There are essentially no applications that require email. We should just stop doing email verification altogether. If you need to have a separate communication channel with your user just establish that separately after signup.
Then we're all doomed. Regulation has proven they have neither the interest nor capability to do anything about it, GDPR being the perfect example which have achieved nothing more than make Web2 more annoying to use.
> If the answer to killing the ad funding business model was individuals pay directly it’s going to face a steep uphill
Indeed, we tried that and it failed, so we need something else.
Blockchain will probably fail because the narrative has been taken over by greed and NFTs.
But Web3 will fail because the tech world seemingly (as evidenced by the comments here) have no interest in solving the problems of Web2, rampant privacy violations, predatory business models and advertising. The answer to all these problems by HN is ”no one cares about privacy so it’s not worth solving”.
Monopolies like Google and Facebook exist because of advertising. Remove advertising and they don't exist.
The fact that they're processing a lot of data is in large part because they need to for advertising.
Still, your understanding of blockchain tech is misleading here. Ethereum is public key registry at best and is not and should not be used to store or process data.
In a blockchain world you can still have service providers, but the user is the one with the power, not the service provider. Users are free to switch service providers as they see fit because their identity and data isn't tied to a single company.
If it has dependency on capital investment, it's not blockchain tech. Like almost by definition. Unless you adopt a super dumb idea of "blockchain = linked list". If you're talking about more than the data structure then what you're saying makes no sense.
You are using a very different meaning of centralisation and decentralisation than blockchain people do.
That's neither here nor there though.
The way you kill Facebook, Google and any Web2 company is to kill their business model. These are all 100% ad-funded businesses. Kill the advertising funded internet and these monopolies categorically die with it.
The only _attempt_ I've ever seen at addressing the issue that all the major websites are ad-funded has been within the blockchain space. Show me any other realistic alternative to ad-funding and I will happily adopt it.
The idea that blockchain tech is somehow invented out of nothing and then we search for a problem to match couldn't be further from the truth. Talk to anyone who works in the industry and they're trying to solve a problem.
I used to work in blockchain tech and the main problem I was focused on was "How do we prevent internet monopolies like Facebook and Google?".
If you don't see those monopolies as a problem, then you're disagreeing with the problem space, that doesn't make it "trying to find a problem".
> The parts of it being uploaded to iCloud, not the whole thing, yes?
If you leave your phone on default settings, that’s all of them. In fact you need to turn off a lot of things. Turn off backups, Photo Stream, Files, Mail Drop, album sharing (make sure you don’t accept any invites to shared albums or you will get flagged) and I’m sure there are more iCloud integrations I’m not aware of.
It’s actually quite hard to not use iCloud, by design.
Apple has caved to china many many times, a quick googling of it will give you a list.
The difference between the "old" content scanning and the new is indeed that they are now willing to "use" the results of that. Facial recognition was client-side only (or so they said), the results of which never left your phone.
Now they're doing content scanning and sending it to themselves as well as others.
In parallel Apple is starting up a growing advertising business, hiring aggressively and expecting that to be a big part of their future revenue. If they're now "allowed" (by its users) to do content scanning _and_ sharing the results, why wouldn't they use those results for themselves to target you with ads?
To all the people suggesting ad blockers, read the post and look at the image. There is no adblocker in the world that would block this. It’s a suggested video, a feature built specifically by youtube to push ”premium” content. The full page ad is also a new type of thing for youtube to market its own events.
Clearly youtube doesn’t see this as ads (though it is) and no adblocker would see them as ads either.