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?
Comment on ‘Meta is out of options’: EU regulators reject its privacy fee for Facebook and Instagram
tal@lemmy.today 5 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 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.
ManniSturgis@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
tal@lemmy.today 5 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:
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Pay with your data. That’s what happens today.
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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.
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lemmyvore@feddit.nl 5 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 5 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 5 months ago
I would prefer paying for it with my taxes.
tal@lemmy.today 5 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.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 5 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”?
moitoi@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 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 5 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.
DarthYoshiBoy@kbin.social 5 months ago
if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.
It's called Google Workspace and it's decently nice. You can get a basic business starter account for something like ~$7 per month/per user + whatever you want to pay to register a domain each year. Takes a little bit of know how and you need to do some lifting for yourself that Google would otherwise shoulder for you, but it's pretty nice and has more benefits beyond just the privacy implications, like 30GB of account storage and Google Meet conferencing for up to 100 people without time limits. On the downside, some stuff that needs to track your usage to function properly (Like YouTube video recommendations) just do not work with a Workspace account because they don't track your preferences so they don't have a way to build a recommendation profile for you.
I've been doing it for years now and I appreciate it a lot. In the rare instances when I need to go do something on my old Gmail account it's shocking every time how bad the unpaid versions of Google products have gotten.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 5 months ago
if I could pay a privacy fee to Alphabet and not be logged and data-mined, I’d do that.
It’s called Google Workspace and it’s decently nice.
But you are deluding yourself if you think that your data will not be “mined” there.
tal@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Hmm. That sounds interesting.
goes to investigate
It sounds like that covers Gmail and stuff like that, but at least in this 2022 article, it doesn’t sound like it covers Web searches on Google, or YouTube, or Google Maps. That sounds like it’s fair game for data-mining.
arstechnica.com/…/confusing-google-workspace-priv…
Regarding the promise to not use data from “Workspace core services,” Google’s statement doesn’t cover Google Search (it’s not a core Workspace app), which is the primary vector for Google ads and data for Google ads. That’s right—the “Search History” setting from Google doesn’t cover Google Search history.
The terms “Google Workspace products” and “additional Google services” are the key to understanding that description. Basically, Google is splitting the data that was previously captured by “Web & App Activity” into two settings. “Search History” will only cover apps that are part of the “Google Workspace” product lineup. There is a full list of those services here, but it’s basically Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Contacts, Drive, Google Chat, and Keep—the business apps—and not Google Maps, Google Search, YouTube, and other products that lack a strong business use case. So for paying Workspace users, Search History will now cover usage data for Workspace stuff, while Web & App Activity will cover every other Google product that isn’t specifically listed in the Workspace terms.
DarthYoshiBoy@kbin.social 5 months ago
I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience. It's why when I search for Python, I get results about the programming language and not snakes both in Search and YouTube. Or why Commodore gets me the computer and not naval crap. Or any number of other things that steer their search results towards things in my interests and away from junk I don't care about.
An ad blocker in my browser keeps anything else they're targeting at me through their scraping out of my hair while also blocking a load of what they might learn about me from third party sites, so I'm not terribly bothered what they think they know about me, they're not getting access to the bulk of the stuff I'd consider personal, and the junk they do track is kept so that they can get me results that will matter to me instead of generic crap.
I think there's a general misunderstanding that Google tracks stuff so that they can sell it, when the reality is that they keep it so they know where to target ads (that I never see) and so that they can provide results relevant to my interests so I'll keep coming back to (not) see ads. They don't sell the info they collect, they sell people the ability to run ads against that info. If they were selling the info itself, they'd be killing the golden goose. So long as they're contractually not allowed to look at my mail and files, I'm good with the rest of what they take because it 100% goes into making a better experience for me using their services so long as I'm running Firefox/uBlock.
That said, if you don't want tracking being used to improve your search experience, a Workspace account indeed won't get you 100% away from it. I tried using DDG for a while and I just couldn't hang with it. Its lacking the little dossier that Google has on me made it so that I constantly had to work harder to find what I wanted vs a quick search on Google, and that's what you'd get without the tracking and info collection. It wasn't worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?
tal@lemmy.today 5 months ago
I actually consider the tracking of my browsing/watching history to be integral to the search experience.
I don’t have a problem with people who are okay with it getting it. I’m not saying that Google shouldn’t be allowed to do that, just that it’s not what I want.
It wasn’t worth the tradeoff for me, maybe it is for you though?
I use DDG now, as well as some other things like dropping cookies at browser exit. But they aren’t really an alternative to, say, YouTube. And…I mean, I’ve got no problem with Google’s services. I just would prefer to pay for them with money rather than with data.
piratehat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Fuck that and fuck them.