Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product(odysee.com)

192 pointsby deworms5 tahun yang lalu210 comments

Even if you’re paying, you’re still the product

https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre-still-the-product:7

220 comments

poidos5 tahun yang lalu

It gets grosser by the day.

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.

SyzygistSix5 tahun yang lalu

>If I'm buying gas, I'm being served ads via the little screen.

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.

mtnygard5 tahun yang lalu

In my area, I have one option for fuel without ads. That's a place that has old analog pumps that still ding when the gallon dial rolls over. Obviously there's no pay at the pump.

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.

matheusmoreira5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

SyzygistSix5 tahun yang lalu

Sao Paulo banned billboards and large signage throughout the city. I'm not sure if it would be a first amendment issue but it doesn't seem much different than banning billboards, which some states/cities do. Like addressing noise pollution, it's just part of not having a polluted environment.

matheusmoreira5 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, I've read about that. Really awesome move from São Paulo. In my city people are placing ads everywhere. About three huge billboards on every major street, electronic billboards brighter than the sun, ads near sidewalks and traffic lights, ads on street signs, ads anywhere and everywhere they can possibly get away with. I'd rather look at graffiti than this garbage...

whoaisme5 tahun yang lalu

Just because competition and the "market" don't think much of your preference doesn't mean it doesn't exist lol. What a self centered view! Also it seems to me when there are no variations in the options that's when it gets the most competitive. Commodity markets are the most competitive in the world. Jesus.

_nalply5 tahun yang lalu

You could put a pinch of salt into your bottle with hand sanitizer and wait for about a day till the salt is dissolved. Then when disinfecting your hands, pour a little bit into any opening you see near the screen.

(Never tried that out and never will. Hand sanitizer has about 30 percent water and salt water will both short-circuit and corrode circuits.)

jareklupinski5 tahun yang lalu

"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field before inducing seizures."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw

i guess 81% is the end :P

SCNP5 tahun yang lalu

Small band-aid on the repressive overall issue. You can usually push the second button down on the right-hand side to mute the mini-TV once the ads start playing. Not sure if you knew this already but I like to get the word out. And, maybe if they track how many times that button gets pressed they'll take a hint but I doubt it.

pavon5 tahun yang lalu

Every time I have been to a gas station that does this, the mute button is broken, presumably from so many people violently jamming it to make it stop.

poidos5 tahun yang lalu

I didn't know that, thank you! This will be a big relief.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

hanniabu5 tahun yang lalu

What's worse is I feel like I can't trust anything I hear because I'm just trying to get sold something. Look at the FDA and it's recent extremely controversial approvals. If you can trust regulating boards anymore meant to keep you safe then there's nothing you can trust.

lotsofpulp5 tahun yang lalu

There is no perfect. Tossing away all the trust is also unnecessary. There will always be corruption and mistakes, but as long as there is transparency and correction, it is still a pretty good situation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/health/aduhelm-alzheimers...

personlurking5 tahun yang lalu

And now we can add getting ads while at the beach

https://www.reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/oovnrj/only_in_miami...

poidos5 tahun yang lalu

It's disgusting! And it's not just the fucking boats, but planes overhead, constantly! (I've lived in M my whole life)

npteljes5 tahun yang lalu

This YouTube video "HYPER-REALITY" perfectly illustrates this, for the augmented reality era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

corpdrone20215 tahun yang lalu

I realized this when Microsoft started reading the emails and attachments in my office 365 account, and having Cortana "helpfully" suggest various to-do items from them.

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.

neither_color5 tahun yang lalu

I was mortified by Cortana auto-extracting todos from private emails but my father in his late 50’s said it was neat and very useful for him. So it goes.

merrywhether5 tahun yang lalu

Long term this is definitely something I want from my personal AI assistant, filtering out all kinds of annoyance/tedium from my life, so I totally understand how your father could like it. The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.

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.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

I have always found it pretty helpful when Gmail would add reminders and calendar events by scanning emails so I can see it.

taeric5 tahun yang lalu

When it is locally done, I find it hard to see what isn't too like. That is, if I open an email and it asks if I want to make a reminder or add it to my calendar, that is cool.

When I see that several emails I have not opened are already on my calendar, I am less happy about it.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

I don’t really see what’s different, honestly. They’re moving it from one system they control to another, big deal. Plus who says I even saw the original e-mail?

taeric5 tahun yang lalu

If they have given a side channel to impact my calendar, that will cause issues.

