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Comment by w0m | Hacker News Reader

... what?

If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.

Nowadays you are the product even if you pay. (E.g. Subscription news sites including trackers on subscribed users, smartTVs siphoning data etc)

Thing is the TV's you're only half the customer. That's why the TV's have gotten so cheap, the extra revenue stream from selling data. You can't even buy a dumb TV any more.

My gas pump feeds me ads while I pump gas that I paid for.

T-mobile sends me ads over SMS that I paid for.

JetBlue serves ads to paying passengers on the seat-back displays.

I hear Windows has ads now, but I got off that ship a while back.

Being the customer is no longer sufficient; companies have figured out that they can make more money by charging you and serving you ads.

I agree completely, that's what's so messed up with this "freemium" model that's so popular these days. If companies need to develop the ad-ridden version with tons of tracking to monetize free users anyway, what's the incentive for them to turn it off for paying users?

It's not like 99% of them are going to care and/or notice anyway, and if anything it would be more work to test and maintain a different version of the code without trackers.

Just pay for the things you use people, and block everything you can with browser plugins. This model needs to die.

This is a meaningless cliche. Just because users of Google products don't pay in cash to use them doesn't change the fact that Google has to attract the users to their platform in the first place, and keep them there.

No, Google has paid to be the the default in most cases.

Anticompetitive behavior is a different and unrelated problem from monetizing your products using advertising and personal data

Your original comment suggests otherwise.

But what about people like me that are paying google (quite a lot actually)?

I don't understand your group. The company that offers everything for free for the price of privacy and you also give them money?

If I was paying for a service that didn't respect my privacy I wouldn't give them my identifying payment info as well. Your fingerprint is connected to all of the credit data providers. If you didn't pay they had to guess or connect you another way.

Same reason people use amazon/aws or microsoft/azure.

> If you aren't paying for it; you are the product. Simple.

This nonsense should belong into Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness along with: Capitalism - God's way of determining who is smart, and who is poor.

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