Businesses can both charge money for a service and sell / analyze user data. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I agree. But as a rule of thumb, if someone gives you the service for free, they have no choice but to collect value from you by other means. Whereas when you pay money for the service, the business does have a choice not to sell your data. Either way, I guess we need to read the terms to be sure.

If a company has a certain type of investors or shareholders, they may have no choice but to collect value from you all means possible regardless of how much value they are already collecting.

One very underrated (or overrated depending on your pessimism) way to deliver value to customers is by offering privacy as one of the products you deliver. The issue is that privacy is hard to prove and so most claims of privacy are accepted at face value and many proclaimed privacy minded services are very much the opposite under the hood.

This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions. We could potentially manage the definitions as an industry group - but we'd need the government to get the big stick.

> This, I think, is a place where we need some regulation to codify some different forms of privacy and give the government a big stick to bop companies over the head when they violate those definitions.

I 100% agree with you, but doubt this will ever happen in a heavily pro-surveillance government in an effective corporatocracy. Therefore, I think open source can and needs to do better in providing free competition against potentially-dystopian closed-source alternatives

> Codespaces costs money.

It's going to be paid by your employer which leads to GP's concern about,

> or build a productivity dashboard so managers can fire people for not being productive enough (like Xsolla did)

Which is more likely. If your employer sets something like this up - will they use it to calculate a productivity score and use that for lay offs? Seems rather probable to me.

My company is stupid, but not that stupid. We already have vast amounts of data about checkins that could, in the hands of a stupid person, be used to create stupid developer metrics for performance evaluation, and yet I've never once in my many cross-team performance ranking meetings heard a manager who had the gall to trot out "lines of code" as a serious metric for comparing people. And I'm at a FAAMNG. ;)

Windows also costs money and is chock full of spyware.

Businesses rarely ever leave money on the table.

If they can sell the product AND sell developer productivity metrics to management, they will.

Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 costs money, but they still analyze your activity and report so called "productivity score". Maybe not sell, but I have no doubt they will analyze the data if they can.

Unfortunately, that rule doesn't apply to Microsoft and the other tech giants.