
Why we can't have privacy on the internet (2018) - tikhonj
https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2018/the_price_of_privacy.html
======
jakelazaroff
_> Every online service costs money to provide. [...] Since most people are
unwilling to pay for online services, the way to cover these costs is by
advertising to the users._

Why does it follow that we should be okay with privacy intrusions?

Companies don't have a right to their business model. If we as a society
decide to limit how companies can collect and use our data, and it forces some
to start charging their users or go out of business, that's okay! Just because
that's a sustainable way to run a business right now doesn't mean it should
be.

~~~
josho
The reason why consumers are unwilling to pay for service is because VCs have
funded companies ability to give away tremendous value to achieve fast growth.
Because of this consumers now have an expectation for free.

Previously when software was sold at retail, consumers had no qualms paying
for software.

So maybe you are right and the root problem are the business models and
specifically the funding behind those models.

~~~
vageli
> The reason why consumers are unwilling to pay for service is because VCs
> have funded companies ability to give away tremendous value to achieve fast
> growth. Because of this consumers now have an expectation for free.

> Previously when software was sold at retail, consumers had no qualms paying
> for software.

When was this? I recall the warez, cracking and keygen scenes being huge years
ago (before the rise of SaaS).

~~~
anonymousab
In this case 'people' does not mean 'every single person' but rather 'a
significantly large enough amount of people as to represent a valid business
model in many cases'.

------
saagarjha
> There are bad actors out there - fraudsters/scammers, terrorists laundering
> money, legal gun manufacturers moving money around, child pornographers,
> people who believe in evolution (even among humans), people advocating
> abandoning Islam, Russians posting Pepe memes, and journalists/revenge
> pornographers revealing truthful information that people want kept hidden.

I can think of maybe two of these that are are “bad actors”.

------
novok
I did some napkin math on ad revenues arpu for the big 5 ad supported tech
companies and came to the conclusion that you could cover all of their
revenues if you could charge $7-10/month for every user, which is netflix
money for a set of services that are far more useful than netflix itself.

So I forsee something like 'setapp/netflix for privacy' that could cover it
all for $10/month with enough scale.

Because honestly, paying $10 for each subservice quickly adds up to
$100s/month

~~~
johnchristopher
I strongly believe it's doable and there's a market - although small - for
that. WhatsApp used to be $1 a year and it was profitable.

> [https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
> finance/04091...](https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-
> finance/040915/how-whatsapp-makes-money.asp) The short answer used to be $1
> at a time. In some countries, the app used to cost about $1 to download; in
> others, the first year is free, but each subsequent year costs $1 – in other
> words, WhatsApp had a subscription model. At the peak under this model it
> has about 700 million users worldwide; yearly revenue can be estimated at
> $700 million per year at this time.

There's no reason we couldn't get a $10 a month budget that would give users
mail, instant messaging, file sharing or hosting of some kind. But there
wouldn't be any of the perspective of the spectacular kind of growth the
adtech bubble is trying to sell or integrated software solutions à-la Google
that monopolies like so much.

~~~
novok
Most whatsapp users didn't pay the $1/year over several years I've heard.

------
api
"People won't pay for privacy" is it, and it's really a subset of the larger
truth that it's hard to get people or businesses to pay for security. (Privacy
is a part of security.)

I worked with a serial entrepreneur once who refused to tell his tech people
to spend any time on security. He said "no company ever failed because of bad
security... nobody cares about anything except UX and price." I dont think he
was 100% right but I do think he was like 98% right.

Privacy is like legroom on flights. Everyone complains about it being taken
away but nobody will pay even a little bit for it. Price signals say nobody
really cares.

Meanwhile advertisers, governments, and political propagandists will pay
handsomely for user data. If anything the price signals say to minimize
privacy and maximize surveillance surface area.

~~~
saagarjha
Many people will pay a premium for privacy if you bundle it with the other
things, though: see Apple’s market strategy.

~~~
themacguffinman
So, in other words, they're not paying a premium for privacy, they're paying a
premium for the other things you bundle.

------
earenndil
The only reason that private/censorship-free platforms end up filled with
nazis, is that they have nowhere else to go. If _all_ the platforms are
private/censorship-free, then the problem is mitigated.

------
xfitm3
Classic fear mongering. The so called risks of these bad actors are part of
life, and something we must accept. There will always be evil.

------
cosmodisk
I think this is because of the assumed level of risk. People don't think it'd
happen to them.My colleague's house was nearly burgled. Once that happened, he
invested in intrusion detection system and etc.So his level of assumed risk
has gone off the charts. Some years ago I made a suggestion to the company
owners that we should ramp up on security,at least starting with getting an
antivirus. One said he'd use the insurance from the bank if we get
robbed,while the other said it slows down his PC( an avid player)...While now
we do have much more than just an antivirus, the assumed level of risk is
still pretty low. People simply don't care...

~~~
pirocks
Not sure exactly how to phrase this comment.

If I see a computer with an antivirus on it(besides the default windows
defender thing), I assume it is less secure than something with an antivirus.
Most often it was installed by someone who was either mislead about the
benefits of an antivirus and/or tricked into installing it. Getting adblock is
an massively better way of making a computer secure.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I admit, if I see a computer with anti-virus software running on it these
days, my first assumption is that its the anti-virus software that's the
scam/payload...

------
danShumway
> If we built a privacy preserving payment network, it would be used for money
> laundering, drug sales and ransomware.

Like cash!

> There are privacy preserving/censorship resistant social networks. They're
> full of Nazis.

Oh crud, has anyone told Mastodon yet? This seems like the sort of thing
they'd want to know.

I guess it's time to go back to safer, Nazi-free networks like Twitter.

~~~
pessimizer
Or the telephone network

------
verisimilitudes
This article is drivel.

>how many of you pay at least 500rs/month for services that give you privacy

It's my understanding that's between $7.00 and $8.00; I pay less than half of
that to have an entire server I use for things such as hosting my own email
server for my personal use.

>Instead of paying for it, many of the people at the panel wanted the
government to mandate it. Moreover, many people seemed to think it would
somehow be free to provide.

I can understand why this would be looked down upon, but isn't this the manner
of thing a government is intended to do? If we're going to pretend democracy
is so great, then people wanting the government to outlaw certain business
models is perfectly reasonable.

>Will you pay $20-50 a month to replace your free online services with privacy
preserving ones?

I'll pay for a server and that's all. If I can no longer read some articles
online because of a pay wall, then I won't, but I may if it's otherwise
available to me gratis, but I still won't allow any JavaScript to run and so
won't see any advertisements. If they dislike people not viewing
advertisements, they should have a pay wall, but many of these organizations
are aware people won't pay for what they offer.

>User tracking enables product managers/UI designers to figure out exactly
what customers want, and give it to them.

They can go to Hell.

>A special case of fraud which also relates to the problem of paying for
services with advertising is display network fraud. Here's how it works. I run
"My Cool Awesome Website About Celebrities", and engage in all the trappings
of a legitimate website - creating content, hiring editors, etc. Then I pay
some kids in Ukraine to build bots that browse the site and click the ads.
Instant money, at the expense of the advertisers.

This never ceases to amuse me, so far.

>To prevent this, the ad network demands the ability to spy on users in order
to distinguish between bots and humans.

They can also go to Hell.

>Question: What does the government call a payment platform that provides
privacy to it's users? >Answer: Money laundering.

Money laundering is a made-up crime, just as with jaywalking and copyright
infringement.

>In many cases, censorship authorities require social networks and others to
track and notify them about people posting illegal content (Nazi imagery,
child pornography, Savita Bhabhi, anti-Islamic content).

Oh, so the government makes rules that make something illegal, so the illegal
thing is bad. Yes, I can't run a service that transfers money and is
unmoderated, because it's illegal. I'm American and I'm well aware this
''freedom'' I enjoy is a lie.

>This is a fundamental collective action problem, and no player in the game
seems to have the ability change things.

Right, governments conspire against their citizens, but this is an intractable
problem.

>There are bad actors out there - fraudsters/scammers, terrorists laundering
money, legal gun manufacturers moving money around, child pornographers,
people who believe in evolution (even among humans), people advocating
abandoning Islam, Russians posting Pepe memes, and journalists/revenge
pornographers revealing truthful information that people want kept hidden. Any
privacy preserving network, at it's core, allows these people to engage in
these actions without interference.

Many of these things aren't like the others.

What utter foolishness.

~~~
FluffyKitty
Is running a server really that cheap if you include the up front costs,
maintenance, and your own time? What about the costs of having an offsite
backup?

As someone who also has their own personal server, I can definitely say it's
not cheap.

~~~
verisimilitudes
>Is running a server really that cheap if you include the up front costs,
maintenance, and your own time?

It's annoying, but it's still cheap. What ''up front costs'' do you mean?
Maintenance is mostly me struggling with software someone else wrote and
wanting to replace it with my own; the smaller services I run, Gopher and
Finger, use software I wrote so I need not configure some awful software
written by someone else. My goal is to eventually only run services with
server software I've written, such as for email and FTP and whatnot. I have
spare time and knowing how to maintain a server is useful.

I'm clearly an advanced user, however. Still, I've offered others some things,
not that they want them. I could host email for my family and whatnot if I
needed to.

>What about the costs of having an offsite backup?

I use scp to transfer it to my machine. It's all measured in single digit
megabytes.

>As someone who also has their own personal server, I can definitely say it's
not cheap.

Okay. I don't know what you do with yours, but I run email, HTTP, Gopher,
Finger, and I want to have FTP and Bittorrent available soon. The email server
gives me the most problems, but that's mostly because of other email servers,
as I didn't need to do much configuration and it's measured in hours rather
than days. The HTTP is preconfigured and I've written the software I use for
Gopher and Finger, although I want to replace it with better software I write,
later.

------
miki123211
When I see things like this, I just wish HN had a superupvote button.
Definitely adding this to my "favorite, underappreciated articles that
everyone should read" list. I think a solution to the problems outlined in the
article is sneakily smuggling privacy with something else (Apple sort of does
that) or making government resistant solutions. I mean systems that you don't
even run, that you release to the world and you have no control over.
Solutions that communicate in ways hard to detect, and have no central points
of failure. Solutions that are hard to shut down, that never die unless the
last two computers using them die. They must be tampering and censorship
resistant, no matter if you call the censorship censorship, protection against
terrorism or preventing copyright infringement. Yes, it is hard, especially
that, for any hope of success, the solutions must be as good (or better) than
centralized ones. If they are not (if their UX is not), people won't flock to
them. That is our only hope of winning in this war. The fight will be hard. It
laready is, but that's the only way forward, if we don't want to live in an
Orwellian state in twenty years.

