Who’s paying him? Seriously:

• If nobody is, then we got our value’s worth.
• If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.

Don’t be sorry, just don’t use downvotes to express your opinion… use your words.

If you don’t like my arguments, go ahead and propose others.

For starters, I see you referring to “case law”, which sounds like a US thing. In the EU, case decisions generally don’t shape the law, except Supreme Court decisions, and even then lawmakers can inform or reform those decisions. It’s usually more accurate to define a logical reasoning from the bare law, rather than expect decisions in one case to influence others.

What do you base your reasoning on?

IANAL, but… I don’t think the law says that? My understanding is that the points are not related to each other:

• You need prior explicit consent in order to gather non-essential tracking data
• You can charge any amount for any functionality

That would mean all these combinations would be allowed:

1. Free, no tracking and no consent
2. Free, prior consent for tracking
3. Paid, no tracking and no consent
4. Paid, prior consent for tracking

If a site decides to only implement numbers 2 and 3… there wouldn’t be any conflict.

Either everyone pays, or you have the right to privacy. Otherwise, long term, the internet will become divided and inaccessible to low income households. And that’s something the EU definitely doesn’t want to happen (net neutrality)

Net neutrality doesn’t apply to services, only to carriers, who are considered more like utilities, but still aren’t required to offer a “free” tier. Services don’t need to offer an option accessible to everyone at all, they can specify whatever requirements they want (with only a few exceptions related to discrimination).

Large social media platforms… is where current legislative efforts are in. Above a certain number of users, they’re getting defined more as utilities, and subject to more requirements, but still no “free” tier.

The internet divide exists already: some households can afford 1Gbps unmetered symmetric fiber with Netflix, HBO and Disney+ and a few mobile lines with unlimited calls and 50GB/month data for 100€/month… while others can barely affford a prepaid 100MB/month mobile connection for 1€/month… but it’s fine as long as it’s a divide based on service pricing, not carrier traffic discrimination.

Don’t sell yourself short, you’re worth more than that, I believe in you… being able to generate tracking data worth more than that.

Nobody is forcing anyone, you are free to not use the service at any time.

What they’re doing is turning it into an explicitly paid sevice, and letting you choose whether you’d rather pay in money, or in personal data.

In an ideal world, everyone would have the option to decide getting their personal data gathered, or not, in exchange for some money/crypto, with competing data gatherers offering different packages and rewards, and they could use it to subscribe to whatever services they wished.

Technically, no reason why there couldn’t be. You could even have ad bots follow you to send you targeted ads.

On Meta, you pay so they don’t use some of your data for showing you ads, while they collect tons more of data on you and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the Fediverse, you only give everyone access to all your published data for free to run whatever analysis they want on it… but at least you can choose from 1000+ different instances to pick the one that will be able to track your behavioral data.

You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.

But feel free to give me an alternative “script” that gets similar functionality for cheaper.

It’s a -$10/month type of service, they’d have to pay me in order to use it… and they’d still be making money on the data and ads.

They set the price artificially high

Actually… it’s likely only slightly higher than what they get from ads per user, and still lower than what they get from compiling and selling all the information you agree to give them.

Users tend to severely underestimate how much their cumulative data can be sold for.

I’m getting anxiety just from looking at this 😰

Free pet for a day, free roast for the next… /s

A website? Ew. You’re one of those people taking a laptop on your bathroom breaks, aren’t you… 😛

There are over 300k lemmy users, so that would be an average of 300. You can find plenty of instances with between 100 and 1000 users.

What was first, the eggplant or the chickenplant?.. 😛

Lemmy is 1000+ different instances, feel free to find yours.

Kids need to grow strong so they can be brainwashed into doing the bidding of the ruling class.

The elderly are too set in their own ways to be brainwashed efficiently, and too weak to get exploited efficiently anyways.

“Pay us, or your grandma can choke to death. Your choice!”

…pf.

LMAO

It brings me back to my wee lad years when I went to an academy to “learn computers”, we had to draw the flow diagrams and write the code on paper, with a review by the teacher, before being allowed to type it into a computer and hit [RUN]… while the teacher humble bragged about how they used to cheat in college.

No, that is the phone’s built-in keyboard, look at what mine does around the UN flag:

(Google Gboard, on Android)

The UK flag is back there: