> “Applying for a job or apartment or anything today means creating endless pointless copies of your pesonal information in databases across the world that will eventually be neglected, hacked, exploited, sold off etc”
This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally.
But people only see the tip of the iceberg and think EU data protection is something to do with annoying cookie banners. We need to do a better job of celebrating Europe’s real achievements in making the digital world better for its citizens. Instant zero-fee bank transfers are another example.
Yes just make user data hoarding and targeted advertising a nonviable business model, and watch the horrible secondary effects start to dissipate. it requires a lot of political will that currently isn’t there but we have become too resigned in the US that things can’t change. I still hate cookie banners though :).
That will never happen as long as people are terrified with anxiety from continuous media exaggeration and "Security and Defense" are hidden behind thick veils and dark budgets.
Idk if it's the thought that the US can't change things, but these concerns are mostly hypothetical for almost all people.
How are real people's lives being effected by these problems?
centralisation of power leads to fascism and historically people didn't really like that ie 2. WW
It doesn’t happen because when a company replaces advertising with a subscription, people balk and then switch to a competitor that doesn’t charge anything by using advertising.
We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them. They distort the idea of a free and fair marketplace by poisoning consumer expectations of what things should cost.
> We need to (once again) define “free” pricing models as predatory and broadly outlaw them
Free services funded by ads have been a boon for the poor.
I fail to see how. Having ad-subsidized access to Facebook and YouTube has not reduced poverty, hunger or made housing and healthcare more affordable for them. The overwhelming majority have not used it to up-skill or improve their income prospects. Predatory "free" pricing appears to have simply made the poor more easily targeted by propaganda and advertising.
That rips off the advertisers and/or leaves the poor poorer.
For any given ad supported service, one of two things must be true:
(1) the ad spend was more than or equal to the cost of the service for those users
(2) the ad spend was less than the cost of the service for those users
From fork (2), it follows that the service isn't sustainable anyway.
From fork (1), it follows that the buyers of the ad slots in turn only make a profit if those ads led to sales higher than the ad spend.
But for any given poor person, buying that which was advertised on the ad supported service necessarily means spending more than they would have on a non-ad-supported version of the same ad supported services.
or (3), the non-obvious, or non-advertised effects of the service may be valuable enough for powerful people to make the service "profitable" through artificial money flows (e.g. by paying for ads, endless investing, stock price manipulation, etc).
thinking of stuff like facebook here...
Paying for ads like that is still a subset of fork (1). Even as propaganda, it has to somehow be "worth it" to spend the money.
Endless investing is, depending how you look at it, either not (just) ad supported and preceeds the premise, or it still is ad supported (and hence (1)) just with extra steps to badly hide who is doing it.
Hmm… I suppose the purchase of a vote in a democracy is something that a poor person might not otherwise be able to sell, and where "we advertised and convinced you" is (depending on campaign finance etc. rules) one of the legitimate ways to do it… but even then, for reasons too long to type on my phone, I'd say in this case it would still make the poor poorer.
This assumes that poor people's attention is liquid and can readily be turned to cash whenever they please.
It doesn't matter how much you think my attention is "really worth". If I want the service now, have no cash, but can pay with my attention, I am strictly more enabled than if the service only accepts cash.
I make no assumption there.
The fork between (1), (2) is how much cash their attention is actually turned into.
To put it another way: what's the attention of a poor person really worth, in dollars? Answer is always less than or equal to the amount they can spend.
The comment you were responding to said that the free tiers were a boon for the poor and you responded that they (under the fork of interest) "left poor people poorer".
I mean I supposed every transaction leaves someone poorer of something and richer in something else. I'm not sure of the point though.
I concede that if the ad companies are willing to forgo collecting X dollars in exchange for showing you an ad then it must be worth >=X dollars to the ad company for the person to see the ad.
But it remains true that the poor person has no way to convert their attention directly into X dollars, and all that taking away the free tier does is make it so that someone who would have made a trade (of their attention for a service) cannot do so.
Have they though? Have you seen the scammy, misleading, trash ads that litter most sites and wondered, "who falls for this crap and gives these people money?"
Converting a service to a subscription is hard. Customers get used to "free" and will always be resentful.
