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Let's make them pay for using our personal data

140 points by Igor_Wiwi 7y ago

sbhn 7y ago
usertesting.com pays you for your data. And earn.com pays you for your data
thehoomanist 7y ago
“GoGoDuck”. Clearly a user.
- Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
  fixed
danpalmer 7y ago
Arguably, they already do. They pay us in services such as communications software, social software, search, etc. Also, this is very common in some countries/industries. In the U.K. if you want to buy insurance or open a bank account etc, you’ll often use a comparison website, and they will likely give you an incentive (such as free cinema tickets) for choosing a service through them. This is paid for directly by the affiliate revenue. Cashback sites also exist that do this through affiliates. Credit cards do this with air miles, cashback and other rewards too.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Perfect example in picking affiliate comparison sites - they skew the market, and don't include companies or plans that aren't in the affiliate scheme, so you rarely end up with the actual best value through them. Just the sort of conflicting loyalties that leads to insurance, pension and mortgage misselling scandals. More generally the exchange seems to have become one of being scammed out of £10 of data, tracking and inferences for every £1 of value received. It's years since it's felt like a fair and equitable exchange - like search in exchange for simple keyword ads without tracking.
- Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
  I bet for 90% of users of Facebook(or Google) it is not clear how actually Facebook makes money
  - matz1 7y ago
    Or they may just value personal data differently than you.
  - sbhn 7y ago
    Facebook sells your attention. Look at your news feed, every second post is an ad.
    - munk-a 7y ago
      Your attention and your productivity. They are a leech on modern society.
  - ummonk 7y ago
    Really? The ads are annoyingly obvious.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  This. Your data is already a currency. By visiting and consuming content you’re effectively paying for that content with whatever data they’re collecting. Maybe this transaction needs to be somehow more explicit?
  - Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
    this is the point, if you are already paying (implicitly) for using the different services, make me the one who can control it and give me the choice to opt out if I don't want to do it
    - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
      You do have that control. Find an alternative service provider. Don’t like gmail? Choose fastmail.
      - ionised 7y ago
        Or change the law.
      - AlexandrB 7y ago
        Don't like reCaptha? Stop using 90% of websites that require login. Don't like Google Analytics? Stop using basically everything else. The only remaining "control" is in ad and tracker blockers, and a vocal minority of the tech industry considers these tantamount to theft.
- velcrovan 7y ago
  The argument is that the intangible costs of the current scheme (life under total surveillance) make it desirable to force a direct dollar-value recognition of people's personal data. A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up completely is an acceptable outcome of this policy. Make everyone go back to non-targeted advertising! [1] https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change
  - fyfy18 7y ago
    I don't have a problem with the theory of targeted ads, in fact as a consumer it is actually useful. If you start looking for a pair of boots, then see that a brand you like but was out of your budget has a sale on, so you buy those boots you really wanted but couldn't afford. That's useful for a consumer. The problem is that targeted advertising mostly just sucks. Last year I bought wireless headphones from Amazon, and everyone I visited them again for the next two weeks I had recommendations to buy wireless headphones. So even Amazon can't do it properly. What if I'd browsed on Amazon and bought from another store? The other day I saw an ad on twitter for an wine company, in the "why am I seeing this as?" section it said that it is targeted to males (yup), aged 35 and above (no) who live in the United Kingdom (no). And to top it off, I don't even drink. The problem is targeted ads mostly don't work, their targeting is so simplistic (see something you like, then blast you with ads for that over and over) or just assign you to such a general bucket (age range and location) that it isn't useful. Even "likes" aren't that useful for targeting - just because I "like" a brand doesn't mean I want to be blasted with ads from them or am going to buy every product they sell. I like Thinkpads, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy every new ThinkPad that is released.
- BonesJustice 7y ago
  First parties might compensate me by providing a service in exchange. What of the third parties with whom they share my personal data? When those parties profit off my data, what compensation do I receive?
  - umvi 7y ago
    You are not the IRS - you don't have a right to compensation every time your data changes hands, just for each unique copy. That's like me paying an author for a book, and then the author demanding I pay if I give (or sell) the book to my friend. I know what you are thinking: "but in this case copies of your data are being resold" in which case I would agree that each party has to buy their own copy from me, or, if they resell to each other, they have to delete the copy they previously bought from me.
