article/site content etc. (Also another problem with account requirement for no adds is that it often deceptively sneaks in the permission to track when creating the account making it de-facto no option to not be spied on!)
Another problem is that it can be easily too expensive for many people (not just very poor ones). Especially if like currently there are no "supper cheap but also very limited accounts".
I mean consider YT Premium Lite is 5.99€, no ads but you still get tracked. Twitch has no Lite version (and some non YT-lite premium features are actually for free) cost 11.99 (YT non lite is 12.99). Most news papers and similar are between 3€ and 8€ or so, commonly 5€. Of most of them I only read ~1 article per moth or so, often less and often not even the whole article sometimes I just look for a link to the original source and often I realize I just got click baited and bail out. Like you could easily end up 80+€ a month that's just ... to much for many.
And in pretty much all case paying means no ads but not no tracking/selling your information, at best a bit less tracking.
The answer to advertisers and suveillance capitalists is technological blocking of their monetization attempts while simultaneously leeching their "free" services. You want the value they extract from you to be zero or negative. It should cost them money until they cease and desist.
They should charge a fair price for their product and deliver something good to customers.
No one is forcing Facebook to not charge for their service. They just can’t do it without slurping your data. If they can’t have a business without invading people’s privacy, they shouldn’t have a business. It is baffling that people still shill these practices from big corporations. It’s like saying “I can’t make money without robbing you, so it should be legal for me to rob you”.
> the only result that will satisfy organisations like noyb is that companies like Facebook disappear from the EU.
This is absolutely not true and frankly reads like an argument in bad faith. noyb’s position is clear: don’t invade people’s privacy.
> This is illegal, as the GDPR clearly states that withdrawing your consent must be “as easy as” giving it.
The whole point of the article and this discussion is precisely that you can’t make privacy protections a separate “feature”.
NOYB is perfectly fine with companies making money by placing ads (as long as they preserve your privacy).
All I want is for the true costs of using a product to be understood. Businesses can and should make money! But it’s wrong to present a product as “free” when it is not. It’s no different than having a fine print click license granting Facebook permission to come take stuff from your garage.
Yes, businesses cost money to run. No, that does not mean that all business models must be permitted regardless of consumer and social harm.
There is no fundamental right to a profitable businesses; if a business cannot be profitable within the bounds we choose to set, oh well.
(And I say this as a huge EU policy skeptic that thinks they are way over-regulating)
Edit: You can still charge for your services. Literally nothing in the EU prevents you from charging for your services.