“The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.” That governments – east and west – are trying to destroy the open web, that we know. As for Facebook and Apple… Well, all I know is that it is completely and utterly impossible to check what information Apple has about you. Unlike Google (more here) and to a lesser degree Facebook, Apple provides zero means to see, export, or delete the information they have on you, associated with your Apple ID or otherwise. In 2012, that’s just sinister.
In some countries, it’s not only sinister but it’s also illegal. For instance in France per law any corporate or institution’s database keeping personal data should offer free of charge a way for the person to consult or delete whatever personal information is kept in that database.
But, hey, by signing an Apple account, people would have read the small text at bottom regarding soul, selling and evil, right?!
I’m always smiling how the worst dictatorship always name themselves as the more democratic country ever : Congo, Cuba, China, …
And it reminds me the Apple’s 1984 ad : we free yourself from big brother. Understand : we are worst than big brother !
Just to add a final touch : France, country of humans’ rights, is a great democraty with a great freedom of speech. Search for LSI, LCEN, DADVSI, HADOPI, LOPPSI, ACTA to undestand what it means…
Kochise
Nope, according to a South Park episode, only the license to sew your mouth to another Apple-users <x>
That’s true, but the law doesn’t say anything on how this service should be provided. So maybe someone should try to send a letter to Apple France and see what they do.
Edited 2012-04-16 12:30 UTC
Indeed. But for obvious reason, I don’t own an Apple account, so I’m not eligible to do that.
And I guess the ones who are read since there contract and find “I therefore agreed to lose my right to control my digital life” above their signature…
In legal matters, there is an order of priority, at the top there is the constitution, then ratified treaties, then laws, then contract. Hence if a term of the contract is a violation of laws, treaties or the constitution, that term is invalid, even if you signed it.
Whose business model is based almost solely on collecting data about the behaviour of end users: Google or Apple?
What proportion of Apple’s profits come from, or are strongly linked to, possessing data about end users?
What proportion of Google”s profits come from, or are strongly linked to, possessing data about end users?
Please let’s get real around here. Google’s business model does not work very well in the new mobile device world. Google should stop complaining and start innovating, start creating a business which (unlike Android) actually makes money in the mobile world. Personally I don’t think they have a clue how to do that. If only they would stop whining that would be progress.
So if a company collect data on you, it is ok as long as they don’t directly make money with that data ? And beside, they also mentioned Facebook, which has the same business model as google and as repeatedly try to claim they own your data and until recently did not have any ways to delete the account.
How about you actually read what Brin said, adress the points that he made and stop throwing your fanboi rage baselessly.
In what way your point make invalid mine?
Mine is that the list of *all* personal data collected by Apple must (in some countries, maybe not your but at least mine), by law be accessible and, on demand, deleted.
I’m not saying that Google don’t collect a lot (more, most probably) personal data. What I’m saying is that so far they don’t refuse your right to access them and update/delete.
I fail to see how making a profit from mobile business instead of profiled advertizing change anything here. Collecting personal data comes with rights and duties. Nobody is above them.
Or should.
It’s funny that he talks about walled gardens being too restrictive, because if you’re not restrictive enough, then this happens:
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/googles-official-app-m…
IMHO, there’s room for both types of ecosystems, for those who want absolute freedom at the risk of having some app p0wn their device(s), and those who don’t mind giving up some control to let someone else do the curating.
Edited 2012-04-16 09:54 UTC
You get a company that sells malware protection reporting that they found unspecified malware in the most popular smartphone market on the planet, with a link to where to buy their product?
Sorry to dig up this old Ben Franklin quote again, but:
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Using “walled garden” environments involves trusting a corporation to know what’s best for you, and while it may be in Apple’s best interests to disallow third parties from doing things like clandestinely copying your personal data for profit, it is indeed only because it is what’s best for them. It would be really bad PR if Apple was distributing malware and spyware on the App Store, so they are careful not to.
However, they could just as easily choose to allow other shady dealings, and those would fly right under your radar if you choose to just straight-up trust Apple.
They might want to use personal data and usage metrics for profit and marketing (see the Carrier IQ debacle), they could be strong-armed by governments or carriers or the MPAA to give up your sensitive data, et cetera.
