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.
Privacy violations usually aren’t done just for fun. There are two main reasons for using tracking:
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.