    - basicallydan 7y ago
      I haven't thought it through much, but on the face of it I like the idea of receiving some compensation whenever my data is _resold_, plus a way for me to see _where_ my data has been resold, maybe even a notification. It's a bit like a songwriter receiving a royalty whenever their song is played on the radio or in public (see https://www.prsformusic.com/ https://www.prsformusic.com/). Obviously this would be a challenging thing to implement.
      - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
        here's the way this generally works for music: 1. a musician joins one or more "guilds" and pays dues. there are three major musicians guilds in the US. 2. a public venue pays subscription fees to one or more guilds. 3. the venue is licensed to broadcast music by any of the guilds' members. 4. the guild divides monies from venues proportionally amongst its members, with proportions based largely on the musician's popularity. that model wouldn't work very well for what you're imagining. firstly, it wouldn't give you the access to information that you want about who has your data. secondly, unlike music, user data for advertising purposes doesn't really have differences in value; to an advertiser, data about one person is just as valuable as data about another person. any differences in value have to do with the type of data rather than the source of the data.
- atoav 7y ago
  Similar to the leader of a scam sect who pays you in spiritual enlightment: you might find it to be a reasonable deal, if you even recognize it as such, but ultimately it is not a solid foundation for a stable society. The usual question arises: What would a civilized solution to the problem look like? Edit: Having a unhinged competition where the winner is he who manipulates the masses most effectively without getting cought doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better future to me.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I like to pay in dollars - can I pay for their services in dollars and not be tracked everywhere I go? Advertising is a negative value add on pretty much all modern interactions, it needs to go away and stop imposing such a steep cost on consumers for the atrociously marginal value it delivers to producers.
DavideNL 7y ago
That sounds like what Brave Rewards does... https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
dijksterhuis 7y ago
https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://solid.inrupt.com/ Tim Berners Lee is already working on something similar
NoblePublius 7y ago
And let’s make them charge us for sending emails with attachments.
ergl 7y ago
I used to support this point on view, but after the Facebook VPN scandal [0][1] I think using this approach will do more harm than good. It's a good way to make sure only poor people lose their privacy, since those that can afford it will use other platforms that charge a fee in exchange for a private experience (say no ads, or better privacy defaults). Arguably, this is already happening with Apple, positioning themselves as privacy-aware, but charging a huge markup for it. [0]: Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for access to all of their personal data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-research-vpn-minors-data-access-apple https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-re... [1]: Discussion on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055
ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
> Do you remember when you were looking for good pair of hiking boots on Google and almost imminently you start seeing promoted posts about nice shoes discounts on Facebook and Twitter. I don't think this happens? > Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company. This definitely does not happen. Google doesn't sell search history to anyone else. It may be the case that Google itself remarkets things to you. But I don't think so, since how would they get paid in that transaction? Through affiliate links? Doubtful. Instead, I think what actually happens is that people make a search, they click a link, and target of that link (be it Amazon or some other store) associates their profile with interest in a particular product, then remarkets to that profile on Facebook.
Communitivity 7y ago
This is not a new movement, and Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID is good but not the first attempt to address this. The first I heard of something like this was in the Berkman Identity Group, which grew into the Identity Commons. At the time the movement was called Vendor-Relationship-Management (VRM), an inversion of the CRM practice where customers controlled the information and could be incentivized in various ways (discounts, paid, etc.) to share that information for agreed upon durations. https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship-management/ https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship... This movement was one of the drivers for the link contract work done as part of the Extensible Data Interchange (XDI) OASIS technical committee. I don't know if this is the first instance of this kind of movement, but it was the first I heard of it. Doc Searls reports another recent development: VRM is alive and well, under a new acronym that plays on B2B, Me2B. Source: http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
nerd7473 7y ago
Although the idea sounds nice, I think it's impractical. Large companies don't care about you, they care about profit...
jszymborski 7y ago
I've been thinking instead of paying individuals, gov't should levy a tax on PII that is stored. A $/person identified/fingerprinted would be interesting. This would allow ethical companies like Firefox and Signal to operate at much lower margins than Chrome and Messenger.
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  I like this. One worry I have with paying individuals is that it becomes predatory for poorer people. If you struggle come back-to-school season, it might be tempting to let companies vacuum up your data for a quick buck. Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). We should make companies value our privacy in the first place, not commoditize it.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    > Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). Heh, yes, clever spin on his part: it's expensive primarily because the default is actors (like Google) working so hard against it.