There is absolutely no guarantee anything in a “walled garden” environment does not do things you would consider harmful. Combine that with the fact, as outlined in the article, that Apple simply does not allow you access to your own data that they keep on file, and the Apple environment is looking like a potential breeding ground for some very scary things.
I personally feel that doing some research and using some common sense before installing apps is a small trade-off for not having a corporation decide what’s “safe” for me.
Edited 2012-04-16 12:16 UTC
Right, as opposed to Google, who always has my best interest in mind? If you use pretty much ANY walled garden, you’re putting some amount of trust in whoever maintains it, and Apple isn’t the only one pulling apps for reasons other than security. For example, Wireless Tether and other apps have been yanked from the Android market. Even with Linux distro app repositories, which I imagine is mostly run by ‘free love’ people, if some major corporation came threatening with a lawsuit because of a particular app, do you think that app is going to remain in the repository?
And this is different than Google, how exactly? Hell, Google probably has a lot more sensitive info about me than Apple and Facebook do. And why do you suppose they wouldn’t keep some of that info under wraps and/or do anything nefarious with it? Because they say they won’t? LMAO!!! Surely, you’re not that naive?
And that’s fine… for you. But is it really up to you to make that decision for everyone else? For some people (a lot of people, actually), there’s nothing outside of the walled garden that they’d have a particular need for anyway.
Apple was just a convenient example, since you were kind of implying with your original post that the Apple App Store was preferable to something like Google Play because it is a walled garden with taller walls. I don’t mean to say Apple is particularly bad, I just mean to say that “letting someone else do the curating” is dangerous no matter what.
For the record, I don’t trust Google in the slightest. I’ve stopped using Gmail and I now use DuckDuckGo for search. I also don’t own a smartphone – so I don’t mean to come off as biased. If I have a bias, it is against the idea that most corporations have ethics.
Nope, but I think ideally people should think about what they’re actually getting themselves into when they cede control of many aspects of their personal life to corporations. If you do know the facts, and then decide to do it, great, knock yourself out!
Edited 2012-04-17 07:46 UTC
I meant to imply that it is preferable to SOME people, not specifically me
Ideally, people wouldn’t open files like Angelina_Joline_Nude.jpg.exe, but hey… what are you gonna do?
Facebook most definitely has most of your most sensitive information. Painting Google as being worse than Facebook is just plain uninformed.
If you’re an Apple user than Apple has much more sensitive information than Google. And with Siri, they have even more. Google’s information is surprisingly advertisement oriented, or I guess it’s no surprise.
Obviously, if you’re Google user then Apple has practically no information about you.
PS: And their ecosystem is as protected as it possibly can, without involving error-prone human review or castrating developers.
Edited 2012-04-17 11:39 UTC
Although it seems like the malware problem is bigger on Android, just having a “curated” app store doesnt make iOS completely immune to malware :
http://www.intomobile.com/2011/11/08/security-expert-sneaks-malware…
The thing is, Apple isn’t only refusing malware to their store, they are also refusing Tor, uTorrent, Google Voice and so on. No alternative web browser either. They just refuse anything they don’t like on completely arbitrary basis.
The worst part (and outright outrageous) part is that there is now way for a user to install apps using another medium (like by downlading and installing an APK directly on android). You have to jailbreak your damn device to be able to install what YOU want on YOUR phone. Seriously…
oh come on, the full interview is full of BS.
Some points are true, the Govs censorship- including the US – & the media companies approach to piracy but the finger pointing to Apple and Facebook are just bollocks. Basically he just put them there to get a not so thinly way to launch a media uproar about them.
He actually complains that other search engines can’t search Facebook? really? facebook is, for all intents and purposes, the largest private- discussion forum on the world. WHy should that be “searchable” by third parties? Would he like to open up gmail contents to outside search engines? really curious on much users it would have after that change. There’s a lot of criticism one can point to facebook, but an excess of privacy is not one of them.
And also, he points out that FB has been “sucking out” users from gmail for a long time and that you can’t extract your info from facebook? The last time i check the only way for you to get your info out of gmail was using their non standard implementation of IMAP to download your entire gmail account to your pc, spending a day reordering things and cleaning up, and then uploading to you new
mail server that actually complies with the f***ing standards. I wouldn’t call that “correct and user-friendly exporting of data”.
