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