<story><title>The Price of Free Is Actually Too High</title><url>https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/04/the-price-of-free-is-actually-too-high.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajeet_dhaliwal</author><text>This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it&amp;#x27;s not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to pay and be free of advertising.</text></item><item><author>drchiu</author><text>I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bilbo0s</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s the thing though, would we ever get privacy? Even if we were to pay?&lt;p&gt;I know that there are several defendants [drugs etc] even in my small area who have had deleted snapchat posts, deleted texts, deleted emails, &amp;quot;anonymous&amp;quot; forum posts etc etc etc show up as evidence in court. Now I&amp;#x27;m obviously unfamiliar with the legal and technical means by which police investigators made things like that happen, but the fact that they happen means that we can assume that at LEAST the government has access to a record of most everything we do online. Free or otherwise.&lt;p&gt;Even ignoring the question of the government surveillance net, once your data is on that company&amp;#x27;s server, how would you even be able to reliably validate what&amp;#x27;s being done with it? By which I mean, they say they don&amp;#x27;t share it, but how do you KNOW?&lt;p&gt;So maybe we would get some pretty compelling new features in a lot of our services if we were to pay for them, but I&amp;#x27;m not at all certain that ironclad privacy would be one of them.&lt;p&gt;In fact, I&amp;#x27;m fair certain that it wouldn&amp;#x27;t be.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Price of Free Is Actually Too High</title><url>https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/04/the-price-of-free-is-actually-too-high.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ajeet_dhaliwal</author><text>This is an honest answer that I think many people who are outraged about privacy and advertising would begrudgingly have to admit if forced to really answer. The only way to know whether the price of something is too high or not is to put up two options. A free version where privacy is lost, and a paid version where it&amp;#x27;s not. See how many people opt for the paid version. Now unfortunately many services that go the advertising route do not offer a paid version. I happen to be in the camp that does pay for several services I use online, and I run a service that charges customers too. Where I can I like to pay and be free of advertising.</text></item><item><author>drchiu</author><text>I find whenever I consider the alternative to free, I need to examine deep within myself to ask if I’d be willing to pay for the half a dozen services or so that I use every day for free, subsidized currently by an advertising model. Although the idea would be great if companies existed solely to serve people like myself for free, it isn’t realistic. Weighing the cost of free vs the potential loss of privacy at some point in the future, I can’t help but choose free today and kick the proverbial privacy can down the road. Thus, I’m a bit hesitant to go find my pitch fork in this fight for privacy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wybiral</author><text>Websites were &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; from the start when people were hosting them on their own machines. At this point we have the internet access and cheap hardware that would allow us to take control and build distributed solutions that are &amp;quot;free&amp;quot; in the sense that they only cost our contribution of hosting power or something.&lt;p&gt;Look at the Tor network, for example, the next time you assume that nobody would run a service for free without collecting data or ads.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I used Tor as an example because of the contrast with data collection companies like Facebook but there are a lot of people who run Tor relays for free that push quite a bit of traffic around. Things like IPFS, blockchains, Mastodon Project, SETI@Home, etc, are examples of free approaches given our modern hardware proliferation.</text></comment>