• tal@lemmy.today
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    7 months ago

    It looks like Meta’s strategy of charging European Facebook and Instagram users, for the privilege of not being tracked for ad-targeting purposes, ain’t gonna fly.

    I’m in the US and also don’t care about Facebook and Instagram, but if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.

    I don’t know if there’s enough people who would for that to be a viable market, but I’d be there.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      7 months ago

      Well yeah but you guys are already used to paying data collection agencies for protection just so you can have some basic quality of privacy (like not getting sales calls or having your identity stolen).

      I imagine that paying a tech giant for it is just the logical next step.

      If Apple came out with a paid service that said “I’ll make sure those other companies don’t have your data” it would sell like hotcakes and nobody would think twice about the irony.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        7 months ago

        I mean, it’s a service. You can pay for it with your money, or pay with your data. I’d prefer the former, myself. But either way, it’s not going to be free.

        • fxdave@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          I would prefer paying for it with my taxes. Not for facebook though.

          • tal@lemmy.today
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            7 months ago

            Like, you want Instagram to get some kind of government subsidy? Why? And what about people who don’t want to use it? I mean, I don’t use Instagram.

            • fxdave@lemmy.ml
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              7 months ago

              I would imagine it as lemmy. It would be a free, ethical software which is indirectly funded by the government. Everybody uses facebook so that’s a good reason to turn it into a public property. We could make it without anti-features. Made for people, not for profit.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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          7 months ago

          By this same logic I take it you’d be ok with the day care saying “you can pay with your money or we can use your kid for manual labor”?

    • ManniSturgis@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      And who cares about people like me who can’t afford to shell out $50 each month to not be tracked by various services, right?

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        7 months ago

        The service isn’t going to be provided for free – it’s a business, not a charity. One way or another, it gets paid for. You have two options:

        • Pay with your data. That’s what happens today. If someone’s okay with that, it remains an option.

        • Pay with money. This would be an option to the above.

        Personally, while I don’t use or care about Facebook, I’d like to have the option to pay with money rather than data for services that I do use. Some of those don’t have that option today.

        I’d also add that this doesn’t just apply to online services. For example, we’ve been talking about car tracking using cell radios to send data back a bit on the Threadiverse. If someone doesn’t care about their car transmitting data back, okay, fine. I’ve got no problem with that being an option available to them, if it can reduce the purchase price and someone is okay with that. But I’d prefer to have the option to just pay a higher purchase price and not have that happen. I don’t really want to screw around with trying to game the system and disabling cell radios and trying to let other customers bear the price of my subsidized car (nor is that really fair to those customers, frankly). I just want to have the option to pay for my car the way I historically did – I give money to the automaker up front, deal is done.

        A vendor should be agnostic as to whether someone pays with data or money, as long as they are able to charge enough to cover whatever they lose via not being able to sell data and whatever overhead exists from maintaining two payment models. The only argument I can think of against it is that it requires them to expose some data as to how valuable they assess the data to be. That might be considered a trade secret, but given that the consumer really needs that data to assess whether-or-not they want the company to have that data and that price information is required to be available to the consumer for an efficient market to work, I’m okay with imposing that limitation on the vendor.

    • moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      It’s not about privacy if you’re paying. Privacy can’t be negotiated. This is a hard fact. It’s privacy or nothing.

    • skulblaka@startrek.website
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      7 months ago

      You are being blackmailed. This is no different than having the boys show up at your front door demanding protection money. Pay us and nobody (read: us) will break your legs. Pay us and nobody will steal your data.