  - jszymborski 7y ago
    I think that enforcing strong privacy creates a "herd immunity" similar to how vaccines work. Collecting vast information on individuals allows companies to work in the disinterest of the public. I also think that services that have become essential to receive public services like email should be regulated as such, with availability and cost guarantees. That's a whole digression on eInfrastructure though....
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  That sounds self defeating from matters of auditing would expose it to the government and everyone involved in compliance layers. Not to mention PII can be composite. Knowing you are 26 and in say New York City doesn't tell much. Now add "once worked at a Quiznos in 2010" and "born July 19th" starts narrowing things further.
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
This page sends your data to: - Google - Disqus - Facebook Maybe the author should practice what they preach.
Qiho 7y ago
Why not sell our data and for that money buy non - free services? In that sense we can at least control what to give and services will compete not only for a good service but also for a good price.
neilv 7y ago
Be careful, as you legitimize a practice that has been very secretive and dishonest in tech, and in many cases should be considered criminal. I suggest that we're tremendously outclassed in understanding how this all works, and how to find angles or "evil" in it. Also, it could be somewhat similar to what we get with class-action settlements that are just a minor cost of doing business to let the wrongdoer off the hook, while paying some middleperson to facilitate that.
ausjke 7y ago
Good points, I will trade money for privacy myself if there is an option, but the product quality has to be good.
jackforsight 7y ago
I have said this for the longest time ECHO, GOOGLE HOME etc... DNA tests, Ancestry et al. should pay the users and not the other way around.
martinshen 7y ago
Why would they pay you for your data? How much is it worth? If you click on 0 ads per year, you generate $0 for Facebook and therefore your data is worth $0. For a personally targeted (using your data) ad click on FB, you're looking at ~$3.25. For a web targeted ad click on a niche website, you're probably looking $0.50-$2.50. In other words, your "data" is worth $0.75-$2.75 per click of revenue FB spends 17% of revenue on direct costs and another 18% on marketing. Let's ignore R&D improvements and assume 35% of costs to serve that revenue. Profit per click for FB = $0.49-$1.79 per click. Please consider that these clicks must have real intent behind them. In other words, there should be at least 10% chance you'd actually buy that product. In other words, your data is not worth that much money. ... On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?
- jtbayly 7y ago
  I agree. The whole point is that they are already providing a service to you in exchange for your data—a service that is quite expensive to run. If you want to sell somebody your data, that's fine. Pick how you want to be paid. Services or cash.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  > On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.? IIRC they don't make anywhere near $10/user/month. If you gave me the option to pay, say, $25/year for ad-free, tracking-free, and it was implemented in some way that I could trust, then I might be willing to participate with FB again. I'm hoping, actually, that someone will come along with exactly this business model so that we can have social networking for friends and family without the dark patterns. Needs to get everyone on board, of course, which is the hard part.
  - martinshen 7y ago
    They generate ~$100 ARPU on US users. https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-user-north-america-ever/ https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...
intopieces 7y ago
I’d rather be given the option to just straight up pay for a service with assurance that my personal data isn’t being used. That is what I would like to “make them” do.
- ducktypegoose 7y ago
  I read a statistic that claimed Facebook would only need a single payment of like $4 from it's users to operate at the same margins without selling their data. Seems like presenting users with the option of paying $10 for premium privacy could end up make companies more money. I don't use FB, but I'd sure use Google products more often if the option were available. Maybe we're edge-case users, but I surely don't feel like one. That said it's confusing the options don't exist, because from a purely capitalist perspective, the only perspective these companies have, the option seems to make sense.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    > Facebook would only need a single payment of like $4 from it's users to operate at the same margins without selling their data Facebook makes about $100/year from American users. [1] Something like $4 once can't be right. (Facebook also doesn't sell your data. They allow people to target ads against your data.) [1] 2018 Q3 data, but the right range: https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-user-north-america-ever/ https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...
