<rant>
I'm getting so sick of people bitching about their privacy and apps (looking at you gdpr).
They want full anonymity and share 0 data... well fine but then pay me 2.99 a month to use my service... oh you don't want to spend money well ok then, ill use some of your metrics and share them with advertisers so you can keep using the service at no cost... oh you don't want us to collect the data you are already spewing around on every online platform? well then we cant have you using our service because you are costing us money... what? the gdpr is forcing us to keep providing you with the service... but... who is going to pay for resource costs?!
arrghh!!
</rant>

ps: the gdpr is so full of loopholes, half the arguments you "nerds(be honest you read it on facebook that we have to delete you data...haha..)" use for how great it is are...well... moot

pps: with you nerds I don't mean the readers of this

When you have overhead cost due to server maintenance, paycheck...

-You usually are providing a service, that service you make pay your user for, they want that service so they are willing to. For those users, you shouldn't take more (so data or metrics) than what you asked for (money for your services).

-For free service, you can use advertiser but you have to be open with your audience, they know that the service is free and you have costs, they dont mind the ads while it stays a fair game

-For open source service, you have still costs but you dont want to rely on ads so you ask help to the community or search for public funding, in that way you are making a service for the greater good and spending for the best.

When you dont have extra costs (meaning its all client side, the only thing you invest it is time and energy). If you share and make it available for everyone, you should not expect users to pay for it, or you are entering one of the previous categories.

As far as i am concern, for me only these option exists for a product

-Full price (it can be a subscription)
-Ads price (users dont pay but know he will have ads somewhere which correspond to his preferences)
-Communities price (some ppl will pay for the others so all can benefit)
-No price (the ground work is freely shared for all without expecting anything)

@FrodoSwaggins You're willing to pay, but the vast majority of everyday users aren't.

They also give any app any permission it asks for without batting an eye.

If you actually care about your privacy, you'll do research as to why the app needs the permissions.

People "care" about their privacy because it's trendy.

@hube this is actually the way I do things, my whole rant may have been a bit very anti-privacy of tone hehe, but hence it was a vent ^^

@stuxnet this does indeed catch the tone, I guess i am indeed a bit sick of the whole privacy as a trend business going on, meanwhile they just throw everything online without a second thought

@FrodoSwaggins Your last comment is a stretch.

I know people that play games 24/7 but would never spend a single dollar on it. That doesn't make it "not worth it" just because they're not going to pay.

It really is trendy though. Not in the tech community. But just like any other social issue, the buzz around security died down with the general public. When the Facebook shit storm was going down, even the non techies were onboard with the privacy hype train. But look in on them now? They're still using Instagram, Twitter, and have the map active on Snapchat.

These same people won't use smart speakers because they're spy tools, yet they leave their location on 24/7.

@Stuxnet while I get some of your arguments (especially your 24/7 gamers one :rolling_eyes:) I don't understand why you require these users to give up their social media or other privacy ignorant services. Only because someone decided to leave their Snapchat map on, doesn't mean the person didn't give it a thought. There are people who genuinely like this feature and they know they can only use this feature if they give up some of their privacy and they know what they are getting into.

Furthermore I think some of these social medias try to respect your privacy as good as possible, and I think the GDPR is the best way to find out if they do. Instagram for example doesn't care about the GDPR and most likely doesn't care about your privacy, I never subscribed to a thing and they are sending me countless emails "hey, hey, come back, blablabla". Twitter on the other hand gave us a whole new interface (on mobile at least) to customize our privacy preferences.

This is my opinion at least...

@FrodoSwaggins Will defrost respond tonight!

Just want to know one thing, what does the OR define as privacy?

@Stuxnet Arguing based on trendiness is typically a tactic to attempt to divert attention from the actual principles involved. While there are certainly a lot of people who are ignorantly entitled (in their own minds) to free things everywhere, that doesn't mean that those providing a service are entitled to collect anywhere near the data they do. I don't know what data collection you would consider acceptable, but a typical example these days is Facebook, which admitted that they collect everything their users do while connected to Facebook servers. (A widely used user analytics tool advertises on its homepage that you can play back user sessions complete with mouse movements.) This type of behavior goes far beyond what is reasonable, and should not be defended. (I'm not going to say that no tradeoffs are acceptable, but most existing trades are far too skewed in favor of the big providers.)

