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Comment by e_i_pi_2 | Hacker News Reader

> If the standard becomes "make illegal business models that the media gets enough people upset about"

I think you're giving "the media" too much credit here, it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them. I think in general that's the basis for all the laws we have - a bunch of people thought there should be a law against something and made it.

The only alternative to this is someone doing top-down laws based on what they personally think is right or wrong, and I'd argue that's much more what was happening in Christian-ruled Europe. The church was making laws - they weren't coming from a democratic government.

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I'll preface this by saying that I don't like Meta and am very privacy-conscious.

> it's also very possible that the business models are actually unpopular and people are upset after learning about them.

I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge. This is clearly a small group of "elite people in the know" (which in this case I consider myself and yourself a part of) deciding this.

Those people will be given a choice (assuming Meta doesn’t throw a tantrum and decide to leave the EU in Brexit fashion - which they are more than welcome to do!).

“Do you want us to use [extensive list of all of the kinds of information we have meticulously gathered about you] to show you more relevant ads? Yes/no”

I have a personal belief on what most people will answer to that question. You may disagree. But it doesn’t really matter - the key is that people will be given the chance to make an informed decision.

You don’t have to guess. We know. How many people use Gmail vs paying for a provider not owned by an advertiser company? How many people use Hulu free/lite tier vs paying more for zero ads? How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free! People have choices and their preferences are clear: “give me free shit!”

> How many people use Gmail vs paying for a provider not owned by an advertiser company?

Ads shown in Gmail are not based on the contents of the emails, rather on other characteristics inferred from the associated Google account [0]. It's a bit of a "splitting hairs" thing, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.

I'm not familiar with Hulu.

> How many people are flocking to use a paid privacy focused search engine like Neeva? Hell even DDG hasn’t taken over and it’s free!

Those search engines are not as good as Google. All things being equal, I posit that people would prefer products that respect their privacy.

> You don’t have to guess.

Again, that's beside the point. The point is that people should be given the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether a company is allowed to process their personal data for the purpose of showing "more relevant" advertisements, and that is a Good Thing.

[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

A ton of people use Outlook.com. The choice is usually not about the presence of ads (these are very moderate with both providers), but about the UX one finds more convenient / used to. When something like Protonmail supports tags, I may give them a try.

I do pay for Youtube premium, because without that, the amount of ads really annoys me. I usually buy ad-free versions of freemium Android apps. There must be some value to pay for; making the free version annoying subtracts enough value that paying for the uncrippled version becomes a reasonable choice. (I usually buy paid versions of open-source apps to keep them open-source; that's also a value.)

Also, a lot of people are very much not well off. They often don't have that extra $5; I remember being in that state myself as a student. So they will put up with free shit, even if it has a noticeable shit component :(

I’m not so sure. My observations are certainly not statistically significant, but I’m a Brazilian who moved to Germany. One of the things I noticed when using email here is that the amount of people who have an email not @gmail.com, but whatever German provider that has to follow GDPR is much higher than what I saw back in Brazil. This suggests that the population in general in Europe is indeed more privacy-conscious.

Were those not-gmails free or paid services?

I very much doubt that people will actually get that choice, because if Facebook does give it to them, the response numbers won't look good for the model. It's easier to remove the choice altogether and then spread FUD about how it's forced on them.

> I am 100% convinced - from people around me - that those who use FB and IG don't give a damn about privacy and would rather it be free of charge.

When Apple forced apps to implement App Tracking Transparency which asks a neutral, OS-provided question to the user, only 4% opted in.

Furthermore, people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision (which is exactly why the GDPR was enacted instead of letting consumers and "the market" decide), but they do freak out when the tracking ends up backfiring on them.

> people generally don't care about privacy because they don't understand the ramifications of that decision

Every single time I point that out, I get told to show proof of such "ramifications". They just don't think they'll be impacted by this tracking, which is ridiculous. Even more strange is the position of "I have nothing to hide." - privacy != secrecy.

100% agreed - the issue is that people aren't giving _informed_ consent, I think it'd be great to have a law that basically says "the default has to be not tracking, and you can prompt and allow users to opt-in for targeted ads"

That... that is literally what GDPR is about: default is no tracking, no extra data collection. Users can opt in to data collection if they so wish.

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