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> You pay for it with your eyeballs on advertising. Data is not payment, it's sewage that people are finding a use for. Advertising that is targeted using said

> You pay for it with your eyeballs on advertising. Data is not payment, it's sewage that people are finding a use for. Advertising that is targeted using said data. One might be able to argue that it once was true (10 years ago?) that data was just a byproduct that people found a use for. But now it's more explicitly a goal for companies to collect. I don't think anyone can argue that the data google and facebook collect is incidental and they're just trying to find some use for it. Collecting users' data is a core part of their business model.

Eridrus 9y ago
> Collecting users' data is a core part of their business model. Collecting data is part of product strategy, it's not a business model unless you're actually selling it - which none of the companies people wring their hands over do. I worked at a startup where part of the pitch to investors is that we would get in early and collect all this data that would be expensive and maybe even impossible to replicate. Well, we collected all the data during the course of actually providing our service, it just turned out there wasn't a whole tonne of value in large volumes of unlabeled data. Every product person hopes that data will make their product better, but not all data is created equal. If it's not signalling what you want somehow, it's basically worthless.