Besides facebook i guess you could also find out other mini-internets that are not searchable by third-party search engines: maps.google.com and plus.google.com just popped into my mind..
the Apple cheapshot is also off-mark. Apples restricts on iOS what apps you can install, not what content you can access. As long as it is on the web, i can “safari” my way to it. And why the f**k should my apps be searchable by google?! Didn’t understood that one. We may agree that Apple’s policy of not allowing side-loading on iOS devices is “incorrect” or “not-user-friendly” but that has nothing to do whatsoever with the internet censorship Brin is talking about.
“Apple provides zero means to see, export, or delete the information they have on you, associated with your Apple ID or otherwise. In 2012, that’s just sinister.” – Thom Holwerda
About apple this really doesn’t make a lot of sense. Apple is not in the business of data mining and does no money from advertising ((don’t really count the invisible/tiny business of iAds )). Apples does its money the old fashion way: it sells you products that you want to buy.
The only times i needed to use my AppleID was when i purchased something on itunes store or app store. And now if you want to use iCloud. Not sure if you need to provide it anywhere else.
So i guess the only things that you would get on Apple list of what it knew about you was your list of Apple purchases. I agree that it should be made available on appleid.apple.com for instance, but i would’nt exactly call it “sinister”.
What was sinister for me was discovering my google record in google’s dashboard somewhere in 2008/2009 and discovering that they had recorded everything i ever searched since 2004. You could pretty much make a day-to-day picture of me just by following their records.
Oh, the whole privacy issues of iCloud concern me, but my focus would be if that data was encrypted and properly secured, as apple is notoriously bad at web stuff, not exactly if apple was data mining it. Not saying it can’t happen, just saying that untill now it was never a part of Apple business strategy.
Edited 2012-04-16 13:57 UTC
Apple uses that data to better understand how to extract money from you. Google does it to better understand how to extract money from advertisers. I don’t see the difference.
If it dated back that far, then you turned the tracking feature on yourself. Only very recently did Google turn it on by default for NEW ACCOUNTS ONLY. In other words, you willingly turned it on, and now you;re complaining? Even though you can see all the info and delete it?
Cry me a river.
“Apple uses that data to better understand how to extract money from you. Google does it to better understand how to extract money from advertisers. I don’t see the difference. “
Untill now i have seen no such behaviour from apple. nor any proofs of it. Again, not saying that i can’t happen, just saying that, in the present, i don’t think that is credible.
“Only very recently did Google turn it on by default for NEW ACCOUNTS ONLY. In other words, you willingly turned it on, and now you;re complaining? Even though you can see all the info and delete it? “
That’s not true. I did no enabling. The only thing i did do, was browsing the web and doing search on google.com WHILE logged in to my gmail account. Something that i actually never thought was “wrong”.
And the whole “info deletion” considering Google is rather suspicious to me. This is the company that set up gmail to not erase your email messages when deleted by an imap client but rather “archive them”. This is the company that still keeps your email messages on their servers even though you set up “forward and delete on receival”. This is the company that does 100% of its money by selling your data and profile to advertisers. So , again, i apologize if i don’t exactly trust them on their “check what we know about your and delete it if you want”…
Edited 2012-04-16 14:23 UTC
So, you believe Apple on its blue eyes, but not Google? That’s perfectly fine, of course, but you have to be incredibly naive to think that Apple does not use the data it has on its customers to extract more money from them.
You MUST have enabled it. Maybe you didn’t know, did it accidentally, or whatever. But for older accounts, it was only enabled if you opted in. I never opted in, so it’s disabled for me. For newer account, it was opt-out.
i accept that somehow i might have do it accidentally but i seriously doubt it. I am, and always was, very concerned with my privacy, so that kind of option would have caught my eye.
You sure that you didn’t also have your history logged in dashboard on some old gmail accounts?
I did a small search and found out this:
“Originally a separate Google Labs project, the My Search History has now been incorporated into Google’s Personalized Search. Log in with a Gmail or other Google account. As with Ask Jeeves, once a user is logged in, all Google searches are tracked. Google does offer a “pause” function that can stop the recording of search results without logging out.”
http://www.infotoday.com/online/mar06/OnTheNet.shtml
the date of the article is march/april 2006.