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.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

I would guess in the many years they've had this they've had to iron out some issues, but allowing you to receive e-mail at all is a denial of service attack vector.

taeric5 tahun yang lalu

True. But it is only a denial of your email service. Allowing it to leak over to other services is not good.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

You could think of them as different facets of the same service, like Exchange.

marcellus235 tahun yang lalu

That can still be done locally, no? You don't have to open an email for the phone to retrieve its contents.

taeric5 tahun yang lalu

I meant locally to be in my sight.

That said, I'd also assume that full emails are not sent to my device until I open them, unless I setup something.

starky5 tahun yang lalu

It irritates me to no end how Microsoft keeps updating their programs to make them be "helpful". I literally NEVER want their suggestions, I just want their programs to get out of my fucking way so I can do my work.

blooalien5 tahun yang lalu

One of a thousand Microsoft "papercuts" that drove me to Linux. Admittedly it ain't Windows, but that's pretty much the point. After enough years of daily little Windows annoyances built up, the fact that Linux was not Windows was worth the learning curve to me.

j455 tahun yang lalu

The reality has changed a lot about self hosting. Looking into it might surprise you.

hundreddaysoff5 tahun yang lalu

You're saying self-hosting is easier now than in the past?

j455 tahun yang lalu

Having done self hosting and and coming back to it after a 10 year break.. much easier.

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.

nisegami5 tahun yang lalu

With the exception of outbound mail, I absolutely think it is.

folkrav5 tahun yang lalu

Self hosting e-mail? With the trust issues you get with small mail servers these days, I've got better things to do than worry if that job application ever reached their inbox.

j455 tahun yang lalu

There’s more pragmatic ways to self host, other than configuring everything from scratch.. including email.

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.

Spivak5 tahun yang lalu

I feel like the rule for these kinds of features goes like this: if it would be fine and useful for a self-hosted version of the app to do something then it's fine if a cloud-hosted version to do it as well.

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.

SCNP5 tahun yang lalu

Precisely this. I think this is why these discussions always blow up. A lot of commenters talking past each other about the tech that is pretty awesome. I've loved the idea of a personal assistant since I saw the movie Cherry 2000. However, I don't want MS or Google in charge of it. I'm in the process of setting up home automation and I'd like to eventually get to some AI driven processes but it needs to stay in my house. It makes me sad that the tech exists but I can't trust it's purveyors. I'm gonna have to figure it out myself.

pdpi5 tahun yang lalu

The next to last paragraph bothers me:

    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.

Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn't cash, it has to be something else. If you're paying cash for the service, though, you're well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.

nonameiguess5 tahun yang lalu

That doesn't seem like a fair representation. The quote there isn't saying you should expect totally free services. It's saying you have the right to expect not to be tracked. Advertising up until 20 years ago relied entirely upon context and behavioral and engagement studies were conducted on an opt-in basis on Nielsen families and focus groups composed either of volunteers or people being compensated for participating in market research.

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.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

You do not, and should not, have a right not to be tracked. You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result. Similarly, they should have the right to know if you are going to block/evade tracking and be able to decide if they still want to do business with you as a result. This is how a free market works.

scrose5 tahun yang lalu

How does this work if you’ve never done business with the company or ever intend to?

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.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

For “random websites” there are laws around cookie approvals.

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.

paulryanrogers5 tahun yang lalu

Equifax is a great example of a service which you don't do business with and get opted into without consent.

astura5 tahun yang lalu

>without consent

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.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

Equifax and the like collects massive amounts of data about people whether or not they have a credit card. There is no way to stop that without completely withdrawing from society.

That right there, in my opinion, is beyond wrong.

pessimizer5 tahun yang lalu

I've never had a credit card in my life, but I do have a credit rating.

mehlmao5 tahun yang lalu

Oh hey, the "growth consultant" thinks we shouldn't have privacy. It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

DSingularity5 tahun yang lalu

Hard to get a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it.

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.

clevergadget5 tahun yang lalu

this is true in a non malicious way and has basically gone berserk in the realm of complicity

AlexB1385 tahun yang lalu

This is an ad hominem. He's making a fair point, attacking him personally doesn't improve the conversation.

darkwater5 tahun yang lalu

It is an ad hominem, I agree, but the opinion stated by GP is clearly dictated by their past career and experience. Actually seeing the ad-hominem made me check the GP profile.

