There is an universally available subscription that applies to all services, costs $0/month, refuses donations, and is called uBlock Origin.

Haven’t noticed any of the YouTube issues either so far.

They have considered this, I think Facebook was even experimenting with it. But it isn’t as obvious a play as it looks.

1. Most people won’t pay, so you are spending resources creating a product that will be used by a tiny fraction of users.
2. The people who are willing to pay are typically those that you make the most off of with ads, because they tend to have more disposable income. This means that the price is much higher than you would expect.

it’s baffling to me that these big tech companies haven’t created a subscription that lets you opt out of data collection

It’s not baffling when you understand that big data makes a lot more money out of the data they steal from you than any money you’d be willing to give them directly. Not to mention, it allows them to cozy up to the police state agencies - possibly their most important customers.

The other reason why they haven’t offered it is because nobody would take them up on the offer: most people are cheapskates who are perfectly okay giving up their privacy if they can save a buck.

And those who would gladly pay to escape the corporate surveillance machine know that it won’t stop tracking them even if they do, so they don’t.

The corporate surveillance economy is a self-fulfilling prophecy (as in “we do it because people like this deal” even if people don’t and in reality have no other choice) and a race to the bottom.

That would make one third more aware and inform the other 2/3 of the data-collecting-vs.-showing-ads issue.

It would be hard for them to prove that they’ve actually done it, and they won’t want to admit that giving them your data is something undesirable.

Tells a lot about the business of personal data in adtech ;-)