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lori

I'm calling this the Two Money rule of data privacy, paying doesn't make your data safe

27 Dec 2024 at 2:33 | Open on hackers.town
7 comments
lori

Whether or not you're paying has no bearing on whether you are or are not the product.

That has a lot more to do with the people in charge of the product and how big the company is.

A tiny open source hobby project may be free AND not sell your data. A company that sells you a product may also sell your data for Two Money. There's not actually a correlation between whether you're paying and whether your data gets sold anymore.

27 Dec 2024 at 2:39 | Open on hackers.town
lori

Honestly I think this idiom was pretty true at one point. That point is long gone because now everyone knows how lucrative selling user data is. Everyone that can get away with it will sell it. Unless, like some small dev with some tiny app on GitHub they do as a hobby, they aren't in it to make any money at all. But if you're a business and in the business of making money, you wanna make Two Money. And if you say you don't want to make Two Money, you might later decide to make Two Money, or sell to someone who wants to make Two Money. The only way to avoid Two Money is to use software that doesn't have data of yours to sell in the first place, which is extremely difficult. But you can't take this on faith alone.

Honestly I think this idiom was pretty true at one point. That point is long gone because now everyone knows how lucrative selling user data is. Everyone that can get away with it will sell it. Unless, like some small dev with some tiny app on GitHub they do as a hobby, they aren't in it to make any money at all. But if you're a business and in the business of making money, you wanna make Two Money. And if you say you don't want to make Two Money, you might later decide to make Two Money, or sell...

27 Dec 2024 at 2:51 | Open on hackers.town
aburka 🫣

@lori the best part is that in the fullness of time, everything gets bought out by a private equity firm who will absolutely sell your data to make Two Money if that wasn't already happening

27 Dec 2024 at 3:01 | Open on hachyderm.io
rakoo
@lori

That rule is true in the very mathematical sense: "A => B" doesn't automatically imply "B => A".

"If the sky is blue it means the sun must be up" doesn't imply the reverse ("if the sun is up the sky must be blue")

However the saying ir not enough, what's missing is "if it's a commercial product/service". That's important because if it's not then it's not happening, and if it's a libre software you can even take steps to *ensure* it is not happening.
@lori

That rule is true in the very mathematical sense: "A => B" doesn't automatically imply "B => A".

27 Dec 2024 at 10:20 | Open on blah.rako.space
estelle

@lori pricing of pretty much everything has converged to "what the market will bear" and the market has all too easily borne having their data sold anyway,

i think it's the european market that did something to start regulating this

(advertisers hate this)

27 Dec 2024 at 4:27 | Open on mstdn.social
Chris Harrington ☕✊

@lori The classic example here being the implausibly cheap product, like an indefinite service for a one-time payment.

27 Dec 2024 at 4:32 | Open on mspsocial.net
Laberpferd

@lori im getting increasingly often the impression that this, as well as its brother "you get what you pay for" is said mostly from people who want to sell products that can not easily judged for their quality

27 Dec 2024 at 7:37 | Open on sueden.social
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