AlexB1385 tahun yang lalu

Sure, pointing out a bias is fair, but it needs to be followed with an actual refutation of the idea presented. Just saying "you're wrong because of who you are" doesn't add much.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

Better than being a self-important navel-gazing privacy nerd.

piva005 tahun yang lalu

And there you went, down to the same stupidity level.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> You should have a right to know if a given company wants to track you, and to decide if you want to still do business with them as a result.

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.

Aboh335 tahun yang lalu

'...You could argue that I still have the choice to avoid using online services entirely. Which is what I do...'

Same here. Outside of HN, very few sites I will actually visit making use of outline dot com or internet archive when needed

ashtonkem5 tahun yang lalu

Disagree strongly. You’re ignoring the disproportionate power that tracking companies have compared to citizens. Is it really a free market if every single website you visit has the same tracking code built in?

As is always the case, rights are there to protect the weak from the powerful.

piva005 tahun yang lalu

Sure, now let me know how that works when you have massive corporations, controlling products that you can't really move completely away from because there is simply no competition, or they also serve (and get revenue from) part of the competition?

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.

letitbeirie5 tahun yang lalu

Sure, but then that opens up a lot of questions about "is this actually a free market?"

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.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

That is a reasonable concern. Perhaps utilities, or other oligopolies, should have different rules.

Tade05 tahun yang lalu

That's assuming a maximally unregulated market is an ideal we're striving for, which isn't the case - at least not in the EU, and that is a good thing.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

An unregulated market cannot be a free market.

Tade05 tahun yang lalu

For long at least and this is the reason why GP's assumption is doubly wrong.

6r1d5 tahun yang lalu

> This is how a free market works.

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".

_jal5 tahun yang lalu

> a right to know if a given company wants

> 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.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

You’re making this unnecessarily complicated and I can’t tell if it is in bad faith or not.

- 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.

websites20235 tahun yang lalu

Your statements lack agents, which contributes to the feeling that they are intentionally slippery.

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.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

Cool, bro.

_jal5 tahun yang lalu

I'm trying to take what you're saying seriously, and think through how it would work in the real world.

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.

Intermernet5 tahun yang lalu

"The free market" is demonstrably a sham. It, like communism, is good in theory, but broken by human behaviour.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

trollski5 tahun yang lalu

quickthrowman5 tahun yang lalu

(2)

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail. It seems hard to imagine any way providing that service for free would be worth their while if they couldn’t harvest the data.

marcosdumay5 tahun yang lalu

> If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail.

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.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

Well your claim is a lot more expansive, really, because you’re saying that I have no right to sign up for the service myself because you don’t like the business model. There are some things that are so harmful that that makes sense but I don’t agree that Gmail and Facebook being in that category.

marcosdumay5 tahun yang lalu

There's a reason the constitution of my country grants me a right to privacy...

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.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> I don’t agree that Gmail and Facebook being in that category.

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.

hobs5 tahun yang lalu

It's pretty simple - if its not profitable to run a service without spying on your users then it should simply not be run.

That's it!

Cederfjard5 tahun yang lalu

OK, that’s how you feel, and your choice. What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

I’m personally with you, by the way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the only valid position.

coldtea5 tahun yang lalu

>OK, that’s how you feel, and your choice. What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

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).

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

Couldn't you make the same argument about one's "right" to never be the subject of automated data collection?

coldtea5 tahun yang lalu

Yes, haven't I already covered this angle by writing "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.

hobs5 tahun yang lalu

It's not the only valid position, its just the only position that doesn't allow giant corporations to use their power to coerce people with no money to give up their agency.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

They can probably find other ways.

darkwater5 tahun yang lalu

> What do you think about people who wouldn’t mind being spied on in exchange for free or cheaper services?

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.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

By and large Snowden's revelations were met with a shrug. If that didn't bother people much, why would details about how Google makes money?

CogitoCogito5 tahun yang lalu

Should it be up to you to allow e.g. Google to systematically read incoming mail written by people with no relationship to Google whatsoever?

badloginnew5 tahun yang lalu

People who want to be spied on have the freedom to move to North Korea. I’d be ok with using tax dollars to help them. They’d still complain that people here have entitled attitudes about freedom, but they are free to choose a different way.

p_j_w5 tahun yang lalu

>People who want to be spied on have the freedom to move to North Korea.