About the pause logging option, never saw it. But i must admit i wasn’t looking for it. As gmail and google search we’re supposedly two different products i didn’t anticipated their joining of data. Of course back then i didn’t really understood how google made its money.
About i trusting apple more than google, it’s not a matter of “trust” is simply a matter of understanding what their goal/source of profit is.
Google does its all of its money by datamining. Apples does it by selling products. Google wants to refine the data to you specifically. Apple probably only wants aggregated feedback from their products.
As such i trust apple more regarding my data because:
a) they don’t make any money directly from it
b) they have no history of doing it.
I would also say that i trust (more or less) Microsoft int he same way. Until the whole bing/hotmail fiasco they had no interest in my data, just in selling me software. With hotmail/bingo i became a bit more concerned but as Microsoft is essentially a giant set of family-angry mini-organizations, i really don’t care a lot. Basically i trust them more then google because they are incompetent.
But if Google nukes your privacy and sells your data to anyone who wants it you don’t mind?
Recently you liked the idea that Google linked all their databases so they could target you even better with ads, but you don’t like it if Apple should use the data they have on you to, well, effectively tempts you to spend money?
It seems both want your money, expect Apple doesn’t sell it to companies you have never heard about.
What if it becomes accepted that ads you are presented are targeted and embarrassing ads appear when you want to show someone something? You can’t claim it’s a random ad, because people wouldn’t believe it. Surely all ads are tailor made.
Now from Apple I haven’t received any ‘offers’ and my .mac/.me accounts are spam free (unlike my Gmail account). As I use Apple stuff a lot they should have my all figured out, but it doesn’t seem I’m targeted for anything.
So it’s strange you favor a proven privacy menace over a company you suspect/hope they do so too.
If one was asked before the rise of Google if it would be a good thing if there was one single company that tracks what you read, watch, see, hear,search, email, where you are, etc…, drives through your street and takes pictures of your house while sniffing your WiFi and they’re even on mobile phones with mall ware issues… and sell what they find on you to anyone who pays for it… I’m sure many people wouldn’t like this.
If Google sells your data where can I buy it? Please do direct me to the portal where I, as an advertiser, can get phone numbers and emails of my visitors just to thank them for visiting.
(This is my canned response to the crap with words “sells your data”)
Sorry, I don’t work at Google. You better contact them directly.
Yet you make the claim that they sell your/my data. If you want to be a part of a rational discussion, the please defend your claim.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rational-discussion-flowchart/
I did not claim they did, I asked Thom if he would mind IF they did, because Google has much more on him than Apple does, yet he does mind when Apple uses this data and doesn’t when Google does it.
Even though you can see what Google has on you, which most people don’t know how to get to, apparently they don’t delete it when you hit the delete button. You have no control over this data. Google may use it legal or illegal or a befriended employee or hacker may grab the data and export it out of Google.
for google to sell your data they have to construct a profile from you. that profile, as facebook profile, has your email id tagged with endless descriptions in their neat DB. ” residence: Bronx / New york city” / “usually logs in from: ny public college, comcast block 100.121.121.*” / “is 34 years old” / “regularly communicates with users ids: [email protected]; [email protected] ” bla bla bla bla.
you get the picture. it’s a relational database so that they can segment you and aggregate you with others in the same desired group by the advertiser. Now, this is not bad in itself, but it has the “inconvenient” side-aspect that for that to happen they have to completely categorize you.
You might be comfortable with that. i’m not. someone knowing that much about me makes me uncomfortable. While that may be completely innocent by now, considering the “authoritarian and paranoid drift” of the US government that demands data under dubious pretense and permissive laws, one day it might not be so innocent. And i say US gov because for now they are the crazy guy on the block. tomorrow might be other entity or china gov when you happen to go there on business . Or someone can break in google data base and steal that info from google to their own profits. the bad outcomes are endless.
Anyway you put it, there’s slim benefit to you, the user/consumer/citizen of having your life spied and discriminated and categorized like that. IF you are willing to do that for a better recommendation for potato chips or a free email service, then fine for you. I on the other hand, am not.
I agree that they have a lot of that information that US government could get access to. And that disturbs me.
