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> The potential disparity between the value of personal data and what users receive in return creates space for governments to seek reimbursement on society’s b
by cle 7y ago
> The potential disparity between the value of personal data and what users receive in return creates space for governments to seek reimbursement on society’s behalf.
Is there a way to leverage competition to reduce this disparity instead of taxation? If there were proper competition, would there be a disparity?
- save_ferris 7y agoThe problem here isn't a lack of competition. This happens because tech companies are well-equipped to siphon user data at massive scale and have been given the luxury of embedding these services into our daily lives without sufficiently educating the public around their business models. Ultimately, the public has very little control over what these companies do with this data, so there's a perverse mismatch of incentives here. Tech companies are incentivized to collect user data and not explain how it's used. Tech companies are incentivized to pay lobbyists to discourage the government from placing a market value on data. The public doesn't have that kind of lobbying influence.
- cle 7y ago> Ultimately, the public has very little control over what these companies do with this data, so there's a perverse mismatch of incentives here. That's what I'm getting at. See for example: https://stratechery.com/2016/antitrust-and-aggregation/ https://stratechery.com/2016/antitrust-and-aggregation/
- chillacy 7y agoThere might not ever be proper competition if internet companies are fundamentally winner-take-all monopolies where the more data you have the better you do.
- mtgx 7y agoWhat would competition do in terms of how advertising companies benefit from user data? I think the point is to start forcing companies into thinking sensitive user data is a liability that is taxed or worse if they do anything "nefarious" with that data (where nefarious could be whatever we think to put in that law). So it's like asking for Coca-cola to "have competition" (which generally just creates more sugar soda brands) vs taxing sugar.
- laughinghan 7y agoThis is brilliant, I've never thought of it this way. In a sense, GDPR already kind of does this, increasing the burden of storing user data. Would be interesting to consider dramatically ramp up this burden---maybe with a literal tax---for behavioral data stored longer than 90 days (or some other grace period), like a weaker version of Maciej Ceglowski's Six Fixes. https://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you.htm#six_fixes https://idlewords.com/talks/what_happens_next_will_amaze_you...
- lugg 7y agoThat's just going to optimise for short term thinking. Your customers will probably just get treated like crap long term.
- laughinghan 7y agoWhat does keeping surveillance records of your customers' online activity indefinitely have to do with not treating customers like crap? Offline businesses now and always don't and have never had indefinite surveillance records of their customer's behavior. Is it your position that offline businesses are incapable of not treating their customers like crap? Besides which, aggregated data that can't be de-anonymized would be exempted, as described by Maciej Ceglowski. The 90-day limit is only on fine-grained, personally-identifiable behavioral data that isn't explicitly shared (the content of my HN comment should of course be kept forever/until I delete it; but there's no reason to keep the IP address I used, other than aggregate statistics about what cities people access HN from).