Surely there's some middle ground between no digital tracking of users and North Korea?

pessimizer5 tahun yang lalu

What do you say about children who really want to work in mines, or people who want to sell themselves into slavery?

hobs5 tahun yang lalu

My grandfather sold himself into slavery for 2 years for a handful of sheep - I would say that we should fix the world so that such a thing never happens and it should never be allowed.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

I disagree because I’d like to keep using the service.

tendstofortytwo5 tahun yang lalu

I do see advertisements on the Gmail mobile app though. They're never in the primary view, but the automatic categorizations (Promotions, Social, Updates) generally have them.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

The point is that it supports IMAP and POP3.

Scarblac5 tahun yang lalu

If it's an Android phone, then Gmail came with the phone, that I paid for. I have no idea what the manufacturer paid Google, but I paid.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

OK but it works on my iPad, my iPhone, Thunderbird or Outlook on a PC, etc., and what you’re saying does not apply to any of those.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

pdpi5 tahun yang lalu

> Tracking is becoming less effective, and the only recourse they have is stuffing even more ads everywhere to make up for the lost revenue from targeting. This is great, because you're not affected if you have uBlock Origin. If you don't, install it right now.

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.

only_as_i_fall5 tahun yang lalu

I'll write them a check then.

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.

D13Fd5 tahun yang lalu

This is actually what bothered me the most about the article.

If we all install add blockers, content producers can't make money.

BizarroLand5 tahun yang lalu

I disagree. The shift would be towards content producers offering tiers of service and content, for instance a free tier to draw people in and a paid service with perks & more content.

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.

basscomm5 tahun yang lalu

There are other ways to make money producing content besides advertisements

xboxnolifes5 tahun yang lalu

I would be more supporting of turning off my ad-block if the average blog or news post didn't have 70% of the screen be ads, with 2 ad popups, a cookie banner, an auto-playing video, and a redirect to another ad page on first click.

8note5 tahun yang lalu

Easy. VC money pays for it.

acituan5 tahun yang lalu

> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement

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.

Kalium5 tahun yang lalu

> Like open source software?

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.

p_j_w5 tahun yang lalu

>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.

acituan5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

mindslight5 tahun yang lalu

Talking about "entitlement" is generally a red herring because it ignores talking about why expectations are a certain way. On this topic, useful services in exchange for absolutely no consideration is exactly what the surveillance companies are marketing. When you go through the sign up flow, there is no attempt to inform users of what they're actually exchanging. And no, boilerplate legalese that nobody reads doesn't count for anything. To have an actual meeting of the minds, there should be at least one page of friendly infographics showing the extent of what data they're capturing, where they're using it, and how long it will be stored.

only_as_i_fall5 tahun yang lalu

The entitlement argument has always been a strawman.

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.

BizarroLand5 tahun yang lalu

Think of how much money google & fb is leaving on the table by not selling google ad exemptions.

"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.

bachmeier5 tahun yang lalu

> Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement.

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?

ThrustVectoring5 tahun yang lalu

"Commoditize your complement" means that cheap-to-provide yet valuable services will be offered for free, simply because it drives down the total cost of buying from their main profit center. Regardless of how valuable Amazon's open-source AWS-related tooling is to developers, it's still not in Amazon's interests to charge for the software.

forgotmypw175 tahun yang lalu

I don't think it's entitled at all.

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.

PaulDavisThe1st5 tahun yang lalu

I think the author's point is that you will be tracked even if you do pay.

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.

irjustin5 tahun yang lalu

To be explicit, you're paying for the add-on storage. I think the distinction is important.

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?

PaulDavisThe1st5 tahun yang lalu

I'm "part of" Workspaces.

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.

LegitShady5 tahun yang lalu

I pay for ad-free YouTube and YouTube music premium. It’s possible to make any fees for service a fee for something other than service. “You’re not paying for YouTube you’re paying to not see ads on YouTube”.

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.

pdpi5 tahun yang lalu

GSuite and Youtube play by very different rules, though. Youtube is a consumer product and privacy legislation unfortunately doesn't have much in the way of teeth. GSuite is a business product, and there's many industries they'd like to serve that are fairly strict about data breaches.

LegitShady5 tahun yang lalu

The ads on YouTube pay for YouTube. If I’m paying for YouTube and not seeing ads, I’m paying for YouTube. Playing semantic word games saying ‘you’re paying to not see ads, the ads that pay for the service’ is just word games.

