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Once again begging people to give up on "if you're not paying for the product you are the product" because I've seen so many people who now think if you are paying for a product your data is totally safe now forever because if I'm paying the company money they don't need to sell my data

When instead they could also sell your data and get Two Money

in reply to lori

lori
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lori
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I'm calling this the Two Money rule of data privacy, paying doesn't make your data safe

noiseician 🏴🖤 reshared this.

in reply to lori

lori
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lori
• •

Whether or not you're paying has no bearing on whether you are or are not the product.

That has a lot more to do with the people in charge of the product and how big the company is.

A tiny open source hobby project may be free AND not sell your data. A company that sells you a product may also sell your data for Two Money. There's not actually a correlation between whether you're paying and whether your data gets sold anymore.

in reply to lori

estelle
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estelle
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pricing of pretty much everything has converged to "what the market will bear" and the market has all too easily borne having their data sold anyway,

i think it's the european market that did something to start regulating this

(advertisers hate this)

in reply to lori

Laberpferd
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Laberpferd
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im getting increasingly often the impression that this, as well as its brother "you get what you pay for" is said mostly from people who want to sell products that can not easily judged for their quality
in reply to lori

Enkiusz🇺🇦
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Enkiusz🇺🇦
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yes. pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kar…

Pluralistic: Paying for it doesn’t make it a market (22 Apr 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

pluralistic.net
in reply to Enkiusz🇺🇦

lori
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lori
• •

@enkiusz feels weird that he links his article where he gushes over Kagi in the middle of this because the Kagi CEO quite literally uses this argument when people ask any questions about data privacy. Oh, well you don't have to worry about that because you're paying for our product, so we have no need or incentive to sell your data!

When the incentive is: Two Money

in reply to lori

Devourer
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Devourer
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Really unfortunate that the Kagi CEO is somewhat shady, since it genuinely feels like everyone that uses Kagi loves it (most criticism I see is about the Brave partnership and the AI)

At least the Orion browser still seems nice

in reply to Devourer

Art Nouveau Appreciator
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Art Nouveau Appreciator
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@Devourer_ITA building off the Immortal Lori Science of Two Money is that: if your successful product relies on someone else’s product, they have an incentive to increase the cost to also make Two Money, a perfect example being all these dumbass “browsers” that wrap the chrome rendering engine in dumb bullshit. The second Brave or Orion or Kagi or whatever get too popular, Google will start turning the screws for money.
We see this all the time in corporate IT where eg Snowflake starts jacking up rates when cloud provider costs increase because interest rates rise and money stops being free.
@Devourer_ITA
in reply to Art Nouveau Appreciator

lori
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lori
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@Jetengineweasel @Devourer_ITA lol yeah I've tried to explain this to so many people: none of these "new" search engines can overtake Google, because if they got that big to become a threat, Google would cut them off. And if they were big enough to threaten Google, then everyone else they use as a source (Bing, Yandex, etc.) would also have cut them off.
@Devourer_ITA
in reply to lori

lori
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lori
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@Jetengineweasel @Devourer_ITA if they killed Google and Bing they'd actually be totally fucked
in reply to lori

lori
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lori
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@Jetengineweasel @Devourer_ITA (I will add that Orion is Webkit based, so not reliant on Google, but the rest still stands, and I doubt Orion would survive without Kagi anyway)
in reply to lori

Devourer
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Devourer
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@Jetengineweasel yeah it's unfortunate about Orion, especially as it's closed source (with plans to release the source once they go out of beta, at least)
in reply to Devourer

lori
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lori
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@Devourer_ITA @Jetengineweasel I'm skeptical about that given how Vlad reacts when people ask him about open sourcing it. He does not like the idea of open sourcing his code at all and constantly argues with people that it isn't necessary.
in reply to lori

lori
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lori
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Honestly I think this idiom was pretty true at one point. That point is long gone because now everyone knows how lucrative selling user data is. Everyone that can get away with it will sell it. Unless, like some small dev with some tiny app on GitHub they do as a hobby, they aren't in it to make any money at all. But if you're a business and in the business of making money, you wanna make Two Money. And if you say you don't want to make Two Money, you might later decide to make Two Money, or sell to someone who wants to make Two Money. The only way to avoid Two Money is to use software that doesn't have data of yours to sell in the first place, which is extremely difficult. But you can't take this on faith alone.
in reply to lori

lori
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lori
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If you are coming to reply to this to explain what the phrase means to me as if I clearly just don't understand: stop. I get it. I just think it sucks.
in reply to lori

aburka 🫣
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aburka 🫣
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the best part is that in the fullness of time, everything gets bought out by a private equity firm who will absolutely sell your data to make Two Money if that wasn't already happening
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to lori

CaveDave
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CaveDave
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but ... but ... Apple charge a lot so they obviously don't take any of my data!!!1!!!!! /s
in reply to lori

L0wKey
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L0wKey
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@TheDailyBurble

100%, but the greater the difference between the cost to you and the cost being born by the vendor, the more likely they are selling something you’ve given them to cover it (which is almost certainly worth more than you thought).

Which is essentially what you said.

in reply to lori

raganwald 🍓
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raganwald 🍓
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People paid General Motors for vehicles. Large amounts of money for vehicles. They then paid even more money on a recurring basis for "connected services."

So they were already paying two money, but GM wanted more. So GM sold personalized data about their driving habits to insurance companies.

Presto! Three money!!!

And it's not just about greed: Selling their customer's data actually cost GM's customers money. They invented enshittifying a car...

A pile of money
in reply to lori

Alfredo
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Alfredo
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"If you're not paying you're the product" is not equivalent to "if you're paying your data is safe". So the latter can be false, and yet the former is true.
in reply to Alfredo

lori
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lori
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@alfredo I don't think the former is true either, look at a lot of open source stuff. Sometimes free is just free.
@alfredo
in reply to lori

Cifer
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Cifer
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@alfredo I feel like people are intelligent enough to add "unless no one is trying to make money from the entire project" on their own. You're not the product when granny is inviting you over for tea or when you're establishing a hobby club with friends.
The meme is just a short reminder to be suspicious when something that's obviously a business seems too good to be true.
in reply to Cifer

lori
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lori
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@Teskariel @alfredo If they're not aware enough to realize they can't use the phrase in reverse, I don't think that's true.
in reply to lori

Handsome Bear
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Handsome Bear
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also people now think there is a catch with the fediverse as well.
in reply to lori

Nora Reed
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Nora Reed
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the funny thing about that one to me is that it came from metafilter, which at that point was using the $5 entry fee as a barrier more than anything else and which made its money largely from serving ads on user created content. i think everyone knew this and opted in in a way that i have no ethical problem with but it seemed so obvious that both was happening there, too
in reply to lori

Stephen K 🔑☢️⚛️🇺🇦
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Stephen K 🔑☢️⚛️🇺🇦
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I brought this up to several people at Google Next, as Google swore up and down they were going to protect Enterprise data.

This was only weeks after the settlement where Google admitted that it had scraped Incognito data from Chrome.

Its safe to assume that if you don't have your own keys, they are scraping and selling the data.

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