Starting as a subscription service at least doesn't feel like a broken promise.
The problem is that a lot of these services are just worthless. As in their market price is precisely zero dollars and zero cents. The reason you won't get me to subscribe to your random recipe or news website isn't the competition - the site simply provides no value. If it also costs nothing, then I might be indifferent to browsing it when it appears as a search result. If it costs anything, I definitely won't. I also feel the same about your competitors, so I'm not replacing you with them - I'm just browsing this type of content less. And that's a good thing for me and for society overall.
>This problem is practically fixed in the EU (to the extent that legislation can fix it). Data protection laws have enough teeth that real companies can’t afford to keep or sell customer information illegally
Not even close to the case for any big player. It just exists as a moat for smaller companies.
https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ and sort by amount, these are not small companies and amounts aren't exactly trivial either, with a mechanism to get bigger if ignored.
Meta appear 4 times in the top 10 with a total of about 2.25bn in fines. That sounds like a lot but it's only 1.6% of their revenue. As a cost of doing business that's probably acceptable to the Meta board. It'd cost them more to do things properly, so there's little incentive to do so.
The fines will increase if they continue breaking the rules, so there is incentive.
The fines are calculated to be enough to pad the coffers of the EU bureucracy and for FB to not really care, to keep this racket going.
Besides fines being able to grow that's global revenue, probably a bigger part of EU revenue. And their margins aren't 100%.
I've worked with many large enterprises, including US megacorps, who have completely changed how they handle EU data post-GDPR. It's not perfect, but it's certainly not just a toll to be paid to continue old practices.
Like with most laws, smaller companies have smaller chance to get caught and smaller likely penalties.
But I've noticed there are two kinds of people when it comes to entrepreneurship and regulations. There are people who go all gung-ho and do what they want and ignore the law as much as they can get away with. And there are people who are so scared of things like laws that they never become entrepreneurs. I don't see much of a middle ground in practice.
Was this posted from a Brussels IP? This certainly seems to reflect how the EU regulators see themselves, but I haven't met many real Europeans who have themselves realized any actual value coming from their laughable, vague attempts at legislating the problems away. The best they've managed is making some Europeans smug, but their data still exists in all the same places. Worst case a few fines get levied, for megacorps that can easily afford them, while small businesses grapple with confusing and vague language that threaten to punish them even absent any actual harms or even ill intentions.
So, if Europeans think these rules improved the situation, they are smug and dont count.
Frankly, in here EU did a good job, certainly better then USA does. It would be neat if USA made similar laws too.
Megacorps do get bigger fines then small companies, actually. Megacorps existence is also literally result of winner takes all and rich are untouchable legal system cranked to 11 Americans are proud of.
I didn't say the happy Europeans don't count, I said that their data is still in all the same places as everyone else's and thus haven't realized any concrete benefit. The requests to be able to download your data which almost no one ever does, all the requirements of keeping the data on EU servers, all that stuff, never has a measurable impact on anyone's quality of life. And people in the EU still choose free, ad-supported crap just like they do everywhere else.
And the regulatory environment 100% advantages large businesses who can afford to hire dozens of compliance attorneys, and who can handle the risks of noncompliance fines.
PS: I'm not saying US regulates anything effectively either. We just allow every merger until 2 remain in a given market, and then say "Good. We still have competition. Everything must be fine!"
> Frankly, in here EU did a good job
People in the EU are still using Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp. Zuckerberg did a "ok, if you don't want us to track you, you can pay 12€/month" and everyone just smashed the "I consent to get my data mined forever" button.
Not to mention that we *still* have lobbying for chat control.
Every measure from the EU is, as always, meant to look like our beloved bureaucrats are doing something but absolute ineffective at changing the status quo.
Elsewhere there is no choice. How is that better?
What do you suggest instead?
> How is that better?
Things elsewhere are bad, but the EU is worse because it lies to people about the efficacy of its regulations and the whole apparatus only exist to make lawmakers and lobbyists a justification for their existence.
Let's stop pretending that the EU has done anything more than political theater.
> What do you suggest instead?
Break apart any company that has more than 150 employees (by employee, also count individuals working more than 50% of the time to the same company): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641