Monkey Paw: Its a subscription service. $50 USD per month, if you stop paying, your device automatically upload all your data.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
35 points (90.7% liked)
Showerthoughts
37082 readers
990 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If you pay for Youtube, they still take all of the data they can
Paying doesn't stop data mining
Big tech in 2025 makes its money from invading privacy and there's an increasing demographic of users that don't see any value in protecting their data from harvesting for some reason
You only have to look at a company like proton who provide a pretty comprehensive suite of privacy focussed software, and yet they're still very much a niche player in the wider tech industry
Proton are slowing building up solid competition to google on emails, auth, cloud storage, documents. I feel like the main barrier preventing more widespread adoption is literally paying for the service, but I guess that's the price for privacy
Yep that's exactly it, it's hard to convince people to pay for any service on the internet, let alone for something like privacy that many users have been conditioned to not value at all.
Big tech is hooked on having two revenue streams. One from product sales, one from customer information sales. Why would they willingly give one up?
But how would they make money if they can't sell targeted based advertising
Idk where you're at but I frequently see messages from big tech claiming they care about my privacy. They could launch a publicly accessible database that will only show you what they have on you and give you complete control on what to delete and I'd still be sceptical.
Let the record show, every time somebody tries it's out-competed by the
- more responsive,
- cleaner looking,
- simpler,
- easier to scale,
- less error prone (and less annoying when it does error!),
horrible privacy stuff. The market really doesn't care; consumers will pay 3 less dollars for an insecure product. It's not even really their fault; it is extremely difficult to tell when software is actually secure. It is a pain to tell when some middle-man is actually selling your data or not, due to a carve-out in the TOS of a TOS of a TOS. Anyone upcharging for security could be scamming you, and with nontrivial probability is an NSA front.
This all applies to companies, which can afford to pay for security experts and analysts. See this very old interview with Schneier. Generic consumer never had a prayer.
Privacy violations usually aren't done just for fun. There are two main reasons for using tracking:
- Making money via ads/tracking
- Tracking users to improve the product
The first one is obvious: A ton of stuff on the internet is "free" but still needs to be financed. It's incredibly hard to get people to fork over some cash for simple things like news sites, recipes or even full-blown apps. Cable TV used to cost €30-60 per month. A physical newspaper subscription is in the same range. People used to pay €20 for an album of music. But online people are not nearly as happy to spend money. Even paying €5 for a smartphone app feels like extremely expensive.
Ads are an easy way to get around that problem. It's completely friction free. The user doesn't need to sign up, they don't need to go through some payment process, nothing. Just load the page and the users generate money.
So a privacy-focussed product would need to cost a substantial amount of money to the users.
Many services already offer hybrid products: Ad-financed products that have a paid tier without ads or tracking. But most users still choose to pay with privacy over money.
The second one is more complex: Tracking allows for making better products. Users give little to no feedback. The only time they do is if there's a bug that stops them from using your product. At that time it's often too late: They give you a negative review and uninstall the app. Tracking allows you to see problems before the users report them, but it also allows you to see what users are actually doing with your product. Tracking even allows you to tailor your product to the user, showing them content they might like and so on. For all the talk around algorithms, they can actually be useful.
Log out of Youtube and open it in an incognito tab and you will know what I mean.
Fact of the matter is, good marketing for scummy data practices is more profitable than good data practices 10 times out of 10. Big tech is soulless and has no financial incentive to do so.
No shit.