The way this was phased made me realize that by offering a free service funded by VC money, it squeezes the competition forcing them to reduce quality or go out of business. The monopolistic behavior to eliminate competition then increasing prices is not something that I saw before in many tech companies.
This is very similar to the anti-competitive strategy of "dumping", where you sell something at a loss to undercut a competitor. Again, the primary thing being disrupted here is "laws".
In fact, knowing that people put such a low value on their privacy nowadays, is offering them decent, innovative services in exchange for that data not by definition "doing good things to change the world"?
Snowden risked his life to show the world and public at large that they were being spied on by the US government, facilitated by the big tech companies. The response was at best apathy, at worst a thirst for Snowden's blood. It's very hard to come back now, in 2017, with "muh privacy".
Is that the right pattern?
Because it seems that a lot of things don't fit that pattern.
A lot of people smoked, and continued to smoke even after the packages all got warning stickers on them. Yet it took decades before general smoking bans went into place.
People used pull-tab cans for 20 or more years, because it was much more convenient than remembering to bring a church key to open the can. This despite many warnings about how pull-tab litter caused people to cut their feet, and how children accidentally swallowed pull-tabs inserted into the can itself. (To paraphrase, "The response was at best apathy, at worst a third for injury in others"?)
Then there are substances which are now banned for general use: asbestos, DDT, CFCs, lead paint, arsenic as a home rat poison, insecticide, and coloring agent (used in everything from children's toys to wallpaper to candy). All of them had a period where sales were relatively unrestricted, but where people knew, or should have known from its coverage in the general press, about their negatives, before they were banned.
That history of protecting citizens has almost certainly lead people to believe that if a company does X or sells X then the government has evaluated it to make sure it's safe, and has good consumer protections in place.
This isn't true, and is becoming even less true over time as the cult of "let the market decide" becomes more powerful.
Nevertheless, history shows that sometimes it takes more than 5 years (Snowden left the US in 2013) to go from "X is bad, we need to stop doing it" to actually putting laws and regulations in place to restrict X.
I tend to agree with the OP that privacy is a red herring. People do not care about sharing their data with large corporations. The idea that they do is the root cause of much wasted effort and malinvestment in the tech sector. It's a pretty idea but it's false. People will happily provide all sorts of information about themselves to get even quite trivial things for free. Companies that bet on privacy usually end up marginalised and struggling. Companies that bet on free+ads take over the world.
If governments give in to the temptation to "fix" this because of powerful newspaper owners, it will be a sad day for everyone. The silent majority that doesn't actually assign much value to trivia like their purchase history or inbox contents and already have enough bills to pay will have been oppressed by the loud minority that massively over-estimates the value and importance of "private data".
Your statement now seems to be is that no problem actually exists. This is a different argument.
I think the modern trend to put mandatory arbitration clauses into consumer contracts, and to prohibit class-action lawsuits, is a horrid perversion of justice. The government should have strong consumer protection laws and enforcement in place. Failing that, people should be able to sue. And because most people don't have much money compared to companies, they should be able to have a class-action lawsuit, with no statutory limits on possible fines or judgement. Mandatory arbitration is a big fat thumb on the scales of justice, in favor of large companies.
But so far there hasn't been much in the way of problems with mandatory arbitration clauses. There are some, and they make it to the press, but given the current Congress and Administration's view on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we'll have those clauses for some years still.
While in the EU, Japan, and other countries, such clauses are either illegal, or are much less tightly binding as in the US.
I see privacy as the same way. At some point there will be laws which place tighter controls over what a company can do with personal data. It will likely take a massive negative event. (Eg, an anonymous public torrent of all of the URLs accessed by Comcast users, indexed by account owner name and IP address. Or just the visit history of the people that the President appoints or nominates for high positions.)
For an example of a "loud minority" which changed the law for stronger privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act . This still applies to sites like Hulu, by the way.
Apple, unlike Facebook and Google, isn't an ad company. They've done a pretty good job taking over the world.
There may at some point be a huge negative event as you describe. I'm not sure there extremely rare events should be used as the basis for sweeping regulations. That has not worked out well in the past.
I did that to suggest that it may be another counter-example showing how that argument isn't really a strong one.
"That has not worked out well in the past." - the VPPA worked out pretty well, though of course not perfectly. It has been changed since then.
I personally like the requirement that if I no longer am a customer of a company (like Netflix) then they don't keep track of my records. That's a requirement of VPPA for video records, and I don't see how that requirement won't work out well for other areas.
It's like big pharma. You could think of them as the good guys who cure diseases. But the truth is that the big pharma guys are in it for the money and are ready to do anything for it.
People are starting to view the GAFA as they see big pharma and big co in general. And that's a shift from the fix-the-world-from-my-moms-garage image they had in the early 2000s.
And that's exactly the point of the article: we as tech people still think we're doing good things to change the world. But as a whole, the industry has mostly produced tools that have eroded privacy, that have isolated people from one another, that have created the gig economy, and that's about to disrupt a whole bunch of jobs.
Of course, some good things came out of it, airbnb has lowered the bar for traveling, transfer wise has made currency exchange fair, coursera brought quality college classes to a large audience, etc.
However, it looks like its giant companies can't manage to keep themselves from becoming evil. The business model of giving free service until people are hooked, and then monetizing the service by selling data has been a big part of the problem. The "if it's free, you're the product" meme was the first sign of a broad acceptance that tech wasn't there for the people's good. And now after theranos, Uber, the election's Facebook problem, it's only normal that the general public distrusts big tech companies.