everyone of those things is built around data collection and tracking, which feeds their ad machine.

>> So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product.

This is only true if everyone does it; Why would they stop advertising for a tiny market, especially if they can get both? Why decrease the value of the tracking on a smaller userbase? Sales conversion says you'd have to charge $50 or $500 a month and you'd have a much smaller base; does social media like this even work with a fraction of the people?

Maybe hthe GP is confident enough to have passed by the shallow indicator of displaying their wealth? The richest people I know personally (and who I deeply respect) absolutely delight in people under-estimating them, assuming they're "poor plebs" like the rest of us. They like money, recognize it's important and appreciate what it allows, but feel no need to advertise it.

>> product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.

Like no ads? that's usually the #1 you pay for and no mention of that.

I can't imagine the economics would work to support anything close to what they make from the ads & tracking model. They'd probably have to charge $39.99/month from everyone to compete.

$196.2 B ad revenue / 3.58 B daily users (as the average rate over the year) comes out to < $5/month from everyone.

Of course, the trick is you don't actually get "everyone". You get the users with more money, who are more valuable ad targets. Still, $39.99/m seems like it'd be pretty high.

Microsoft has always made great hardware, often with partners or acquisitions. If they don't run (traditional) Windows - like the phones - they are really good; if they do run desktop Windows we've gone from useable-but-handicapped to completely unacceptable IMO. They also tend to be side projects within MS; I'd suspect this thing saw the light of day because it was sold as a way to pump more AI at their mostly captive audience.

>> didn't make any sense.

only because of your lack of FAITH </s>

The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.

maybe not, but a terrorist would call in a fake bomb threat to inflect terror; that's kind of the point.

What seems more likely for a startup doing online mental health to collect biometric data? 1. "getting ahead" of potentially changing regulations. 2. collecting data they don't need because it's (a) easier and (b) never know when you'll need it!