I am totally in support of this shift in business model.
Paying for the service you are using in a transparent and predictable way vs deceptively having your personal information monetized should be the norm.
Google and Facebook have been hiding behind an army of lawyers writing opaque TOS and lobbyists defending their user hostile monopolies.
This is wrong. Paying for a service does not automatically mean the service doesn't take your personal information.
* You pay for Windows but Microsoft still tracks you.
* You pay for iPhone & Mac but Apple still tracks you.
* You pay for Android phones but they still track you.
And so on..
I don't understand the shift from "usage tracking" towards "usage tracking for ads". The goal should be no tracking at all instead of "we don't track you to show ads".
But there is a huge difference between usage tracking and usage tracking for ads. Usage tracking of the kind Microsoft engages in (outside of Bing and their ad focused usage tracking that is), is largely telemetry used to change their product.
Usage tracking for ads, however, is used to change your behavior both within the product and outside the product.
Usage tracking for ads is significantly more damaging to humans as individuals as well as societies.
Perhaps tracking ought to be opt-in only. I don’t remember ever installing Debian and not opting in to the popularity contest (popcorn). Angular CLI also asks if it may do some telemetry. I don’t buy that opt in means we are stuck with bad data.
An exception is for testing.
I use Firefox nightly and developer edition where I can. I think by installing a pre release version of Firefox I opted into telemetry. I’m volunteering for telemetry. However, I don’t consent to opt out tracking in the production version of Firefox or running nonsense marketing-driven “experiments”.
This is the basis of the GDPR, which requires explicit, freely-given, revocable, and opt-in consent before any tracking can be done. I wish the US would get its act together and pass something similar for us in the US.
If you ever get that in US, I sure hope your people are more competent than ours and they come up with something that actually works. Because in EU, GDPR didn't actually solve anything. It's a pain in the ass both for businesses and consumers, and it only had one real (good) effect: it made (some) people aware of the fact that software tracks their lives. Nothing more than that.
The problem with GDPR is the EU member states' cowardly lack of enforcement. You'd think that as soon as they had a stick as big and powerful as GDPR, they'd immediately start beating the big, worst offenders with it. Yet, how often have we seen headlines about "BigScummyCorp fined 4% of annual global turnover" in the news?
Does GDPR even allow the 4% fine at first? I thought the point was to start “small” and ramp up if they don’t improve. Because, while GDPR applies to Facebook, it also applies to everyone. So that small business down the street may not be able to handle a 4% fine while FAANG could. If a 0.5% fine fixes the problem, then going to 4% is unnecessary and would only serve to satisfy vengeance (which laws are not supposed to do[a]).
There’s also the fact that GDPR is a directive. Each state (nation) has to implement it in their own laws. So the EU itself can’t enforce it, only the member states.
[a]: The purpose of laws are not to be an “eye for an eye”, but to curb bad behavior (theoretically)
> There’s also the fact that GDPR is a directive. Each state (nation) has to implement it in their own laws. So the EU itself can’t enforce it, only the member states.
> This is wrong. Paying for a service does not automatically mean the service doesn't take your personal information.
No, but it does mean the developer has a lot of incentive to write software for you as opposed to catering to the advertising companies who are paying their bills.
The advertisers only pay the bills as long as users are using the software. But yes, with a "free" software users probably are quite a bit more tolerant to issues.
I prefer "we don't track you around the entire internet, just our site" to "we track you around the whole internet." That's frequently the ad tracking tradeoff. Plus ad tracking is just so egregiously one sided in the loss of privacy for the user for minuscule user benefit and large tracker benefit.
And furthermore an ad-supported product doesn't necessarily misuse your personal information either. Whether the user pays in dollars or ad impressions doesn't change the need to build a product that people actually want to use, otherwise there is no market for ads to begin with.
> And furthermore an ad-supported product doesn't necessarily misuse your personal information either.
What you mean is they don't necessarily intend to misuse my personal information. The reality is many companies with the best intentions end up spilling that information in a variety of ways.
