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Comment by eternityforest | Hacker News Reader

They're probably data collection projects, which is why the GDPR scares me just a bit.

I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.

It's fairly bad and unsustainable to build a business around trying to get people to argue more online, so they look at your ads to buy absolute crap they don't even want, but I'm not sure what the web would look like without it.

Would we still have all the random things like Google Street View that nobody would actually pay enough for as a discrete product?

Reputable news sources seem to have already changed from ads to paywalls, presumably because ads were making the sites look too much like tabloids.

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> I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.

I think this is the problem with big tech right now. We all know an email service doesn’t cost 30/month and generate hundred billion dollar companies with $300k programmer salaries. But adtech makes it so.

Fast mail is $3 a month, Protonmail $3.33. so maybe not $30 total

The bigger mail companies seem to be slightly pricier.

Plus there's Assistant, Calendar, Tile tracking(Already a few bucks a month for proactive reminders), Keep, YoLink's cloud, WiFi Camera clouds, etc.

Some of it could be done P2P(Especially Google Assistant which only has about 5 features people use), some things would probably disappear entirely in a privacy first world, and I'm guessing the rest would be an extra $10-$30 or so to.

My view is that paywalls were to combat scrapers in a legally defensible way.

I don't think GDPR will prevent you from entering a contract where you sell your personal info and get paid in free access to services. It just prevents companies from doing so without your consent. Google and other could just provide ad-supported plans along with paid plans.

The only goal of GDPR is to stop the theft of personal information, it doesn't dictate a business model.

I've seen conflicting opinions on this. Some people claim that is illegal but der spiegel gives me the option of free + personalized ads or paying + ad free but I'm also in the US so it may be different for people in germany.

In a roundabout way you are saying the same thing as the person you replied to. Not enough people are going to opt for that making ad supported plans unviable for a company that is expected to have round the clock all year long growth.

GDPR itself is mostly good although it goes too far in a lot of places. I'm all for full disclosure of what they collect, and for data portability, but I'm not a fan of right to deletion, or technical requirements on how you handle even trivial data.

Plus, the GDPR doesn't allow tracking as a precondition for using the service. Which is needed for the law to mean anything at all, otherwise all the big companies would require it and you'd be disadvantaged if you refuse, but it does change the business model.

It seems like an unsolvable problem, short of some kind of government funded subsidized open source equivalent of Google or something.

The real trouble is from even stronger laws than the GDPR that many individuals want. I'm not exactly sure what the wording of those imaginary laws would be, but a huge number of people did not want Amazon Sidewalk to happen, especially as opt-out, many want tile/AirTag to stop, some people want CCTV to be totally gone, etc.

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