If it was legit it would probably take off
Monkey Paw: Its a subscription service. $50 USD per month, if you stop paying, your device automatically upload all your data.
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.
Having to pay for privacy tells the whole story of how Big Tech makes their money.
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?
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.
But how would they make money if they can’t sell targeted based advertising
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.
No shit.