However they don’t sell your data – let us be poor, but just(as a Lithuanian saying goes). They sell advertisement space, nothing more. Saying that they sell data is an uninformed statement or an outright lie.
“To try out My Search History, you have to sign into Google Accounts (you’ve already got one if you’re a Gmail, Froogle or Google Groups user) and search away. To disable My Search History, just log out and search as usual. Am I scared that someday all-powerful Google will know what color underwear I have on? To some degree, yes. But I’ll happily get the stuff I need from the web as fast and easy as I can until then.”
http://lifehacker.com/100501/google-my-search-history
This is from April 2005. I’m not sure when exactly was the begining of my webhistory from google’s dashboard but this is probably around it.
That article is incomplete. To actually be using the feature back then, you had to go to Google Labs and specifically enable it. It was a Labs feature.
maybe, i can’t be sure. I started using google products somewhere in 2004/2005 but i remember seeing google searches from my university final project (late 2005 and most of 2006) in the google dashboards so somewhere in this timeframe i can surely say that they were already recording my search history.
And i can surely say to you that i didn’t went to google labs to activate “history recording” from google. So either it was in some innocent looking option that i didn’t pay attention to or since 2006 it was enabled by default as the 2006 article i linked mentioned and that could account for me seeing my univ project searches.
In short, you think that Apple is a benevolent organization to help all humanity.
Srsly? This crap again? Hate on Google all you want, but at least don’t lie.
So you’re complaining about the technical issue, you realize that in a high availability distributed environment data can be stay on their systems for months? Hell, even EU data protection laws have no issues with Facebook not deleting profile data immediately, but after a technically appropriate time period. Your rage is unsubstantiated.
no, i think Apple is a for profit company that does its profits by selling me physical and media products. notice the absence of advertising and profiling from this description?
http://www.webpronews.com/google-2011-revenue-breakdown-infographic…
notice the small red letters bellow the 37.9 billion. You may google any other sources but everyone of them will state the same: google does its money from advertising, almost exclusively. (i seriously don’t count the 4%)
no i’m complaining that my forward and deleted email, that should not be indexed or kept by google is indexed, searched, analyzed and put in the gmail trash bin where it sits for 30 days instead of simply forwarding and erasing.
I understand what you said but that is a different technical matter. that it sits around in the cache of the servers for days/weeks ok, i can deal with/accept. That it goes through gmail “indiscrete” processing even though i explicitly asked not to, that i have a problem with.
You claim that they sell your data, that is an outright lie. Otherwise, show me where I can buy it.
just by curiosity i went to dashboard and check out their FAQ. read this:
What happens when I pause the service, remove items, or delete the Web History service?
You can choose to stop storing your web activity in Web History either temporarily or permanently, or remove items, as described in Web History Help. If you remove items, they will be removed from the service and will not be used to improve your Google experience. Web History items that you’ve deleted might show up in your Account Activity Report if the information was saved by Account Activity prior to deletion.
As is common practice in the industry, Google also maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users. For example, we use this information to audit our ads systems, understand which features are most popular to users, improve the quality of our search results, and help us combat vulnerabilities such as denial of service attacks.
I’m sorry, you were saying what about being able to delete your google history from their servers?
And how do you know it?
If Safari tomorrow returns 404 on a url, or don’t show some expected results pages of whatever search engine, how can you know it’s not a safari filter?
You can’t install alternative web browser. Why!?
How comes Apple can consider that the builtin web-browser is the best ever, the ultimate, the best one for *every* body?
And more importantly, why?
Until recently, I was believe it was just the usual arrogant our-is-the-best-for-all-period, but with the personal data *market*, I start to think different (pun intended).
“If Safari tomorrow returns 404 on a url, or don’t show some expected results pages of whatever search engine, how can you know it’s not a safari filter? “
because i use other devices besides iDevices?
on the whole you can’t install other browsers/non-approved apps, i fully agree with you- you should have the option to do so, even if you needed to perform some esoteric commandline kung-fu to do it. But that has nothing to do whatsoever with the crocodile’s tears from Brin about INternet censorship.
Oh, I see. Apple, by his strict control of your web browser experience on their iDevices, can be trusted that they will never filter your content because… they can’t forbid you to use another device to discover it?
That’s a funny argument, really.
