Skip Navigation
102 comments

  • Good news, that’s one point where the EU takes good decisions. Sadly, fight against privacy in terms of anti money laundering rules and similar

  • 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.

    • Fuck that and fuck them.

    • 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?

      • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

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

    • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

        https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/confusing-google-workspace-privacy-change-will-re-enable-tracking-for-users/

        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.

        Google's reasoning for this change is that, because Workspace apps are paid for, "Google never uses your data in Google Workspace core services for advertising," the company said. So basically the new "Search History" setting could be called "save data that won't be used for ads."

        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.

102 comments