[smoldesu]

Paid products can still do all the same datamining that advertisers do, and there are markets for buying/selling that info (eg. Palantir). The truth is that all forms of monetization are inherently at-odds with the user's interests. Paying for an app doesn't magically make this friction go away, and it certainly doesn't reduce the incentive for developers to abuse your trust.

[Nextgrid]

> there are markets for buying/selling that info (eg. Palantir)

A major reason for these markets is that the information can be used for advertising or marketing targeting. In a world where the majority of products/services are paid and the amount of advertising is significantly reduced there will be much less demand for this information, leading to lower prices and even lower payoff from selling this information, not to mention potential legal risks (GDPR, CCPA, etc).

[smoldesu]

Palantir's biggest customers are government entities and market researchers, not advertisers. In a world where advertising has been significantly reduced, their products would become more valuable, since regular analytics would become inaccessible. Compared to the data these corporate aggregators collect, ad fingerprinting seems trivial.

The biggest crux of this, though, is the fact that both of these monetization schemes are destructive. Paying for software simply doesn't make sense in most cases, as there aren't that many people who are developing novel solutions these days. That's the exact reason why advertising is so popular: the market knows that relying on your conscious contribution is unsustainable, so why should you believe otherwise?