I choose death.

Privacy? What is this article talking about. Ads not displaying in no way implies privacy. They will harvest your data as much as it possibly can either way. All you are doing by paying to remove ads is directly funding the ad business model.

I’m not convinced we have even begun to scratch the surface in developing AGI. I’m also not convinced it is even possible using conventional computer hardware.

Also the device is in a condition that makes this difficult like not turning on or the screen being broken.

They have probably already sold the information 100 times.

That already exists by leaving Twitter. 👽

Sounds awesome. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.

I don’t trust them implicitly, but I do believe they are less likely to do certain things than Google which is enough to use them instead of Google for Email.

I don’t know what you are trying to say here. I’ll do my best to explain my point.

When I go to use a browser I have never had the expectation that I should be earning money for doing so. I do not believe this is a use case that most people have had. Similarly with some of these new Twitter clones like BlueSky you can send people money for some reason. Again, this is not a use case that I expect from a social media platform. The transfer of money to myself or to other users in these scenarios does not make a lot of sense.

Where is does make sense to have money involved is paying for software.

Indeed. I am curious about why it needs to be there at all even as an opt-in. Some thought process went into implementing it into the browser in the first place. Did this solve any problem someone had? I am actually curious and actually do not understand.

Usually the up front cost of the software would fund some number of years of updates. Then after that you would pay for a new version.

Yes, if it avoided this headache of ads, spyware and any other intrusive monetization. I’d pay for any category of software I wanted to use for this reason. Which is how software used to be sold before people got used to not paying for anything upfront and instead paid for it in hidden data harvesting.

I don’t see why making money needs to be at all a part of using a piece of software. The only transaction that potentially needs to take place is paying for the software up front.

Same with social media sites like whatever BlueSky or Posts is doing. Why is money involved?

Things would only get worse for user privacy if nothing is done and we let tech companies do whatever they want whenever they want.

Well for one thing a user is prevented from deleting their account when banned. I’m pretty sure this can be considered a violation of the law.

What happens when countries start looking at Lemmy? This place doesn’t really do anything to adhere to GDPR laws.

Big tech made me do it. I wish it were the standard procedure.