Examining my own behavior, I do see a lot of the last part of your comment. Even as someone who recognizes the potential for abuse when you have incredibly detailed models of people and can use them to manipulate behavior, it's not as obvious as another subscription fee.
I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime or my VPN aren't too bad because I can see the cost and not worry about it for a while. But I've just been trained through experience to see anything monthly (or less) as a way to disguise the real cost through stretching it out (even if I can easily do the arithmetic and see the annual cost.
Regardless, knowing about the potential for abusing the data compiled on my behavior is enough to make me feel a bit "icky" or mildly uneasy. It's enough to make me avoid using anything from Facebook, for example. But it's not enough to keep me from checking my subs on YouTube or using Google navigation when I drive somewhere new.
If it was as simple as paying $100/year to use Google services without data collection it would be easy, but then what stuff would stop working? A good bit of the usefulness of Google nav or whatever comes from how it collects usage data or ties in with my calendar to remind me when I need to leave to make it to an appointment on time.
And then what about all of the other things I interact with that collect data? Do I need to figure out what they all are and pay them a yearly fee as well? What about the ones who decide it's still easier and more profitable to skip the whole thing and keep making their money by profiling my behavior?
Instead, I end up avoiding Facebook properties, blocking ads, never using rewards cards, trying to ignore the OG offenders (credit card companies), and still feeling uneasy about all the info being analyzed about me daily.
What if we actually got paid for the data collection? Like UBI through the tech giants. Maybe then you have an issue where it's like the more you use the more cash you get, or maybe it's just a flat payment i.e. if you have even a single facebook account and they've used your data in some way, you get the payment?
I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime or my VPN aren't too bad because I can see the cost and not worry about it for a while. But I've just been trained through experience to see anything monthly (or less) as a way to disguise the real cost through stretching it out (even if I can easily do the arithmetic and see the annual cost.
Regardless, knowing about the potential for abusing the data compiled on my behavior is enough to make me feel a bit "icky" or mildly uneasy. It's enough to make me avoid using anything from Facebook, for example. But it's not enough to keep me from checking my subs on YouTube or using Google navigation when I drive somewhere new.
If it was as simple as paying $100/year to use Google services without data collection it would be easy, but then what stuff would stop working? A good bit of the usefulness of Google nav or whatever comes from how it collects usage data or ties in with my calendar to remind me when I need to leave to make it to an appointment on time.
And then what about all of the other things I interact with that collect data? Do I need to figure out what they all are and pay them a yearly fee as well? What about the ones who decide it's still easier and more profitable to skip the whole thing and keep making their money by profiling my behavior?
Instead, I end up avoiding Facebook properties, blocking ads, never using rewards cards, trying to ignore the OG offenders (credit card companies), and still feeling uneasy about all the info being analyzed about me daily.