Nah I’m a demon that can be summoned with the incantation of “Cat gee, be tea”

That would mean $8T total.

You’re forgetting that many of the 8 billion people don’t have internet or have very little data being shared.

If we assume 8 billion people and $1 trillion industry, it’s only $125 a year. That’s the worst case.

If we assume 4 billion people and $4 trillion industry, it’s $1,000 a year. That’s the best case. Perhaps a little too optimistic, but it’s also very easy maths.

Working backwards from my $500 user value with 30% margin for the brokers, that’s around $715 in the industry. This could be made from 6 billion people and an industry value of $4.29 trillion.

Maybe $350 per American.

Using the method above, that would be $500 in the industry, and with 6 billion people the industry would be worth $3 trillion.

To get more accurate numbers we would need a specific value for the industry. However, I think we can confidently say the value of user data is in the hundreds of dollars, not pennies as is commonly suggested.

I only summarized what the other person said. Bring your complaints to him.

Some nations would be worth more per person to a data broker than others. How many billions have no Internet? How many have little money to spend on the companies the data broker sells to? Americans and Europeans would be at the top of the list, per capita, and could easily exceed $1000, and the total would just barely top 1 trillion.

I’ve finally run some actual numbers, after finding a source for the data brokerage industry value (much lower, $319 billion in 2021). The link to your instance’s version is here: https://lemmy.world/post/10892972

TL;DR my conservative estimate is that every user is owed roughly $40 per year - but this doesn’t include Google or other businesses who keep and exploit proprietary datasets, rather than selling the raw data.

I think that’s fair if the service is free. If I’m paying for it then they shouldn’t be double dipping with my data as well.

But that’s the thing, that isn’t what’s happening. The website is provided free of charge.

Then, the website tries to shoehorn in another, separate transaction and hide it in the fine print, where you give up your data free of charge.

There is a huge amount of deception involved. The whole point of my comment here is to try and dispel that deception, by putting hard numbers to it to show that there is significant value being taken.

That would be nice, I agree. However, like you say, the data is already being used, and it’s much harder to put the cat back in the bag. Rather than trying to do so and ban all data collection, it’s much more practicable to embrace it but ensure that people are at least fairly compensated.

Not so much ago i was handled an iphone and i had no idea how to unlock it and use it as there aren’t any keys or instructions on the device. Joe Everyman is just used to it but in fact iphones are not easy to use. I think this really thread can also hint something, some OSS may not be easy to use or well supported but it is designed to be open and accessible. Proprietary software and standards puts you through a set of restrictions for example having to register and give away all your personal informations to download binaries.

I remember a message appearing on my android device when I first started using F-droid, something like: do not trust any programs you can download from anywhere except places grubby capitalists can molest you and feast on your data.

Nobody verifies the checksum. It installs just fine (probably) if you don’t. Just like reading the EULA.

Sure, it’s a good step if you’re extra paranoid, but otherwise people are just allowing installs from unknown sources and immediately installing, especially since Android takes you straight to those settings when you try to launch a downloaded APK.

“I am a big dumb dumb idiot” - rtxn@lemmy.world

Don’t worry it’s not an attack on you or a lie about what you said, just sarcasm.

If you can’t see past someone’s spelling mistakes then your credibility is the one I think is in question. Just ask me to fix it if the meaning is unclear or ambiguous instead of attacking my credibility(pot kettle black). Perhaps I did make some spelling mistakes, but do you know if english is even my first or third language?

It’s interesting that you both tell me not to connect one issue and also its downstream effects, but then turn around and say that my argument lacks nuance(if that’s a fair summary of your response, as I take it to be)

I’m saying that calling adblocking piracy has downstream effects that complicate the larger issue of the enshitification of the internet in general, and you want to boil things down to a simple binary of circumvention, i assume. But I reject the statement that adblockers are piracy without explanation.

So please, explain it so that the basis for this opinion can be understood instead of simply repeating it. What is it that makes adblocking equate to piracy in your opinion?

I’m passionate about this. I see it very much like a repeat of introducing micro transactions in the form of DLC into gaming which ruined gaming for me and many other people. Enshitification seems rampant these day. I believe that ive seen it in action before and that im seeing it again with this idea that adblocking is piracy.