If they have to be legislated into not spying on the users then it just proves the article’s point.

HelloNurse5 tahun yang lalu

> It’s just semantics and creative structuring.

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".

busterarm5 tahun yang lalu

It depends on the host you pay. It's very simple. Don't use email from Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc.

Get email from providers who care about the same things that you do. I've been using Migadu happily for over a year now.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> I'm paying, and I'm still the product.

Yes, but you're not the only one who is the product. Everyone who sends email to you is as well.

PaulDavisThe1st5 tahun yang lalu

I try to be a nice person. Is paying for my friends and colleagues to be products so wrong?

raxxorrax5 tahun yang lalu

If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit.

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.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> If you are strict with this argument, there would also be no free internet sites to visit.

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.

asplake5 tahun yang lalu

Websites are financed by people and organisations with all kinds of motivations and business models. Websites don’t all have to make a profit! It is totally unfair (not to mention nonsensical) to represent the above argument as leading to the inevitable conclusion that there would be no free websites.

SCNP5 tahun yang lalu

To add to your 3rd point, your friends (and possibly you) may have shared yours and other's contact information without them even knowing it. As you said, Facebook is one of the worst offenders of grabbing all the contacts in a phone without the user's knowledge...

fartcannon5 tahun yang lalu

Microsoft's LinkedIn is also atrocious at stuff like that.

benjaminjosephw5 tahun yang lalu

Wow, I thought you were about to object to the generalization of an end-usr denigrating HN perspective!

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?

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

I find it hard to believe in this day and age that people don’t understand the basic business model of these services.

benjaminjosephw5 tahun yang lalu

People in technology have a far greater understanding of the depth, breadth and potential consequences of selling data and attention to advertising platforms than the average user. Even then, we still don't necessarily know exactly how normative technology can be. That's like taking payment in the form of a blank cheque and calling it "free".

The business model might be clear enough, but the cost and consequences are not.

travoc5 tahun yang lalu

Most people are not aware of the extent that their identities and activity is tracked across the web.

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

Well, I don’t find it that much easier to believe just because you assert the opposite.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

Have a chat with people who aren't into computers and the internet. A huge percentage of them don't understand any of this (and don't even understand why they should understand).

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

Well, do they not understand, or are they indifferent? I suspect that many of us here confuse the latter for the former.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

A large percentage of the people I've talked to about this simply don't understand. Worse, many _think_ they understand.

germinalphrase5 tahun yang lalu

Then (and please try to take this respectfully) you are out of touch. Many (most?) users don’t even know the services are collecting information at all.

hiptobecubic5 tahun yang lalu

Except not because Gmail (and the rest of Google Apps) has an explicit policy against this.

o8r3oFTZPE5 tahun yang lalu

Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.

IIRC, when Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, one senator said his terms of service "sucked". Was he wrong.

p_j_w5 tahun yang lalu

>Before Gmail, it used to be common to have an email account through one's ISP. No need for Google.

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.

o8r3oFTZPE5 tahun yang lalu

Never said "good old days". POP3 and IMAP were not part of the original design of email. The point of difference between then and now worth considering, IMO, is that the ISP's business plan was not personal data mining and online advertising services, it was internet service.

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.

tomrod5 tahun yang lalu

Entitlement, or reasonable payback for the employee economic surplus that has driven the technology boom for owners?

winternett5 tahun yang lalu

That would be fine if the assumption wasn't based upon thousands of content creators, who are also sharing their work for free, most who unknowingly were building Facebook and other sites into popularity through their work for no pay, that now have the rug pulled out from under their ability to be seen.

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.

strogonoff5 tahun yang lalu

> If you're paying cash for the service, though, you're well within your right to set expectations on the terms the service is provided on.

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.

coldtea5 tahun yang lalu

>Expecting a valuable service with absolutely no consideration in return absolutely is a case of entitlement. If that consideration isn't cash, it has to be something else.

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.

yur3i__5 tahun yang lalu

I think the only analogy that works now is "if you aren't in control, you're the product", ala free software and self hosting

ZeroGravitas5 tahun yang lalu

Or in theory at least, well regulated small businesses in a competitive market.

umanwizard5 tahun yang lalu

That’s only assuming a large enough fraction of possible customers care.

