this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
374 points (95.0% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2310 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you're not paying for a service, then you're the product. I never understood the expectation that people should just provide you email and storage for free, because?
This saying is actually horseshit, though. The profit motive and infinite growth model of capitalism guarantees that even if you are paying for a product, your data and attention — everything that can be — will be monetized eventually.
The saying should be "if the service isn't open-source and E2E encrypted, you're the product"
Nah I'd disagree. Infinite growth motive doesn't necessarily apply to private companies. To suggest there's unbridled greed present in every company is just a falsehood.
It should be noted, though, that the "if you aren't paying, you're the product" mantra isn't always true. FOSS exists.
And I know that seems obvious to anybody reading this on Lemmy, but I've had people refuse to use good open source software because they fundamentally refuse to trust something being provided to them for free.
That applies to the software itself, sure, but only if you bring your own infrastructure. Large scale FOSS infrastructure services are going to be the exception not the norm.