Comment by rob74

> she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model.

There is also a third alternative: Threema (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.threema.app...) is a privacy-focused messenger app that tries to cover its costs by *gasp* asking for money for the app! But of course those notoriously financially-conservative Swiss can't hold a candle to Signal, who first decided to give away their app, same as those other messenger-making companies flush with cash, and then found out that supporting all those users who download your free app actually costs money...