[Jaygles]

If services offered a paid version that guaranteed privacy, such that I stay anonymous and only data points that are strictly necessary to provide the service are persisted in the company's servers, I would happily pay.

And I mean guaranteed in a way that I would have legal recourse against the company if they go back on their word or screw up

[amunozo]

You will, most people won't.

[zelphirkalt]

Baiting people with "no cost" services, and then using their data in ways that people might not agree with, hiding behind 10 subpages to click through or a huge "how we protect your data (NOT)" text is no solution though.

What would be a solution, but one that the companies don't want, is to offer a service either as a paid service or truly at no cost which includes no privacy cost. But they are afraid of doing that, because they fear that then they can't hitch the ride on data taken from users, who are not informed and who only clicked some accept button, because the business kept nagging them about it, instead of accepting a "no".

I have to admit though, that Google did better than most other big techs, as they do provide a consent dialog, where rejecting is as easy as accepting. See for example YouTube. And not sure about Google search, since I don't use it these days. However, I did not research (and that's how one would have to call it), whether rejecting is truly adhered to, or they sneak in not actually needed things as "functional cookies" or something.

However, lets not have any illusions here. If the EU didn't demand things to improve and didn't impose fines, big tech would have done exactly nothing of the sort.

[LtWorf]

Because they know that even if you pay it's very unlikely that they will respect the deal anyways.

[iepathos]

What specific legal recourse beyond what exists? You can already sue for breach of contract if a company violates their privacy policy. The real problems are: (1) detecting violations in the first place, and (2) proving/quantifying damages. A 'guarantee' doesn't solve either.