Customers and users in 2024

Up until a few years ago, the adage of theinternet was that if you weren’t paying for something, your data was being harvested and sold as the real product. This informed many of the decisions I made: using Apple and paying for iCloud instead of “free” Google products, and paying for a whole bunch of software and other digital services.

By 2024, it’s become less clear that you can ever be a paying customer with any reasonable expectation of privacy. The latest example is Slack training AI models on chats from paying customers. The temptation for companies to do this is simply going to be too strong for most to resist.

Going back to iCloud, there’s a recent bug reported wherein old photos, deleted years ago, reappear on phones. This raises the far more nefarious question of whether Apple or iCloud ever delete your data.

A few years ago I could have fairly confidently told you which devices and services to get for a balance of reasonably good privacy with a decent enough UX. These days, I’m not really sure.