this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024

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Privacy

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174

'Pay or Okay' explained: Why more and more websites make you pay for your privacy - noyb (noyb.eu)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I misread pay as gay and I thought this thread was going to get spicy

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago (2 children)

My biggest concern is they will hold your data hostage if you don't pay or try to leave.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (13 children)

Can't do that in the EU (thank you GDPR).

Anti Commercial AI thingy

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago

My bank would probably tell everyone before they did.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is € 251.88 the estimated loss in revenue? I would like to say that it only makes sense if you assume the user will be on the platform either way, instead of just not paying and leaving. However, my experience with others makes me believe they will take whatever option to get to what they want.

I think it's a situation for policy but, at least here in the US, our policy makers aren't in the ethical or learned position to be effective.

What I'm saying is, the boat has holes and I'm concerned.

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[+] [email protected] -24 points 7 months ago (14 children)

I'm fine with this trend.

Servers aren't free and engineers aren't cheap. Online products need to make money in our world.

If you're not paying them they need something to sell to someone else.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago

Problem is that some companies double dip. Pay for the service and have your data sold.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 7 months ago

You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Servers aren't free but it's damn cheap if you don't bloat up your backend

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

And the way you don't bloat your backend?

Expensive engineers

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Throwing more bodies at a situation does NOT solve the situation faster or more efficiently; seriously, this shit is the most remedial, 101-level shit in pretty much any field where man-hours are a measuring metric.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Either you get:

many engineers --> lots of money
some good/very good/excellent engineers --> lots of money

Either way, it's expensive.

Anti Commercial AI thingy

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

That's not what I said or even remotely implied.

If you want a good back end that isn't bloated you can't use cheap contractors or junior engineers - you need someone who knows what they're doing.

It's a fight I'm constantly fighting at work. They finally dropped all the super cheap contractors that were trying to hard code a list of 20 identical entries that differed only by a single field. The contractors who thought the peak of architectural design was decomposition of any method more than 5 lines long into confusingly named functions that had an additional 10 layers of decomposition to them. The cheap contractors who thought that documentation was a waste of time and that the code was "self documenting".

These contractors weren't paid to care - I don't blame them for phoning it in. But if you want a system to work well and be cheap to run you pay your engineers well or inspire such devotion that FOSS is possible.

But the fact is the overwhelming majority of large, optimized and successful FOSS is funded by megacorps

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The cheap contractors who thought that documentation was a waste of time and that the code was “self documenting”.

Unfortunately, there are expensive engineers who think the same 😦 I don't know how they pass technical interviews or probationary periods.

Anti Commercial AI thingy

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Definitely - hiring isn't easy.

But you'll never get value for money from engineers who don't care, and you have a 0% chance of a cheap contractor caring.

Again - I don't blame them. They shouldn't care. The company clearly doesn't respect them.

But it's a false economy.

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[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

says a thing

"no I didn't say that thing"

average day on feddit 🙄

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

optimizing backend services is expensive because good engineers are expensive

um acktually you can't build services faster by hiring tons of people 🤓🤓

Reading comprehension: you lack it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's probably why he wrote "expensive" and not "more".

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

It's almost like he pluralized something implying "go get more". I'm not playing semantic gymnastics with you tech"bro" ballbags this morning

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Expensive engineers is a category dipshit.

You add an S to a noun in English to show it's a category or grouping instead of a specific individual.

Learn to fucking read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_category

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Idk I immediately understood what he meant, no need to be so rude about it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Probably having a bad day and is angry at something else, but lashing out online. Happens all the time.

Anti Commercial AI thingy

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Seriously, you can't have nine pregnant women and expect one baby in one month.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Or it's a FOSS solution.

[+] [email protected] -15 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.

Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.

I certainly don't say any of this in defense of capitalism, but "free" is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn't exist.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Life isn't a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.

Sure, there are costs involved, but that's true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren't like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?

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