Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: I honestly don’t see a big issue with the “pay or okay” model. How many of us ...
I honestly don’t see a big issue with the “pay or okay” model.
How many of us used to say until recently “I’d rather pay Facebook/Google for keeping their nose out of my business, than funding their unsustainable and privacy-invasive business model with my own data”?
Well, Facebook recently has actually given that option in the EU, and instead of privacy activists reacting with “finally, we have a price tag to keep Facebook’s data brokerage activities outside of our lives” I’ve seen reaction along the lines of “this is outrageous! we shouldn’t pay to keep our own data private!”
And apparently only a tiny, tiny minority of EU citizens has opted for “pay” in the “pay or okay” game - proving that many are privacy activists only as long as they don’t have to pick the wallet, and giving Facebook an amazing excuse to keep doing things the way it currently does.
You see, for all the unfathomable hate and bloody grudge I nurture towards companies like Google and Meta, for how much every single cell of my body wishes that they go bankrupt tomorrow, that their surveillance-based business models end up in the graveyard of the worst ideas ever conceived by the human kind, and their cynical managers end up either in a homeless shelter or in a jail, we have to admit a simple truth: companies need to make money in order to operate. They need money to pay their engineers, their servers, their offices and desks, and so on. Of course, we can discuss whether those margins are too high right now (and, in most of the cases, they are), but we can’t deny that some form of liquidity needs to flow in, or the product will cease to exist.
If that money shouldn’t come from harvesting and selling our deepest secrets (and I largely agree with that statement), and it shouldn’t come from users directly paying for the product either, then where should it come from?
If you like neither of the options, because you don’t like the company and/or the product, do just like me: stop using their product. But it’s unrealistic to expect to use a product without yielding the company that produces it any form of revenue.
And it’s not like if you stop using Facebook and only use FOSS services on the Fediverse the revenue problem goes away. If $1000/year for your privacy sounds way too high, you can do like me: either rent a Linode or run a server in your storage room, install Mastodon/Pleroma/Calckey, pay either for the electricity or for the cloud bills, spend some time to configure db backups, an S3 cache, cleanup cronjobs, log rotation and alerts, and spend probably a couple of hours a week to go through moderation reports. You’ll soon realize that the cumulative costs of installing, running and managing such a system are quite close to $1000/year anyway.
Or, if you don’t have the technical skills or the resources, you can just hop on one of the many existing instances (that’s what most of the folks on the Fediverse do anyway), but then do you really believe that the cost of your presence on their platform is zero? Do you really believe that you’re entitled to the service and should do nothing to covert its costs - not make it profitable, but at least don’t turn it into a revenue sink?
I have an ideal solution in my mind, and that’s the “public code, public money”. If we acknowledge that services such as social media, email and file storage are indispensible in the modern world, just like access to electricity and water, then we should also treat them as shared public commodities funded by taxpayers. But, realistically, we’re still very far from it.
All these discussions about privacy vs. monetary contributions ignore the big elephant in the room: running a social media website (or any digital product) is expensive, and if those expenses aren’t offset by some form of revenue then nobody (outside of activists/evangelists) will have any incentive to run it.
If you don’t like Meta’s products regardless of their business model, then you should just stop using them.
And, if you want to use other products instead, you should always remember that the profitability problem won’t go away. Free-as-in-beer solutions are never sustainable, and if we criticize the current business models then we ought to come up with new ones.
https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-1500-eu-year-your-online-privacy
How many of us used to say until recently “I’d rather pay Facebook/Google for keeping their nose out of my business, than funding their unsustainable and privacy-invasive business model with my own data”?
Well, Facebook recently has actually given that option in the EU, and instead of privacy activists reacting with “finally, we have a price tag to keep Facebook’s data brokerage activities outside of our lives” I’ve seen reaction along the lines of “this is outrageous! we shouldn’t pay to keep our own data private!”
And apparently only a tiny, tiny minority of EU citizens has opted for “pay” in the “pay or okay” game - proving that many are privacy activists only as long as they don’t have to pick the wallet, and giving Facebook an amazing excuse to keep doing things the way it currently does.
You see, for all the unfathomable hate and bloody grudge I nurture towards companies like Google and Meta, for how much every single cell of my body wishes that they go bankrupt tomorrow, that their surveillance-based business models end up in the graveyard of the worst ideas ever conceived by the human kind, and their cynical managers end up either in a homeless shelter or in a jail, we have to admit a simple truth: companies need to make money in order to operate. They need money to pay their engineers, their servers, their offices and desks, and so on. Of course, we can discuss whether those margins are too high right now (and, in most of the cases, they are), but we can’t deny that some form of liquidity needs to flow in, or the product will cease to exist.
If that money shouldn’t come from harvesting and selling our deepest secrets (and I largely agree with that statement), and it shouldn’t come from users directly paying for the product either, then where should it come from?
If you like neither of the options, because you don’t like the company and/or the product, do just like me: stop using their product. But it’s unrealistic to expect to use a product without yielding the company that produces it any form of revenue.
And it’s not like if you stop using Facebook and only use FOSS services on the Fediverse the revenue problem goes away. If $1000/year for your privacy sounds way too high, you can do like me: either rent a Linode or run a server in your storage room, install Mastodon/Pleroma/Calckey, pay either for the electricity or for the cloud bills, spend some time to configure db backups, an S3 cache, cleanup cronjobs, log rotation and alerts, and spend probably a couple of hours a week to go through moderation reports. You’ll soon realize that the cumulative costs of installing, running and managing such a system are quite close to $1000/year anyway.
Or, if you don’t have the technical skills or the resources, you can just hop on one of the many existing instances (that’s what most of the folks on the Fediverse do anyway), but then do you really believe that the cost of your presence on their platform is zero? Do you really believe that you’re entitled to the service and should do nothing to covert its costs - not make it profitable, but at least don’t turn it into a revenue sink?
I have an ideal solution in my mind, and that’s the “public code, public money”. If we acknowledge that services such as social media, email and file storage are indispensible in the modern world, just like access to electricity and water, then we should also treat them as shared public commodities funded by taxpayers. But, realistically, we’re still very far from it.
All these discussions about privacy vs. monetary contributions ignore the big elephant in the room: running a social media website (or any digital product) is expensive, and if those expenses aren’t offset by some form of revenue then nobody (outside of activists/evangelists) will have any incentive to run it.
If you don’t like Meta’s products regardless of their business model, then you should just stop using them.
And, if you want to use other products instead, you should always remember that the profitability problem won’t go away. Free-as-in-beer solutions are never sustainable, and if we criticize the current business models then we ought to come up with new ones.
https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-1500-eu-year-your-online-privacy