Nothing in life is a guarantee. It’s pure pedantry to hear someone say “I would rather pay than be the product” and to choose to interpret that as “I believe that paying always guarantees that the company will never also use indirect monetization”.

Preferring business with direct monetization models is risk mitigation, not a naive (and incorrect) belief in a magic bullet solution to a complex problem.

I say that where money can be made, money will be made. But we have laws and regulations, and when the Metas of this world play dirty, you can stick it to them. (in most cases it will be too little - too late)(but the solution is not to roll over)

Consider that paying makes you prime rib for Sunday dinner from a data perspective: card verified PII.

And do not forget that you can be assigned an ID and disassociated from your data, which can then be tracked anonymously completely legally as a non-personally identifiable account. And let me assure you de-anonymizing a collected dataset is often not a very difficult problem in the modern data brokerage filled era.

We cannot pay out way out of this. We need rights to privacy and deletion enshrined in constitutional-style law, and soon. It must become a fundamental human right.

Now it makes sense - they meant wary / leery.

Indeed. A mistyped phrase missed by both my sleep addled self and my annoying spell checker.

Rather than be defenseive (fore I gaudere gehrehte), let’s reflect on this moment to enjoy the fact that “we have over two thousand years of records of old people claiming that language has already peaked.”

I pay for the ad-free experience on every service that offers it, and I still see ads. The 4 second hulu splash screen at the start of EVERY item I stream is still an ad. HBO, sorry MAX, showing 30s ads for other shows EVERY. TIME. I stream something, still an ad. At least those I can skip, but I shouldn't have to.

There was no real purpose to my post, I just needed to vent about that part your point.