Making its money with ads doesn't mean anything anymore.
There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.
I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit attempt at a social network. Even the games themselves had their own telemetry crap I needed to disable buried deep in some advanced settings.
Spotify still insists on ratting me out to Facebook by loading their SDK even if I'm paying for the app. They also interrupt my flow every so often with in-app popovers about some stupid feature I don't care about.
A client I worked for that has a paid app had an insane amount of analytics and marketing SDKs in the app (including Facebook of course), so much that I actually refused to install the app or use the product myself even though they gave me a voucher.
> There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.
This is a good point and I'm glad we're finally seeing some pushback. I would have a problem working for a company that does unethical things and I was surprised that so many people don't care. And before you tell me that people don't have a choice — perhaps some don't, but that certainly doesn't apply to all the crowd that moves to Silicon Valley to work for Google.
The examples of paid products you used to support your point are not very good. The PS4 console was sold at a loss and Spotify is barely profitable. In short, you might have paid for them, but neither company made money from you based purely on those purchases. Both companies perform data collection to guess what, generate more ad revenue (through lots of channels).
Sony isn't having money trouble, they're huge. That's a sorry excuse.
And Spotify doesn't make much money because most of their users are freeloaders. Their poor business model should not become the problem of the paying users.
There are plenty of companies that have paid products and still do user-hostile things including stalking, spam, dark patterns, etc.
I paid full price for a Playstation 4. I still had to opt out of "enhanced data collection" and spend 15 minutes disabling every option on their bullshit attempt at a social network. Even the games themselves had their own telemetry crap I needed to disable buried deep in some advanced settings.
Spotify still insists on ratting me out to Facebook by loading their SDK even if I'm paying for the app. They also interrupt my flow every so often with in-app popovers about some stupid feature I don't care about.
A client I worked for that has a paid app had an insane amount of analytics and marketing SDKs in the app (including Facebook of course), so much that I actually refused to install the app or use the product myself even though they gave me a voucher.