"Pay-by-dignity" has been plaguing computer systems. It should have been stopped.

Shift, the boy

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"Pay-by-dignity" is a concept of purchasing or exchanging a product with a social contract, like, you know, weekly(!) subscriptions in mobile games (www.phonearena.com, www.reddit.com (r/assholedesign)). And to put things straight, we'd like to reveal what the term exactly means for today's world of Android, GNU/Linux, iOS, macOS, and Windows:

  1. Pay-by-your-data. In exchange of free apps, features, and services, you are being enforced to give up your personal data.
  2. Pay-by-your-beliefs. In exchange of free apps, features, and services, you are being enforced to give up your personal beliefs.

For some, you might have understood the first concern better than the latter, because pay-by-your-data is heavily objected in the techno-political war of "surveillance capitalism" fueled by governments and corporations. If you don't even understand what "surveillance capitalism" is and means for you, I'd recommend you reading the following articles:

"Pay-by-dignity" stands beyond than just "surveillance capitalism", because we prefer to focus on individual citizen and consumer rights rather than some business or political interests. Sometimes, it's all about the consumer rights to use versus monopoly…

…or a Tupperware incident that could show planned obsolescence is very, very important for business survival…

…or companies degrading their product value and morale for greed…

…or specifically, in the GNU/Linux community, where it seems you now have to be politically correct (in each of Rust, LGBTQIA+, DEI, and Antifa) in order to contribute to their projects…

How is "pay-by-dignity" justified?

First and foremost, we don't want to outright accuse governments and companies for being "bad" enough to extort users to those extremes. To us, what ThePrimeagen said is as true as:

"Microsoft enjoys getting the value from their customers, whereas Valve enjoys delivering value to the customers."

Whoa, "we value your privacy" just possibly have a whole new meaning to it. Perhaps not because companies "respect" your digital privacy so much. No. But what they said is literally true: "we value your privacy," to a price typically only disclosed for the interests of business investors.

How is your life worth to them? In 2012, that's probably just $25 by Google (www.seroundtable.com).

And the worst part? In many countries, those investors became government officials.