Privacy As A Marketing Tool

For those who are in the known, privacy nowadays is just a dream. Especially in China these days, for example it's very hard to find a Chinese email provider, that doesn't require your phone number to set up a new email account. And, at the same time, every phone number in China is registered using ID numbers, as required by law. Now is the question of how to minimize exposure, not complete privacy, or illusions of.

Yet we could see, time and time again, some hardware manufacturers would use privacy as a marketing tool, combining the two to boost sales. You can't sell privacy, not in this day and age anyways. It's both dangerous to average consumers and laughable to experts.

The reasoning behind this market scheme is, understandable. Profit model of hardware sales is so 90s that companies are all trying to get out of. Services both in the client side and cloud are better, but not much. One thing about services, especially free services though, is that they can run on any capable hardware, on any platform worth running on, and users love them.

Hardware manufacturers should be worried, and has been for some time. Some of them can make money by building a closed ecosystem, in it every transaction would require a fee, up to 30%. The logic is clear, although I have a huge profit margin on hardware, I can still count on people using my hardware to make me some extra money. Makes sense. Until the free services.

There are no transactions. Your hardware and your platforms are being used heavily and yet there is nothing to gain from it. How these free services making money you say? By controlling data.

Defencive move?

Sell people privacy. Easy and simple.

But in the long run? One losing battle.