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From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
(www.engadget.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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In other news, water is wet. Honestly though, people expecting "free" services from big corpos are naive. What do they expect the servers and admins/devs are payed with?
Gmail was initially advertising funded while respecting privacy. It's a false dichotomy to argue that a service can't have a free privacy respecting offering. We've just become accustomed to accepting targeted advertising as the norm.
I don't believe anyone is arguing that it's technically impossible. But reality is pretty clear that it's implausible. Targeted ads reel in too much money.
I think the real fallacy is getting used to services being free at all. You need to pay a monthly fee for basically every utility, but as soon as it's in the digital world people expect that to change. What makes a search engine or mail provider so much different than your ISP or cable provider? You want competent services that respect your privacy? Pay for alternatives like Kagi and Proton.
It's not implausible, Proton has a free privacy respecting tier