Those too poor to afford to pay don’t deserve to have access to it anyway, right?

Those too poor to afford to pay get it for free, comrade.

I feel like a lot of people are wholly unaware of FOSS. But anyway my free market idea would require consent, for example a pop-up that says “would you like to pay $0.30 or watch an 8 second ad to view the content?” and then people could make their choice. If their choice is neither then they will go somewhere else for the information or entertainment. Consent is absent from the current model, aside from using an ad blocker to signal your refusal.

There are tons of videos (educational and otherwise) on youtube that have never paid out to their creators, either because they were from the era before youtube enshittified or because the algorithm decided that the content creator has earned nothing. It reminds me of the old argument that “you shouldn’t pirate music because it’s not fair to the artist” but man you’ve got to see those record contracts, especially those made to black or otherwise underprivileged artists. Being fair to the artist was never an imperative, but this argument still persists with people who identify themselves with their jailers, or who actually don’t really care that much (not saying that in a bad way).

Humans by nature are creative and helpful. We will always make how-to videos, guides, music, stories, and art. We don’t need megacorps to facilitate this, it’s the megacorps that want in, and they’re going to have to come up with a better business model.

No. Making a claim that adblocking is a form of piracy does not in any way say that either piracy nor adblocking is immoral. Only if they actually make a claim that piracy is immoral can it be transferred like that.

You also seem to make the claim that anyone equating adblocking and piracy are speaking against them. Why are you making such a claim?

Also *it’s, *didn’t. It’s not that hard.

I didn’t even think of the ads when writing that, but damn that’s probably the worst part of it all! Thank you for adding that major detail, clearly my very minimal usage of most of those launchers was showing lol

It’s gotten to such an extreme that some websites are nothing more than ad delivery mechanisms under the concept that “ads allow us to provide you quality content for free”, which, under the hood, is just a shitty business model that doesn’t work for consumers. I’ve seen websites that literally copy paste the content 2 or 3 times to extend the word count and have nonsensicle, out of order sentences that don’t contain any information. There are also websites that have incorrect information, which are also published with the sole purpose of serving ads to generate revenue, which imo is worse. Just another way that capitalism is making our world more shitty.

Is piracy not inclusive of subverting the means for a producer to profit off of a product when using that product?

Not really. Most people who “pirate” games or media wouldn’t have paid for them anyway.

As Gabe Newell said (and demonstrated with Steam), “piracy” is a service problem.

Give people an affordable and more convenient way of accessing said games or media (Steam, Spotify before it got enshittified, Netflix before it got enshittified and the market got fragmented beyond any reasonable usability), and we’ll happily stop “pirating”.

If anything, “piracy” increases profits. Neil Gaiman compared it to word of mouth, or sharing your copy of a book with a friend: people in markets his books had trouble reaching (again, a service problem) “pirated” his books, liked them, and shared them with others… increasing his sales in said markets (people liked his work enough to try to find the books and buy them, and many who would have never heard of him became paying fans).

“Piracy” is free marketing (of course, this doesn’t work if your product isn’t worth its price, but bad products not earning money is a good way to improve overall quality), not theft. And without all the inconveniences of paid marketing. And often it’s a symptom that the way you’re selling your content is too inconvenient or overpriced for at least a fraction of your potential consumers, and thus needs to be fixed or improved (either voluntarily or through regulation).

Oh right so you’re a piece of shit. Got it.

Maybe if you spent one day working food service, or any other job that makes $3/hour plus tips, you’d get it.

True, if you had researched the charity in advance and knew that, or at least trusted the intermediary who told you about it to have done that due diligence. I said “some” and I put the word charities in double quotes b/c not everything that passes itself off as a charity is worthwhile… though that ofc does not mean that the converse is true and that none of them are. I remember when a charity - I think it was the Salvation Army? - collected an enormous amount of funds for Puerto Rico after it was hit with an extremely bad storm, and it made a big fuss about all the houses it was going to build there, but even a year (or maybe it was multiple years?) later it had barely made any (something like 10 houses total, or some ridiculously low amount compared to what they had claimed they were going to do). There are so many stories like this. Another one I have previously donated to are CareNet pregnancy centers - they offer potential mothers neonatal health screenings and such, free of charge, plus diapers and what-not, sometimes even cribs when they have them… thereby being (I thought) authentically “Pro-Life” rather than merely “Anti-Abortion” by offering these people real options to work with, not just heaping heavy burdens on others without lifting a finger to help, b/c these people provide that finger, even if it is not a full-on hand up. Although more recently they have been caught lying to the mothers, telling them about horrific health consequences of having abortions that are simply not medically factual, thereby being more “Anti-Abortion” after all.

