Agreed. Mid-sized/smaller players are the places which have very poor data & security practices. Especially when they require PII as part of their operations.
Meta, Google are much better stewards of their users data. One misconception I see is claiming these companies sell user data. I'd instead say that they sell user attention.
They don’t sell user data for a very simple reason - it’s a crappy business, as you can charge much much more with to recurring sales for heavily obfuscated access to the data than just one off selling of said data.
When you think about it - initiatives are kind of aligned with user privacy (kind of, as there’s much more to the story than this simplistic point of view)
The way I've always seen it is that they'd never directly sell user data because that is their most valuable and prized asset. It's what allows them to sell targeted access to users for so much money.
sort-of agree .. the accuracy, timeliness and completeness of any real-world data will change.. many comments assume some kind of perfect knowledge, which is never the case. Selling snapshots of current profile understanding is not only better business, but can also evolves with the enterprise over years; meanwhile selling raw user profiles as a whole is more like "damaged goods at a discount" for quick profit maximizers. This said, "surveillance capitalism" is rife and inherently a step backwards from a democratic society IMHO due to information asymmetry, secrecy and income generation.
Uber/Ola at Indian airports do not actually assign you specific driver/car. You are given a PIN & asked to go queue at the relevant counter (Premier, Electric, XL, Go etc). You just get into the car then, tell your PIN & the ride starts.
> The total in the account has fallen from the original €14.3bn set aside in 2018, as the money was invested in eurozone government bonds, which have dropped in value.
> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.
Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.
I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition.
If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider.
I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere.
I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search.
Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools.
I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.
I'm not surprised that the video has been taken down since it explicitly talks about circumventing youtube ads or alternative interfaces to access youtube (newpipe, invidious etc) - https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1eT421r79x?t=1058.8
One thing which is missing in conversations about circumventing ads on youtube, is that such users are also depriving content creators of their income. For those who don't want to watch ads, feel free to subscribe to youtube premium to support creators(or directly support them).
I don't think that YouTube has anything against creators not using YouTube that can be funded via Patreon.
I'm pretty sure are just against it if people are using the platform and apps that they're are developing and maintaining without them having any possibility of getting any revenue in return.
It's so popular that people are uploading 500 hours of video every minute, so I assume that this platform scaling doesn't come for free and people who're working for YouTube to make this possible wants some money too.
Fun repo that uses the Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme to break a file into parts which can be recombined to get the original. From the README
Who this is for:
People who need to encrypt a big sensitive file like a diary and don't expect to remember any passwords years from now (but who paradoxically will be capable of remembering where they've hidden their horcruxes)
People who want to transmit files across multiple channels to substantially reduce the ability for an attacker to intercept
FAQ
Q) This isn't really in line with how horcruxes work in the harry potter universe!
A) It's pretty close! You can't allow any one horcrux to be used to resurrect the original file (and why would you that would be useless) but you can allow two horcruxes to do it (so only off by one). Checkmate HP fans.
