> Most people don't understand the risks and how badly mass surveillance done by Google / Facebook / etc can be abused.

This is totally dodging the issue.

Would they pay instead of allowing that collection?

Given the choice of "pay for this service", "stop using this service", "give up your data", even with a full understanding of the risks and the extent of this data, the general public has shown time and time again they will take the last option.

People do not like to pay for things.

I see way too many arguments about privacy that doesn't seem to grasp that the core of today's tech industry is built around this fact.

People will pay 5$ for 50 cents of coffee beans and enough sugar to drown a fly a day, but they will never pay 5$ a month to access nearly the entirety of mankind's collective knowledge at their fingertips in milliseconds in the form of a search index spending millions of dollars a year to index it all.

> People will pay 5$ for 50 cents of coffee beans and enough sugar to drown a fly a day, but they will never pay 5$ a month to access nearly the entirety of mankind's collective knowledge at their fingertips in milliseconds

I pay a lot more than $5/month for Internet service.

Would you pay $5 on top of that ISP charge to Google, so that your search experience is ad-free? Would you pay $5 for fastmail.com's standard plan over gmail?

$5 for a tracking free Google, including no Google ads on any site? Maybe. But then it would be $5 to any other tracking network and there will probably be some other tracking with no opt out. I'll be still running adblockers and privacy extensions, so paying is pointless.

Ha, case in point. A technical person talking themselves out of a hypothetical situation where they pay, now imagine everyone else.

The point is that I wouldn't be paying for a search service, I would be paying for not to be tracked, which is something I don't want to happen. It's so similar to paying for insurance against fires (think of gangster movies.) I don't like it.

I in fact do pay for fastmail.

You and the vast minority of internet users.

Agreed.

I recall people were talking about turning back to piracy in response to the fragmentation of streaming services.

Disney plus will cost around 7 dollars a month, Netflix costs 13, HBO costs 15. This is about 23, 45, and 50 cents per day respectively.

Yet this change was enough to cause some people to angrily proclaim that they'll go back to illegally downloading movies and tv shows.

Agree about the overall point, but this example is unfortunate: complaints about fragmentation are not only about money: crappy apps, less convenience, lack of availability (outside US), etc.

I'd think single source vs fleet of disparate services is a bigger concern. If I have to track and maintain 10 subscription services to get the stuff I want, I'd rather just pirate it, the inconvenience factor is too high otherwise.

Look at music, this seems solved there.

If Spotify was $50 or $75 a month a lot more people would not be paying and do things illegally. Can’t blame just fragmentation.

One option I also think we are forgetting, Services like ProtonMail and Tutanota. Both are private and encrypted, both are free (with an option to pay for more services). These services are out there, but general knowledge of them is not so high. I believe more users would switch to them if they knew about them. My own parents came to me asking if there was something they could do after being creeped out/scared by big techs privacy invasive tracking and stalking. They weren't aware of the availability of other services and yet they went looking when it got bad enough. How much sooner for others if they were aware of these alternative services? We could all argue back and forth about both sides, but I believe that both sides would be truly surprised about what would actually happen.

edit: typos

I agree and this seems to be the main problem: we are losing privacy today but we will suffer most of the consequences tomorrow. So most of us are not aware of the real cost we're paying and unable to make an informed decision.

Welcome to democracy, where an individual with zero understanding of an issue can vote on it and is legally entitled to have their opinion taken seriously.

Yes, I think about this often and it appears to be a bug in the democracy system but any attempt to tie voting rights to knowledge seems to create even more bugs.

It really does feel like there should be some kind of aptitude test involved in getting a vote, doesn't it?

We need to require at least some minimal standard. A common-sense starting point would be literacy...

Just for context: do you have any alternatives?