Unpopular Opinion

There are a few fundamental flaws I see with this argument.

As others have pointed out it's a false dichotomy.

There were hundreds of years of profitable content creation and distribution prior to invasive data collection or targeted advertisement. People were fine paying for every movie they saw and every periodical they read. The idea that it's financially untenable unless I tell Mark Zuckerberg my financial situation, medical conditions, and kinks is silly.

It's an uneven transaction. I read an article for one minute the platform gets to bombard me with ads for one minute... that's fair and equal. No notes. I read an article for one minute and Mark Zuckerberg gets to stalk me like a prey animal accross websites, circumventing protections against tracking, even if I don't have a FB account, then he can keep my data in perpetuity and sell it as many times as possible, to any party, anywhere in the world without my knowledge or explicit consent... that's less of a balanced transaction.

I can guarantee that all these people complaining about "muh privacy" would not like having a paywall restricted internet.

As one of the privacy zealots on the internet, I'd gladly pay for services if it avoids advertisements. But I should get a choice in who gets my information.

As things are now, I'm not in control of any of it unless I fight tooth and nail to retain it, and even then I can only limit what they have access to. Facebook tracks my browsing habits and builds an advertisement profile based on it even though I explicitly deleted my accounts almost 10 years ago.

And this information isn't just kept by Facebook. They have the right to sell it to anyone, including the government. Who needs a warrant when your local PD can just pay a data broker and get access to your GPS logs? After all, you consented to that website's EULA that said they can sell that data to any other entity.

People who don't care about data privacy don't understand how much you can learn about someone just from 'anonymized metadata'.

If it was a person wanting to know that much about you, you'd call the cops for stalking. But because it's a multimillion dollar company with a profit motive, it's suddenly okay?

That's definitely an unpopular opinion!

It's also one that is poorly reasoned. The whole "there's only two models" part is bunkum

Big cuck energy have an upvote!

That looks very much like a false dichotomy to me. You left out:

• advertising (which does not require selling data, this is just an invasive additive)
• donation and volunteer based (Wikipedia does this quite successfully)
• funded from tax income (as are online government services, crown corporations etc.)
• companies that sell something thru the internet l, and website is an advertising or pm selling platform. This accounts for most sites, tbh, from brands to retailers, to marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and Craigslist.

These are just off the top of my head. But the point being is that your major premise of obviously false.

Most companies that are harvesting our data are also requiring or pushing for subscriptions now, so the dichotomy is also false in that respect.

Finally, it is clear that millions of people are quite happy to pay reasonable fees for valuable services, which is why so many fee based companies are doing fine.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

Have an upvote.

Model number 3:

• Subscription based AND make even more money by selling your data

Wow. This really is a shit opinion. As someone else has stated, this corporate cuck energy is radiating off this post.

If you truly think it’s just about selling shit to consumers have an upvote

Wanted to upvote because, damn, definitely unpopular. But it's also really badly thought out and supported.

And which of those 2 models for the Internet does Lemmy, the website before your eyes that you're currently using, fit into? 🙃

You could argue that users agree to exchange their data for convenience and free services when they accept the terms of service and create an account with a company that collects and sells user data. So it’s true that there is a degree of personal accountability there. 

However, sometimes you’re required to have an account with one of these services for something like work or school. And sometimes you can even be tracked when you visit websites without creating an account based on your device ID, settings, IP address, browser specifications, maybe even facial recognition used on a photo of you someone else uploaded. Technically you can avoid this by not accepting those jobs or attending those schools, or not visiting any websites at all, but how practical is that in modern life?

I think your average user isn’t well-informed about the extent of data collection and how easy it is to de-anonymize data by cross referencing it, and businesses both take advantage of that ignorance/apathy towards privacy and downplay the extent of how they use it. I support more *transparency* around data collection and sharing policies.

Apart from identity theft safeguards, the fuss over data privacy of metadata that was never private and voluntary information (especially information that could be found in a phonebook or gathered from public observation) always seemed overblown & misguided. I know

• the internet wasn't designed for privacy
• they have my internet address whenever I connect
• they can track my usage of their free service
• they have the information I provided
• they can coordinate with partners
• I'm consenting by using their free service

so why should I act surprised when they do what should be expected to offer that free service? People who do that strike me as a special kind of stupid: do they think the world just runs on magic?

Free shit in exchange for mostly worthless information & ads I ignore seems like an obvious bargain, but what do I know? Let's stir everyone into a frenzy to bitch & moan about the ravages of targeted advertising.

Im sure most people will like the irony of posting this on lemmy. I'm sure everyone is scraping our data. Hell there is a convenient api on every server to scrape.

But its equal for everyone to scrape its the free market of ideas and u don't own ideas.