So, not all charities are honest. Many are outright scams. Some politicians even set them up as a way to attempt to avoid taxes, while giving themselves perks like Donald Trump used people’s donations to commission a painting made of himself, claiming that by doing so he was “supporting the arts”. Technically that was even true, as the funds did end up going to an artist. And yet supporting millionaires like Trump to have yet another portrait - of himself no less! - does not necessarily align with my own idea of what a “charity” is, or at least I mean one that I should send my own funds to. Though I have heard of fantastic ones that I would consider giving to even now. So I am not anti-charity, b/c some true charities I am for (and some I am not), I was just saying that sometimes it is so hard to distinguish fact from fiction.

And even if the charity itself is honest, often the people attempting to take from it are less so. So the efficacy of their own screening process comes into question too - yes a food bank can feed people, but how many of those were truly in need? Tbh, mostly I am setting that thought up as a caricature rather than realistic argument, as a bolster for my next point that does manage to stand all on its own, yet is strengthened by this thought experiment:-).

Workers at least you can see with your own two eyes that they are working, plus you consumed the food/drink product even if it was made out of sight in the kitchen. Oftentimes in the past, these are the people who are attempting to work their way through or up to college and may need the most help going through that process. In the last several years that might no longer be true, though it still leaves open the thought that these are the people who struggle the most, and could use a bit of “trickle down”. These aren’t people who have just given up and looking for others to take care of them, they will accept the wage they are given, but they HOPE for more? At the very least, I identify with that struggle. The owners may be a different matter entirely, but the workers… at the very least they are not evil corps like Disney.

But also, how is what you said any different? Aren’t charities doing the same thing for the needy as tipping does for workers? Governments do not take care of people, so giving to charities is like telling the government “Don’t worry about making sure that your citizens get paid a living wage. I got you fam.” Socialism has its downsides, but people don’t seem to realize that capitalism does too - i.e. the end stage of a purely capitalistic society is slavery for the masses along with a few at the top who own everything. The reason the USA did not devolve to that stage is b/c of HEAVY checks & balances in the system, e.g. detection & punishment of fraud & other similar events such as product safety - whereas in a purely capitalistic society, that is a “shared resource” hence disallowed, so every consumer would need to test every product by themselves?!? Police, firefighters, teachers, heck even roads are all “shared” hence socialism (government controls the means and production of e.g. roads), or at least capitalism & socialism existed side-by-side (e.g. both socialistic shared resources alongside capitalistic private ones - police/bodyguards, schools, roads, and so much more), but we were more socialist in the past whereas today the spectrum has shifted more towards the capitalist end of the continuum. Hence fewer protections in place - e.g. there is still a minimum wage, but that wage has not been kept updated to what is livable for decades now. So the whole idea of charity then is to circumvent the need for socialism to exist in the USA in order to balance things out, and instead to use the capitalist approach by allowing your money to become your speech and say “I want these people to be helped in this manner”. Exactly like tipping?

There is so much more to add but no time or space. One thing I’ll say briefly is that enlightened self-interest also seems like it falls on the side of tipping? People when they do not get enough may steal, so offering them a way to earn enough helps prevent that - or if not fully “earn” (like $3 tip on a <$5 meal) then at least you would incentivize good behavior? As opposed to a safety net that helps people regardless of how they act, which I am not saying that is you but some people feel that that is improper, hence the reasoning behind some of my phrasing - e.g. “there at least you can be 100% certain that they work”.

Perhaps you knew all this already and it is only I just catching up. In any case this discussion is fun:-).

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/installation.html

VPN will encrypt your traffic so your ISP can’t spy on you. That’s the whole point of a VPN.

It said stop torrenting or face a biiiig fine. I’ll try and follow the guides to avoid this but I’m still a bit paranoid. Maybe I was loooking for reassurance that vpn and private trackers are good enough.