I don't get the idea behind the GDPR either, and I think that this is something that @Alice may want to chime in a bit about as well.. if we're calling the big guns anyway, I'll gladly call in some as well :)

Now don't get me wrong, I care a lot about privacy, and I care a lot about great developers who make great apps. So I pay for all of them whenever they offer me the means to do it.

But sadly, not all people are like that. Many people are idiots when it comes to privacy, and are just as much leeches. 24/7 gamers were mentioned earlier, indeed those people care about the app but won't pay a dime for it.. guess what, because they think that they're somehow "entitled to free service". And there's a boatload of people that are like that.

As for numbers, devRant is an app which many of its members like *a lot*, me included. And while I'm paying for it, the devRant++ members make up only about 1% of the community. Granted, many people in here are students and would definitely become a paid member too if they could, but still.. point is, many people won't pay even if what you create is good.

And yeah privacy because "hurr durr I want free stuff that I am entitled to without allowing you to make money" is becoming a trend nowadays, greatly amplified by the clueless US Senate and the EU Parliament. Meanwhile they are technologically as advanced as dinosaurs and I wouldn't be surprised if they still have a 70's mainframe for a database of citizen information in production somewhere.

Lastly, yeah the GDPR is extremely flawed. From what I can tell, it only involves websites and apps. But does it cover the really nasty stuff like Google integration into Android, or the spyware that is the built-in system apps put there by manufacturers? Does it cover stuff like Intel ME, or AMD PSP? No it doesn't. And that shit can't even be disabled if you wanted to.

Privacy is important, but the GDPR isn't solving it. It stifles innovation and impedes revenue.

"if people aren’t willing to pay for it then it isn’t worth paying for which means it’s worthless"

I'm willing to bet if Instagram started charging people 5-10$ a month, people would drop it like a brick, but right now its pretty much the hottest thing out there.

I am not entirely sure what the definition of value is in this case, but i wouldn't call a 102 billion market value, worthless

Oh another good one, wikipedia, they constantly pretty much have to beg for donations because they hardly get enough, and you are not gonna convince me wikipedia is worthless

people dont want to pay, regardless if the service is "worthless"

@linuxxx (need to find this rant on desktop)

Regardless of the new GDPR, I've been 'bitching' about my privacy for a long time now.

I don't want to share 0 percent data. And I can't. Even if I work through tor the entire time, you could technically find out something about me through multiple types of data analysis so i'd never be able to reach that 0.

I'm not spewing anything around. I'm totally fine with you saying that about a lot of internet users but don't place them all in the same spot because we're not all the same.

I don't mind metrics/stats, hell, I collect them myself. BUT: solely in a way that a users privacy is protected. Why?! Because many analytics services/programs are by default integrated within mass surveillance networks/engines (take google's analytics, integrated within the worldwide prism surveillance network and thus sending everything it collects directly through to the NSA).

That's argument number one as I don't want to be the one being responsible for *ANY* user getting into a mass surveillance database solely because I'd like some metrics/analytics.

Then, even if you host something yourself which extensively collects data, how are you sure that this won't *ever* get hacked and leaked? Hell, even the NSA itself lost undiscovered exploits through a hack which made that a massive amount of devices worldwide became the victim of ransomware attacks (WannaCry).
There have been many leaks which brought out data which can have disastrous consequences when leaked online.

*but this data can't hurt anyone!!!* - those are your words. As long as someone can exploit some information and fuck someone else with it, it can hurt someone.

If you depend on a user's ignorance through them clicking through an agreement, are you really that much better than any person who is careless enough to put their users at risk of getting involved of data leakage or having their data forwarded right into a surveillance network?

(@FrodoSwaggins)