Why don't online businesses start offering privacy-conscious customers the option to pay for their services? This seems like a pretty obvious alternative to paying with privacy. I doubt they would even have to charge much for it to be profitable.
The problem is that the people willing to pay are exactly the people the advertisers most want to reach. The whole point of all this privacy invasion is to target the people with money who are willing to spend it. You take those people out of the pool and offering a free service no longer makes any sense, because nobody wants to pay to reach the people too cheap to buy stuff.
Which leaves you with a pay-only service, competing with a free-only service that consequently has ten times as many users (and therefore much stronger network effects), and the pay service goes out of business.
The true problem with all of this is that we're using services for things we should be using products for. You want to share photos with friends? We could do that in 1999 with AOL Instant Messenger. But now Facebook and Instagram have a better UX -- and it has nothing to do with whether they're services.
What we need is an open source P2P Instagram. No ads, no paying anybody anything, just photo sharing.
> The problem is that the people willing to pay are exactly the people the advertisers most want to reach.
So charge more. Instagram et al are trying to make money, not serve advertisers. If privacy-conscious people are willing to pay more than advertisers that's great.
The trouble is that the users (including the privacy conscious users) have to go where their friends are to interact with their friends. And the majority of users are not willing to pay money for more privacy, so the advertising-funded service gets the majority of the users, and the privacy conscious users can then either give up their privacy or lose the ability to interact with their not so privacy conscious friends. And they choose the first option in droves (or there just aren't enough privacy conscious people left), so there is no real market for the alternative.
I mean think about it: It's not like offering a paid service is rocket science. If there was money to be made there, why isn't anyone making a billion dollars offering it? Why aren't you?
Maybe it's an untapped market and no one else has had the vision to serve it. But this is kind of one of those money where your mouth is situations. If you think that market is lucrative enough to be worth chasing, do it. If not, well, apparently no one else does either, so here we are.
Also: "axiom"? How about "fact"?