I want to say "we structured the system like that, right?", i.e. maximize profit at all costs.

But it seems to be the natural outcome of the incentives, of an organization made of organisms in an entropy-based simulation.

i.e. the problem might be slightly deeper than an economic or political model. That being said, we might see something approximating post-scarcity economics in our lifetimes, which will be very interesting.

In the meantime... we might fiddle with the incentives a bit ;)

I have long wondered about the market size for privacy-focused apps. Sure, plenty of people don't know or don't care to value that, but if there are enough, maybe you could have a whole set of apps that emphasize they are not seeking world domination or selling out to the highest bidder, and a major selling point for using them would be that they are not < your expected chat/dating/photo/social site >.

Am I too idealistic? If such apps are not aggressively seeking hyper growth, it seems like these more trustworthy services could be deployed to cheap servers and let people use them for cheap without having to resort to selling user data.

I’ve never posted information anywhere off a machine that I control unless I’m comfortable with it being sold or made public.

Reduces anxiety.

Another point to add, is that old saying: if the service is free, you are the product. I have long considered that dating apps are taking all of our data, and selling it. What's more personal than social media? What do you think about dating. Who you swipe on, the information you put in there, all deeply personal. Sometimes more so than what you put on places like Facebook

The persistence of data means that if you expect a firm to eventually become hostile, you should treat them as hostile today.