Companies increasingly aim to control how users interact with their content online, threatening user freedom. As more companies crack down on browser exten...
If sites want me to pay for their content, they’ll need to find a privacy respecting way to get money from me. But their preferred compensation method usually involves even more privacy intrusion and spam than just blocking their ads.
I was excited when Brave launched their original crusade to try to block privacy-violating ads and replace them with profit-sharing, privacy respecting ads (i.e. local only, no data shared with third parties), but AFAIK the profit-sharing never happened (and as such I never used Brave). I’d be happy to pay a few cents or whatever to view website content, provided it goes through an intermediary so it’s not related to me in any way. I don’t want an account at each of these sites, but I’m happy to replace their lost ad-revenue anonymously, provided that buys me a privacy-respecting experience.
That the point, maintaining a website, a service or information, costs money and it is legitimate that they rent their space to advertising companies to earn money. But it is a big difference from placing ads related to the content of the page and quite another from using targeted ads that are based on your data and histories, many times even coming from companies with a poor reputation or directly from scammers, because they don’t bother to control the origin (eg YouTube)
It is legitimate for an informative page or newspaper to limit access to subscribers, but a user does not have to create an account just because they want to find out about an important fact in a newspaper that they have never visited and never plan to do so again. It would therefore be much more ethical to log this user’s IP allowing a certain number of accesses and only put up a paywall if they log continuous access. Because there is a right to information.
It is not a fight against the legitimate interests of the pages, but the abuse that the pages do with their interests, overriding the rights, privacy and security of the users.
I disagree. I see no problem with media companies locking their content behind a paywall, because that’s their IP and they can do what they want with it. The reason they don’t is because that would destroy their income since people will just go elsewhere for that information.
I have no problem paying for information, I have a problem with spreading my personal information all over the Internet. I honestly don’t think these sites care too much about my personal information, but they need to get it to process recurring payments and whatnot. That just opens me up to security issues, so I choose to not make accounts.
So that’s why I want some form of anonymous payment system where I can pay for access without divulging my personal info. I’d just load the browser with $X/month, and the browser would pay $Y/month for all of the users that use the browser to access that site that month. That keeps transaction costs low and preserves my personal info. The browser could also potentially provide anonymous demographic info since that’s useful for curating content.
Unfortunately, no such payment network exists, or at least no such system is popular.
If sites want me to pay for their content, they’ll need to find a privacy respecting way to get money from me. But their preferred compensation method usually involves even more privacy intrusion and spam than just blocking their ads.
I was excited when Brave launched their original crusade to try to block privacy-violating ads and replace them with profit-sharing, privacy respecting ads (i.e. local only, no data shared with third parties), but AFAIK the profit-sharing never happened (and as such I never used Brave). I’d be happy to pay a few cents or whatever to view website content, provided it goes through an intermediary so it’s not related to me in any way. I don’t want an account at each of these sites, but I’m happy to replace their lost ad-revenue anonymously, provided that buys me a privacy-respecting experience.
That the point, maintaining a website, a service or information, costs money and it is legitimate that they rent their space to advertising companies to earn money. But it is a big difference from placing ads related to the content of the page and quite another from using targeted ads that are based on your data and histories, many times even coming from companies with a poor reputation or directly from scammers, because they don’t bother to control the origin (eg YouTube)
It is legitimate for an informative page or newspaper to limit access to subscribers, but a user does not have to create an account just because they want to find out about an important fact in a newspaper that they have never visited and never plan to do so again. It would therefore be much more ethical to log this user’s IP allowing a certain number of accesses and only put up a paywall if they log continuous access. Because there is a right to information.
It is not a fight against the legitimate interests of the pages, but the abuse that the pages do with their interests, overriding the rights, privacy and security of the users.
I disagree. I see no problem with media companies locking their content behind a paywall, because that’s their IP and they can do what they want with it. The reason they don’t is because that would destroy their income since people will just go elsewhere for that information.
I have no problem paying for information, I have a problem with spreading my personal information all over the Internet. I honestly don’t think these sites care too much about my personal information, but they need to get it to process recurring payments and whatnot. That just opens me up to security issues, so I choose to not make accounts.
So that’s why I want some form of anonymous payment system where I can pay for access without divulging my personal info. I’d just load the browser with $X/month, and the browser would pay $Y/month for all of the users that use the browser to access that site that month. That keeps transaction costs low and preserves my personal info. The browser could also potentially provide anonymous demographic info since that’s useful for curating content.
Unfortunately, no such payment network exists, or at least no such system is popular.