Nobody perceives existing service in such terms except for HN geek crowd. An average person doesn't even have a concept of online privacy internalized, for him worrying about online privacy is basically the same as worrying about TSA agent examining his vacation backpack: he has nothing to hide. But it's even worse, since airport examinations happen in physical world and they cause at least some inconvenience, whilst FAANGs harvesting your data is invisible and only brings more comfort.
Advertising something with better privacy, permission, etc. will only bring you people that already care about it, i.e. the same 0.01% of geeks. I can see only two ways to achieve the goal of decentralized and privacy-respecting "Internet":
- Convince people that privacy is important. A very hard task in our age for several reasons. Also, it needs to be supported by legislation.
- Make the services more convenient to use than existing ones. Arguably impossible due to manpower imbalance and technical issues (privacy and security almost always come at a price of convenience).
An average person has whatever perception the market and product communicate. If you are banking on perception alone the current approach is good enough. The only way to push through that is to provide new capabilities or solutions to old problems other approaches refuse to provide.
You aren't selling privacy. You are selling a product with privacy included.
Yes, this is what I'm saying. So in this this case you're trying to make a product that is both superior in terms of convenience, features and price AND has privacy included. If you manage to do that, then yes, there is a chance. It's just that it's extremely hard to outperform current incumbents given that you're setting yourself very serious constraints, both technical and ethical, compared to them. Not to mention the budget.
Advertising something with better privacy, permission, etc. will only bring you people that already care about it, i.e. the same 0.01% of geeks. I can see only two ways to achieve the goal of decentralized and privacy-respecting "Internet":
- Convince people that privacy is important. A very hard task in our age for several reasons. Also, it needs to be supported by legislation.
- Make the services more convenient to use than existing ones. Arguably impossible due to manpower imbalance and technical issues (privacy and security almost always come at a price of convenience).