- They get acquired and their new parent abuses that information.
- They get breeched.
- Employees abuse the information they have access to.
- Employees leak your information to a third party.
- Government employees get access to that information and abuse it.
All of these things have happened to companies where people thought their information was being safely held. Many of these things have happened at the biggest, supposedly secure workplaces. The best way to avoid this is to not put your information out there.
The poster I replied to suggested advertising supported companies won't mis-use your data. My point is anyone—advertising company or not—who has my data is a risk.
You're absolutely right, non-advertising companies are a risk too. The difference is most developers who collect $2.99 for their app usually don't ask me for personal information unless they have a need which benefits me.
Incentives matter, and not all "tracking" is created equal.
You are right that paying for a service doesn't guarantee you won't be tracked. What is important is that that business model makes it possible for you to not be tracked. This is critically important, because it is extremely improbable to win a fight against tracking when billions of dollars are stacked against you.
Exactly I don't understand this idea that paying mean they won't track you. IMHO unless strong legislation and its enforcement comes into effect, nothing will change.
Of course anyone would agree that transparent and predictable payments are better than deception...
But I don't think it's that clear cut or even about that. Usually we favour open markets, where companies can compete on features and price. The App Store has a monopoly on iPhones as it's the only App Store, and the only reason the fees are that high is because Apple owns both the market and the only player, and they can set the fee to whatever they want.
If Apple wasn't the only one running the App Stores on iPhones, it's not as clear cut that they would act in the same way. But since they are, it makes sense they push people towards apps and paid apps from the App Store.
> the only reason the fees are that high is because Apple owns both the market and the only player
The fact that Google enforces the same fees while allowing competing app stores and varied OEMs access to that market paints a different conclusion than yours.
I agree with the "free market" point but in reality the market is just about as free as the biggest players (with the most capital, whatever that may represent) allow it to be. Sure, consumers have the same power as a whole to sway the market. Unfortunately it's fragmented among billions of people all veering in their own direction, uncoordinated. On the other side the power is concentrated with a few big players who just happen to have more or less the same goals and aim to achieve them almost single-mindedly.
And unfortunately the free market comes at a cost even when it works: a sort of dictatorship of the majority. The free market will want cheaper and will accept the compromise of paying in other ways. You don't get something for nothing and since laws aren't keeping up with this it's up to the tech giants to police themselves. You pay with money and with your data, the ratio is up to each company.
The reason this works to to the user's advantage (read: more money - less data) with Apple is because they saw the business opportunity of this policing. They wanted to compete with Google and Facebook at their own game but had to admit defeat so they realized a much better business model is to position themselves as the antithesis of those and cater to a different market Google and FB cannot target, by design.
There probably are ways in which Apple can open up the store and still retain control on what is allowed or monetize on that but make no mistake, if an app is present on Apple's (spun out?) app store for $1 but free of any shady data collection, and also present on the Apps'R'Us store for $0 but encrusted with data collection modules we all know what most users will pick.
Of course - but Apple here are working to make that much harder, to get to a state where harvesting and selling data won't really be an option regardless of if you're paying for it or not.
Practically speaking, even if you did pay for free services, I'd expect the data to be monetized. You pay your ISP, yet there's tons of data being sold, for example. When it's free, at least you don't pay twice.
You always pay once with your data. You might pay twice with actual cash. There's no way to prevent the former, even if the latter occurs because they aren't mutually exclusive.
We “need” it because governments in certain jurisdictions won’t do it.
But wherever you may fall on the government regulation spectrum, there’s a simple response if you don’t like Apples action. Don’t use iOS. Go to Android where FB and friends are free to track and sell your data only constrained by your government policies.
Paying for the service you are using in a transparent and predictable way vs deceptively having your personal information monetized should be the norm.
Google and Facebook have been hiding behind an army of lawyers writing opaque TOS and lobbyists defending their user hostile monopolies.