fhe solves a ton of issues in sass products that don’t look great under audit. things where we sign off on audit today with fancy contracts called “data privacy agreements.” i think it will take some time (20 years?) but i expect zero knowledge for most of your data to be table stakes for saas offerings
Saas is all about collecting, controlling, and exploiting your data though. If they can still mine your data and leverage or sell the information they get out of it that's not really "zero knowledge". I don't expect companies will stop being interested in making money at all costs in 20 years, especially where the costs are mostly to you and your privacy.
Money and control is what it's about. That usually means making someone dependent on you in order to access/use their own stuff, making it hard to migrate their data away from your service, and taking every advantage of the data being collecting.
I've never seen a saas product that isn't using and/or "sharing" their customer's data for their own benefit somehow. If they exist at all, they're the exception and not the rule.
This is completely wrong way to view SaaS. It's just about making money, the control part is just so they can try and squeeze more money out of you. Control is not the goal. Money is.
I guess that's fair... ultimately money is everything, but I do think there are absolutely companies who highly value the control aspect as well. It can give them the ability to censor, act as a gatekeeper, and nickel and dime.
Saas seems a lot more predatory and risky than most products/services. You hand over money, you hand over control, you hand over your data and all of it leaves you varying degrees of vulnerable.
I guess I shouldn't expect a pragmatic view of saas to be popular around here (some of you are likely working on your own saas projects after all), but the reasons saas is attractive for companies to offer are the same reasons that make me hesitate to use them.
Money is the goal of the individual Cogs in the machine. Control is the goal of the machine itself, which uses money to incentivize (power) its Cogs. If you're a Big Tech company you essentially have endless free money to leverage compared to your Cogs. The machine itself doesn't care about money. That free money train is coming to an end though over the next decade. Or at least that's the reality I'm planning for. :)