ZeroGravitas5 tahun yang lalu

That probably applies to the free software option too and may be unavoidable. Reducing the number of people who have to care and how much they have to care are both achievable goals though and snallwr businesses working with some free software is a workable synergy to some degree.

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.

tonyedgecombe5 tahun yang lalu

>free software

Well maybe, if this whole sorry ediface wasn't built on top of free software.

inkblotuniverse5 tahun yang lalu

Free software gives control to the user, that being the person running the 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!

epicide5 tahun yang lalu

Not OP, but I assume they meant "free as in speech, not as in beer". AKA FOSS.

tonyedgecombe5 tahun yang lalu

It doesn't really make much difference in this case though does it.

cocktailpeanuts5 tahun yang lalu

The whole article took about a minute to load because apparently it’s being loaded from some decentralized network called lbry.

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.

k33l3r4pp5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

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.

6r1d5 tahun yang lalu

And, if not a secret, what ISP do you use and where?

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.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

moron4hire5 tahun yang lalu

> I'm shocked that it's as high as 25%. Why would anyone say yes to this prompt? What do you have to gain?

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.

raxxorrax5 tahun yang lalu

Same is true for advertising, here it is called banner blindness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness

The advertising industry has probably some counter measures.

tomjen35 tahun yang lalu

Prompts are bad from a design perspective: there is no way to say "ask me later", much less one that is universally recognized.

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.

vegetablepotpie5 tahun yang lalu

In theory, if you’re paying, it means that you’re a stakeholder, and can have some influence over the companies revenue, and therefore have some leverage.

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.

ipaddr5 tahun yang lalu

You are or are not a stakeholder if you pay or don't pay.

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.

diminish5 tahun yang lalu

nope, if u r paying u have to agree to the terms of use which usually includes tracking and other things which sell your data.

agloeregrets5 tahun yang lalu

While entirely true, I cant help but think that the overall title effectively equates what happens on Facebook to what happens on a paid service of sorts when that is a bit unfair.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

I don't think it's unfair. The number of services that will stop spying on you because you are paying money for them is distressingly small.

zahrc5 tahun yang lalu

When using free products, I don’t mind ads, I do mind being tracked.

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…

diminish5 tahun yang lalu

most paid products actually add tracking as a condition to their terms of use.

LatteLazy5 tahun yang lalu

The issue is the ad is basically worthless without the tracking. No one wants to blindly advertise. They want to target, and then track the effectiveness.

tomjen35 tahun yang lalu

I will never understand why I can't just select things I am interested in on Facebook and then have it advertise based on that. I have problems in my life and money to solve them. I know what my problems are, but Facebook is so obsessed about tracking that they won't advertise to the things I am interested in.

LatteLazy5 tahun yang lalu

Agreed. I find it reassuring in a weird way. I bought a toilet seat last year and got nothing but toilet seat ads for months. Because if you just bought a toilet seat you must need 10 more!? It surprises me they don't have a list you can at least cross things off...

enumjorge5 tahun yang lalu

A related problem is that many people prefer not to be tracked but only if it doesn’t mean giving up something in exchange. As a result, differentiating your product by not tracking people isn’t enough of a selling point to make it valuable for many businesses. I wish we had more ad-free alternatives but often companies aren’t incentivized to offer them.

telendram5 tahun yang lalu

Interestingly, the author manages to spend the entire blog entry without even mentioning Apple's own Ad Network. If there is a single example where you pay (the devices, the apps) and are nonetheless tracked (without even receiving a warning selection prompt, in contrast with _all others_ Ad networks), it should be this one.

praptak5 tahun yang lalu

Point in case: cars. You pay quite a lot of your hard earned money for a car, and they are much worse privacy invaders than any nominally free product.

https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/tracking-technolo...

eevilspock5 tahun yang lalu

> There's an old adage that goes "if you're not paying for it, you are the product"

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.

gerbilly5 tahun yang lalu

We’ve squandered the ‘personal’ part of personal computing.

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!

npteljes5 tahun yang lalu

Since ads with tracking sell better than ads without - never minding whether it's worth it or not - businesses who do more tracking will fare better. Since the market won't, regulation could help at this point, but I don't think that will happen, because businesses and goverments have similar interests here. From a government standpoint, let the businesses track the users, and when the time comes, they'll just get the results with a subpoena.

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.

Kim_Bruning5 tahun yang lalu

If you're not paying, you're the product.

