Submitted 2 days ago by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
If it was legit it would probably take off
Big tech in 2025 makes its money from invading privacy and there’s an increasing demographic of users that don’t see any value in protecting their data from harvesting for some reason
You only have to look at a company like proton who provide a pretty comprehensive suite of privacy focussed software, and yet they’re still very much a niche player in the wider tech industry
Big tech is hooked on having two revenue streams. One from product sales, one from customer information sales. Why would they willingly give one up?
Privacy violations usually aren’t done just for fun. There are two main reasons for using tracking:
The first one is obvious: A ton of stuff on the internet is “free” but still needs to be financed. It’s incredibly hard to get people to fork over some cash for simple things like news sites, recipes or even full-blown apps. Cable TV used to cost €30-60 per month. A physical newspaper subscription is in the same range. People used to pay €20 for an album of music. But online people are not nearly as happy to spend money. Even paying €5 for a smartphone app feels like extremely expensive.
Ads are an easy way to get around that problem. It’s completely friction free. The user doesn’t need to sign up, they don’t need to go through some payment process, nothing. Just load the page and the users generate money.
So a privacy-focussed product would need to cost a substantial amount of money to the users.
Many services already offer hybrid products: Ad-financed products that have a paid tier without ads or tracking. But most users still choose to pay with privacy over money.
The second one is more complex: Tracking allows for making better products. Users give little to no feedback. The only time they do is if there’s a bug that stops them from using your product. At that time it’s often too late: They give you a negative review and uninstall the app. Tracking allows you to see problems before the users report them, but it also allows you to see what users are actually doing with your product. Tracking even allows you to tailor your product to the user, showing them content they might like and so on. For all the talk around algorithms, they can actually be useful.
Log out of Youtube and open it in an incognito tab and you will know what I mean.
Idk where you’re at but I frequently see messages from big tech claiming they care about my privacy. They could launch a publicly accessible database that will only show you what they have on you and give you complete control on what to delete and I’d still be sceptical.
But how would they make money if they can’t sell targeted based advertising
Let the record show, every time somebody tries it’s out-competed by the
horrible privacy stuff. The market really doesn’t care; consumers will pay 3 less dollars for an insecure product. It’s not even really their fault; it is extremely difficult to tell when software is actually secure. It is a pain to tell when some middle-man is actually selling your data or not, due to a carve-out in the TOS of a TOS of a TOS. Anyone upcharging for security could be scamming you, and with nontrivial probability is an NSA front.
This all applies to companies, which can afford to pay for security experts and analysts. See this very old interview with Schneier.
Fact of the matter is, good marketing for scummy data practices is more profitable than good data practices 10 times out of 10. Big tech is soulless and has no financial incentive to do so.
No shit.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Monkey Paw: Its a subscription service. $50 USD per month, if you stop paying, your device automatically upload all your data.
sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 1 day ago
If you pay for Youtube, they still take all of the data they can
Paying doesn't stop data mining