I will have to disagree. In general by paying it means that you have to have some sort of account and that means that they can track you easier. To be frank I believe that the actual solution is to avoid any cloud-based services.

> To be frank I believe that the actual solution is to avoid any butt-based services.

It's a good solution for more than one reason. It also helps you avoid vendor lock-in, prevents from getting stuck with services that get gradually dumbed down in their pursuit of growth at the cost of actual usefulness, and most imporantly, shields you from losing something you depend on because the startup running the service finally got their exit.

Do you have that extension thing that turns cloud into butt? Nice!

Yes, it's been turning Internet honest for me for many years now. I'm so used to it that I forget about it every now and then ;).

There's still any number of ways to track you, however: ecommerce, credit card, ISP, email provider, etc. It would be very hard to live in the modern world without some of those tools, and few of them have any privacy or data protection guarantee attached.

Sure, but you can do a lot. If you pay a dedicated server or colocation provider to host hardware you own, they have a lot less access to your stuff than if you say, use a cloud VM provider, which is in itself at least better than using an SaaS-type solution where you're 1 database query away from fucked and with paid SaaS you're still miles better than free services where selling your data is the only means to pay for the service and to profit.

It really depends on what sort of tracking you're most concerned about though. If you're concerned about facebook or similar having your pictures and messages then a solution like this is a good option. Yes, your provider knows it's you, but unless they've invested serious effort backdooring your hardware, they can't tell what you send over SSL'd connections, they can't tell what people visiting that page are seeing and by and large, and most importantly, they don't care, they see no profit from that.

> Free means you are trading your privacy for the service.

Exactly. It should be well-known that "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.".

That is true. Also, if you are paying for the product, you may still be the product.

I did not write "if and only if". :-)

No worries - I'm not arguing with you :)