If anything, companies try to double-dip and serve multiple masters. See: the security and privacy mess in smart TVs. Last I checked, LG wasn't giving their TVs away.
This is true, and you transition from customer to eyeballs once you take delivery of the product, but it is also tempered by the fact that they would like to sell you your next TV as well.
In fact there is a pretty strong argument that they are leaving money on the table by not doing so.
Imagine you like your gmail and you have had it for the past decade. If Google charges only $1 per year across say a billion users that is a billion dollars.
Even if they lose some users at the margin it may makes sense...
According to wikipedia gmail had 1.5 billion active users in 2019.
As internet services mature and stop growing exponentially it makes sense to charge for them.
Yes it is true that some might switch but what makes more sense from the perspective of most users?
I long for a post advertising world. What cataclysmic event or human evolutionary change could cause that, I wonder.
Is there any sci-fi that has a world without advertising or is that so far-fetched it’s unimaginable to even futurists?
Even funnier, if Google search worked effectively for product discovery the vast majority of advertising would not be necessary.
I'll just let LG collect my viewing habits if that's what it takes for a good experience. But I did decline all of the agreements that have anything to do with data collection, so hopefully they're not being overly intrusive anyway.
This way I still have a "dumb TV" (apparently impossible to get now).
Second option would have been to get a projector.
It seems fine: no ads, nothing spamming, and it has an option to not share any data, which presumably (!) it pays attention to.
No, but they're selling them at cost, and using monetization tactics to make up for that over the long term.
Fortunately, it's not so bad, just run firmware updates after you get the new tv, and then disconnect it from the internet.
Not necessarily, and in fact this case I would disagree.
I trust Google's security 10x more than that of FastMail.
The 'advertising company' reaps in billions of $ with which they can get all sorts of good engineers for 0-day research, exploits, updates.
They have a lot more of a reputation to defend.
Without hard evidence, I suggest that Google is probably 'more secure' than FastMail. Certainly more than 'Mom and Pop Mail'.
Except for the bit where they read my email and advertise to me on that basis, which is admittedly an ugly tradeoff.
If you are paying for google apps this is not a trade-off. I dislike how (as a paying) customer they continually push me towards google-only <everything> but they don't require it.
> Except for the bit where they read my email and advertise to me on that basis, which is admittedly an ugly tradeoff.
Iirc, Google reads your email, but explicitly says they do not use what they read to personalize your ads.
> To provide you features like smart inbox categories, Smart Compose, and spam detection, we use Gmail data to provide a more intelligent email experience and keep you safe. - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en
Famously, a while back, at some Google subdomain, you could see a list of all of your payments extracted from your emails, but I'm not sure that still exists.
I trust Google security to protect Google, not me. For example by blocking my account.
> They have a lot more of a reputation to defend.
Actually no, if Fastmail pulled the shit that Google does, they'd be out of business.
Any company will protect itself first. As they say in the VPN world, "nobody here is going to jail for your $5/month".
that didnt stop them from having vulnerabilities in gmail that allowed anyone to fake the dkim verification and pretend to be the CEO of google, which they then ignored until someone did in fact do this, to prove it :)
The overused phrase "more secure" doesn't mean anything without context.
To evaluate the security of anything you first need to identify all the threat models that concern you (and perhaps call out the ones you don't care about). Then evaluate each solution against every threat you identified.
For instance for the threat of the vendor itself sabotaging my access to my account, I'll score FastMail far better then gmail.
I just finished reading Postmail For Dummies. Since I'm charging $5/mo for email accounts, you'll obviously want to migrate your gmail over since my solution is so much more secure.
Wherever you paid for the product seems to have little impact, the reality is that all tech giants carelessly invade your privacy with no recourse for the user.