If you are paying, you're the rube who's dumb enough to actually pay for stuff. :-P

mlang235 tahun yang lalu

Spon on. And that is why I will not pay for a YouTube abo. The day I can not stand the ads anymore, I will quit the cold turkey.

travoc5 tahun yang lalu

Ublock Origin, AdGuard or Brave gets you the best of both worlds.

Ruthalas5 tahun yang lalu

Consider also: Sponsor Block

nottorp5 tahun yang lalu

Why do I have the feeling that a static site wouldn't have been slashdotted?

I can't comment on their opinions because all i get is a pretty loading animation...

disease5 tahun yang lalu

I can't even read the article - it just shows some pulsating bars where the content would be. Eventually you see an error pop-up regarding 'libry'

Havoc5 tahun yang lalu

This is currently annoying me with the economist and Financial Times. Even after paying their heavy subscription you’re bombarded with ads and FT has the audacity to block you from some article because they added another tier of premium above that.

Their content is good sure but they sure are milking that on all fronts

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

My primary problem with this article is that the author assumes that consumers get no value from ads. While the author may not personally like ads, it is undeniable that thousands to tens of thousands of consumer brands (the same ones who are now suffering with iOS 14.5 changes) now exist as a result of Facebook’s distribution. These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world. The idea that there is zero consumer value from Facebook ads or ads in general is absurd. There is a real cost to disabling tracking and blocking ads, it’s just often not borne immediately, or in a directly measurable way.

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.

Nextgrid5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

rideontime5 tahun yang lalu

Did you miss yesterday's post about the gay priest being outed by his advertising data? It's not just advertisers that have access to that data.

soco5 tahun yang lalu

If you define those brands as being the consumers, then yes, I guess, if they say so (did we ask them?). But I as a person get absolutely no value from those ad networks. Zero.

jamiequint5 tahun yang lalu

Someone is getting value from seeing ads for those brands, or they wouldn’t keep advertising on Facebook. If you are getting no value and don’t like the value exchange, well, nobody is forcing you to use Facebook.

mattacular5 tahun yang lalu

> These brands mostly would have failed in a pre-FB-ads world.

Perhaps they should have.

s17n5 tahun yang lalu

There are plenty of legit arguments against ads, here are a few options:

- 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

emodendroket5 tahun yang lalu

> This is the worst possible situation for the advertisers, because it can reveal that tracking users offers no ROI. In fact, the overwhelming majority of ads are already being ignored, and they're basically fighting for scraps.

Well, it could, but what if it showed the opposite?

cblconfederate5 tahun yang lalu

> Most people don't though. Given choice, most choose to not be spied on. Mindboggling.

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

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

yodelshady5 tahun yang lalu

Very similar logic applies to the durability too.

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.

LatteLazy5 tahun yang lalu

One of the few concrete changes I think would improve big tech, privacy etc would be to require providers over a certain size to offer a paid option and then NOT advertise, track, share data etc.

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.

trjordan5 tahun yang lalu

This line of thinking ends with "companies are evil." It's not totally wrong, but it's perhaps not a useful framing.

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.

JohnFen5 tahun yang lalu

> 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.

s17n5 tahun yang lalu

And conversely, just because you're not paying doesn't mean you aren't a stakeholder. Companies value you based on his much money you make them, they don't care if it's ad money or not.

trop5 tahun yang lalu

> 13.6% of Faceberg's $94.4b is almost $13b. A good start, but we'll need more.

Presumably a slip on the part of the author, rather than facetious. Regardless extremely unfortunate.

TheMagicHorsey5 tahun yang lalu

On one hand he says companies have no incentive to allow you to block tracking. On the other hand half the article is about how Apple allows you to do precisely that.

Silly author.

shoto_io5 tahun yang lalu

I agree in general. Although I still firmly believe it’s not the case with Apple. Haven’t been convinced otherwise yet.

racl1015 tahun yang lalu

Definitely the case with those Nvidia Shield units. Fuck those pieces of shits.

api5 tahun yang lalu

Payment is necessary but not sufficient to support privacy-respecting software and services.

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.

encryptluks25 tahun yang lalu

Does that mean that Odysee itself thinks that its users are the product?

whckt5 tahun yang lalu

God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.

Nicksil5 tahun yang lalu

>God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.

milkman: "Hey, you guys happy with the milk?"

customer: "Yeah!"

milkman: "Great!"