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At the bottom of all this seems to be the question: can any company practicing surveillance as a business model be trusted?

And if not, what do we do about this business model? Can it be reformed, or should we just kill it off?

It’s doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere on it’s own.

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Selling out your users has never been a successful long term business model. These companies should have held up paid models and not bowed to pressure for free services (at the hidden cost of selling all our data). They should all be replaced by companies that charge a reasonable fee (or are subsidised) for the service provided like every other industry.

But a "free" competitor could then have appeared, and would almost certainly have experienced greater user growth compared to a paid alternative. The number of users is one of the crucial metrics of success.

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