Kinda like during Microsoft vs Apple flamewars, when someone was using the ultimate point: Microsoft is not abusing his monopole because you still can buy a non-Windows computer!
Aka justifying abusive policy because it’s not actual censorship.
Why do I archive my GMail account using standard IMAP client? Opposed to Facebook’s you can’t even get a list of emails of your own “friends”.
Soe is WalMart and other retailers, but dear God how much information do they collect about you when you use their loyalty card and/or plain CC. Or should I remind you for who’s benefit that information is gathered for?
PS: Siri only works because of data mining.
PPS: He’s complaining about the fall of the open web, not privacy. So your characterization of Brin as a hypocrite is not correct.
Edited 2012-04-17 12:00 UTC
i don’t have a facebook account for a couple of years now, but if i remember correctly there was an option of downloading your entire profile/pictures and commments in html format.
my beef with gmail is that for it to work “properly” with an imap client you have to go around setting up stuff and implementing gmail labs features and even so it might never act properly. it’s not that you can’t download, its that for years it was impossible to use it correctly the same way you would simply use a standard imap account. The fact that specific IMAP clients for gmail had to be designed (Sparrow for example) says a lot.
Standards for interoperability are extremely important. I get seriously pissed every time i discover some dumb company ignoring existing standards just so they can be “different”. and lock you in in the process. (and yes, i know that apple does this some times. )
No, he’s complaining that the fall of the “open web” is defined by what google can index or not. Even if that measure is only the reverse of some kind of privacy. Facebook should not be indexed. Nor should any other social network or private foruns. In the same way, google own services as maps and g+ are not indexable by third party search engines. And yet he doesn’t have a problem with this.
So, yes, Brin is f***ing hypocrite that took the opportunity of this article to take cheapshots at his adversaries. Which is a shame because the actual warnings about the govs and media companies messing with the net are serious and real issues that people should be warned about.
Edited 2012-04-17 17:10 UTC
Well guess what? That is long gone. That was a major problem with Facebook, they went from “We play nice with everyone” to “All you base is belong to us”.
Don’t extrapolate that example to mean the whole. As you said, it’s mentioned along with the web censorship so should be taken in that context.
Facebook, however, has grown to be much more than a private forum. Given that you haven’t used it, I can imagine that you don’t know. Facebook is AOL of the 21st century. There are storefronts and eshops on Facebook. There are whole websites that are 100% Facebook based. When Brin says that Facebook is becoming a closed off sub-web, it’s literally true. If that propagates, it’s not good for people like you and me that stay away from Facebook as much as possible. If Zuck gets his way, you will have to become a member of this new closed off web.
A) Actually G+ is indexable by third parties, when the profile is set to public all public posts and public information can be indexed. Though a direct link to the profile needs to be present somewhere for the fist start. A Facebook page is findeable, but none of my public posts are indexable.
B) Maps data isn’t owned by Google, so I doubt that they are in a position to allow indexing.
Your use of swearwords degrades the point even further. He has a very valid point,made from a perspective of a person that knows the situation better. See my points above.
PS: I get to know these limitations and issues because I get the chance to assist startups that have brilliant ideas that stretch the limits. Facebook does start to be looking like a closed off ecosystem where only Facebook is allowed to benefit.
If you don’t ever want someone to store it, do not put it on the internet. It’s as simple as that. Even with services that supposedly let you delete your data, remember that you have zero proof that it was actually deleted. None. For all you know, the delete button just hides your information and/or account. As long as someone else has control over the server, you have no control over what they do with what you put there. Don’t be tempted into a false sense of security via the big red delete button. You have no idea what it actually does.
it’s not as simple as that. why is it that people somehow have this weird notion that there can be no privacy on the internet? That is a false choice. You can have both the “internet” and privacy.
Do some lookup on cryptography for start. and then pop in joindiaspora.com and check the description of their service. you can design a system that is both private and social. it might be a little cumbersome or not so “fluid” to use as facebook but you get privacy.
The only reason we’ve somehow developed this weird and wrong notion of “privacy vs the internet” is because of the “free” ad-based services that we started using when since the net was born. unfortunately i see now that those were a mistake. Every service is paid. you either pay with your money or you pay with your privacy and data. but you always pay.