Ask HN: Pay For Privacy...Really?

3 points by makalu 15y ago ↗ HN

If you're a free user of prezi all your presentations are public, and in order to make them private you have to subscribe and pay. That seems like a pretty genius business model that I'm sure has been used before. But is it a feature that successfully drives people to pay? Does it open too big of feature gap that competitors can differentiate against?

Facebook's privacy is a mess as it is, and it would never (hopefully) happen, but could you imagine facebook under a "Pay for Privacy" model?

5 comments

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bjplink 15y ago ↗

Link to Prezi signup: http://prezi.com/profile/signup/

scrrr 15y ago ↗

That is exactly how github works, too: https://github.com/plans

DanielStraight 15y ago ↗

As a customer, I'm actually a fan of the idea. If you aren't paying for something, you are generally the product not the customer (see: http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continu...). If I willingly become a customer, then I don't have to be a product anymore. I like that option.

jonafato 15y ago ↗

That might work out well for Facebook. I don't know what percentage of their user base would care enough to do so, though. And at this point, with all of the ridiculous things that have happened with their privacy, it might even seem extortive to me. It's one thing to tell everyone their stuff is public unless you pay from the beginning, but publicizing what one would otherwise assume to be private data late in the game and then charging to reprivatize would be underhanded.

fgjhryhty 15y ago ↗

Sounds good to me - I don't want to listen to all the fuss about privacy, let alone pay for it.