131–140 of 221 posts
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.
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. Bu…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Miami/comments/oovnrj/only_in_miami...
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 faci…
Equifax is a great example of a service which you don't do business with and get opted into 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
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".
> 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,…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
If they have to be legislated into not spying on the users then it just proves the article’s point.
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…
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…
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 participa…
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.
God forbid the milkman guarantee their customers are happy with the milk.
milkman: "Hey, you guys happy with the milk?"
customer: "Yeah!"
milkman: "Great!"