Privacy Is Now a Subscription

Privacy companies and their subscriptions

I watched the first episode of the fourth season of Westworld… And that got me thinking.

Today everything seems to be free. Facebook is free, as is Google, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Gmail, etc., etc. But we all know, and you have probably heard this too many times, that when a product is free, you are the product.

These companies collect your data and track you all around the internet to understand your desires and behaviors. They use this data to target advertising, train statistical models, and try to predict the future.

Thanks to the Facebook scandal, having control of your data seems to be important again. More and more people started to value their data footprint and searched for solutions to this problem.

When the demand is high and the offer is low or non-existent, someone somewhere will capitalize on this; the market is a jungle. So new companies were born, with the sole purpose of protecting users privacy, they say.

Privacy companies

Let me introduce you to NordVPN, Surfshark VPN, Privacy.com, BitDefender, … Companies born for the sole purpose of selling privacy. I’m not saying that they are offering useless services (having a VPN can actually hide you from ISPs and servers) but this should be the standard, not the exception.