Are they profitable? Because they exist don’t mean they are “thriving”.

Thriving may be a bit strong - These are small potatoes compared to apple, sure, but these are tech obsessed people buying privacy orientated products.

Librem 5 raised over $2.1 million

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/purism-librem-5-crowdfun...

The VPN market is measured in the billions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/542817/worldwide-virtual...

People spend money in this area. The privacy orientated crowd is willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Please keep orientating products towards it.

edit: sorry, for some reason I'm unable to reply to the comment below. Purism raised 2.1 million pre-selling their the librem 5, not in shares or anything.

You need to wait a bit for the reply button to appear. The site has a delay to prevent discussions from getting too heated. (The delay increases the deeper a comment thread gets.)

Woah, that's a really thoughtful feature. Is there somewhere I can find all of the, like, rules of HN similar to this one?

Sadly, I don't think so. The best source I know of is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented, but it's missing a lot of stuff like that bit about the reply button.

I learned about the reply button because I too was once wondering why it sometimes doesn't appear, and I Googled it.

There are enough sponsored videos on YouTube tech channels by vpn providers that I think it’s safe to concede individuals are paying for those services.

The other products and services mentioned don’t seem to be prospering the same way.

Are most people using VPNs for privacy? Every individual I know that pays for one does it so they can watch TV in a different country or something similar.

There's also lots of businesses that use them for accessing internal networks externally.

I've never met anyone in real life that is using one for privacy reasons.

Using a VPN to watch TV in another country is a privacy reason.

The end result might be privacy, but the demand is for bypassing content blocking. Your average user of a VPN doesn't care if it prevents people from identifying them, all they care about is if it lets them watch The Office from wherever they are.

Well, you could argue about whether it counts as privacy per se, but: a, they don't care to ensure that no one can identify them; b, they very much do care that it prevents whatever server they're getting The Office from from identifying them.

There were also ads for Pets.com....

Needing to raise money kind of means they aren’t profitable.

As far as the “VPN market” according to the link, they are mostly referring to businesses using VPNs in the enterprise not individual users.

Needing to raise money means they don't have the luxury of volume to produce any product and that it is a risky business. Having raised the money, though, is proof that they are indeed profitable.

Unless I misunderstand you, this is not correct. Uber, for example, has raised billions of dollars and has never made so much as a cent of profit.

> Are they profitable?

Yes. I hate this attitude that its not enough to be profitable you have to make literally all the money or your business is a failure.

How did you get from

Are they profitable

To

you have to make literally all the money or your business is a failure

My assumption is that the OP meant - every company is compared to Apple and Google and Facebook in terms of profit. That the business in question has to make extreme amounts of money to be considered a success, when in reality, if the business is sustainable and marginally profitable, it should be good enough for some cases.

If we're talking about privacy, there seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a companies profits and their willingness to sell your private information. As someone who values my privacy, I prefer smaller, stable companies because I'm more confident they are acting with my best interests in mind; not chasing massive growth and huge profits.

I spend quite a bit of money per month to maintain some semblance of privacy and none of the companies I support are raking in millions in profit every quarter.

Until they get bought out by a larger company.

See Onova....

Agreed. At which point I'm free to move to a different provider, but yes, this is always a possibility.

Thriving as in their own miniscule segment destined to remain marginal. Definitely not apple target market.

I'm not arguing that, I'm responding to this part of your comment, by showing products the privacy obsessed segment are presumably happy with as they are paying for:

"Trying to sell something to privacy obsessed tech segment is a futile effort. They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway."

I think you're both right. He's saying that from the perspective of the largest private business in the world with $100B+ yearly revenues, derping about on services worth a few million in revenue is just noise. Apple isn't going to shift it's business to capture a $10M/yr market or whatever it is.

And you're off here being like "BUT THEY DO EXIST (even if they are so trivially small that they wouldn't even make a rounded-up single line on Apple's financial disclosures)".

From Apple and his perspective, these tiny businesses are irrelevant.

Human languages are not code. Statements have meaning within a context.

This sounds to me like moving the goalpost.

First it was both:

> Trying to sell something to privacy obsessed tech segment is a futile effort. They are never happy and don’t want to pay for anything anyway. But that is not their target market anyway.

Now just

> But that is not their target market anyway.

I was replying to a comment about negative comments here and that they are not who apple is targeting so the negativity here is just noise.

Those listed companies exist in an entirely different universe to apple and talking about them is entirely irrelevant here. Their existence proves nothing.

Other peoples concerns are not "noise" in any other than a derogative way and listing companies that refute a substantial part of your comment under your comment is not "entirely irrelevant".

edit (for clarity): Saying that Apples mass-market approach spares them from catering to privacy concerned, somewhat still niche interests would've been a completely valid comment.

The message would not have needed the false part.

For every puri.sm I'd wager there is a SilentCircle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12047219

How is this different than any other industry? Most start-ups fail, security industry or otherwise.

Sorry I wasn't elaborate. What I was trying to say was SilentCircle had the money, the people, the pedigree, the vision and yet failed. Privacy is a hard sell and one of the reasons is that it is expensive and comes at a cost of inconvenience, unfortunately, given then way BigTech has shaped its offerings over the years.

puri.sm may yet execute well and take-off but privacy remains a seriously hard problem to tackle (due to govt, ad-net, big-tech) yet easily a problem to get passionate about.

I still don’t see how this suggests security is not a lively, profitable industry. The same anecdote could apply in spades to food startups, telecom startups, sports analytics startups, makeup startups and dozens of other types of businesses.

lavabit.com returns? Good news for me.

The total number of users of those systems, for all time, combined, is smaller than the average new iPhone users per day.