0thgen 7y ago
worth noting that this is why Andrew Yang is justifying a tax-funded Universal Basic Income proposal in the US: if corporate research makes money of citizen's data, then citizens should be compensated accordingly.
netwanderer3 7y ago
Under the spirit of capitalism, if privacy is such a popular product that so many consumers want, then why not make it available for them to purchase? For Google users example, free-tier will allow each user account 5 searches per month that will not be tracked and recorded, so essentially users will have an option to specify right before the moment of each search to indicate whether this specific search is going to be “cognito” or “invisible” (perhaps by just ticking a checkbox). Higher tiers offering greater amounts of private searches per month will simply cost more to purchase shall those consumers desire. Ran out of private searches? Top it up just like prepaid phone credit! This way those users who are extremely privacy conscious will have a solution to protect their own privacy while Google has invented a new revenue stream and can even increase profits from their valuable services. The next generation Capitalism 2.0 will now enjoy privacy becoming a new cash cow industry overnight. The question then will be how much are people willing to pay for an unlimited account?
- jakelazaroff 7y ago
  This seems… very dystopian. Would we be okay with e.g. landlords placing cameras in the bathrooms of apartments for rent unless the tenant paid an extra fee? What if it were framed as a discount and targeted low-income housing? Why should we allow our privacy to be commoditized, instead of enshrining it as a basic human right?
  - netwanderer3 7y ago
    It's not mandatory. Everything else would still remain the same for free users just like what we already have, this is only for those who prefer not to be included in the data so now they will have the option to pay instead. Obviously we cannot expect Google to provide their services for free as it's very costly to maintain such global infrastructure and their team of engineers, therefore in turn Google would need user data in order to provide advertising products and generate the required revenue. We must pay for using Google services in one way or another, and right now we are paying it by giving up our personal data. In the end this will simply serve as another payment option for those who value their privacy more than cash. I suspect the majority of population would still remain at free tier. However with more options available, at least the public will no longer complain about potential privacy issues, and Google can also remove much of the unnecessary heat and focus off their back. There are just so many different ways Google can tweak and optimize these offers to satisfy public demand for privacy. The current advertising in exchange for privacy model obviously does not work for all consumers so it's time to evolve.
calimac 7y ago
All arguments aside; we all can agree that the current environment is inequitable, invasive, and unsustainable in a modern internet. Why don’t we expose all the marketing execs who trade our traffic and dossiers for what they are.
nostrademons 7y ago
Pretty sure the mechanics as detailed in the article are factually wrong. Google does not sell personal data. It collects all the personal data it can and then stockpiles it, where it becomes an asset that the company can use to build products and charge rent (largely from advertisers, but also from consumers). Selling an extremely valuable proprietary asset to competitors would be a really dumb move - the money in today's economy is in owning monopoly assets and charging rent for them. The actual mechanism behind the behavior the author observed is that the user went to Google, searched for a product, and then visited the product's website. The product's website contains a tracking beacon that associates a unique cookie for the user with the visit. The website's owner can then choose to run ads on Facebook or Twitter that are shown only to people who previously visited the website. This program is well-known among Facebook advertisers (it's apparently quite profitable to them), but Facebook understandably doesn't publicize it much to the general public. Agree that it'd be cool if the person involved could actually control who and where it went to and was compensated for the use of it, but that'd likely require a fundamental change in how the web works.
- delinka 7y ago
  I propose that it would require a minor change in web browsers only. Consider that we have 'incognito' and 'private browsing' sessions. The implementations are slightly different between browsers (e.g. Firefox appears to allow sharing between tabs in a window; Safari keeps each tab completely isolated), but the principle is the same. Modify the browsers so they're always in 'private' mode, and to only permit sharing once the bill is paid.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    Pageviews within an individual incognito session still share cookies. If they didn't nearly every login on the web would break. When you create an incognito session just for one specific task and then close it, this doesn't matter. When you're always in incognito mode you're back where you started: a site that you're always logged into will have all the data from any site you visit with its tracking beacon.
- 7y ago
williesleg 7y ago
All my personal data and posta are copyright by me. Some day I'll sue. That's my retirement plan.
archagon 7y ago
If anyone is interested in some long-form writing, Vi Hart posted a very well-reasoned article about the same subject (and much more besides) a few weeks ago: https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/ https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/
buboard 7y ago
The thing is, without those companies your data is absolutely worthless, users are not holding any cards. To own your data,put it in RSS format and let competitors bid to license them from you. (Also author doesnt seem to know how google,fb work)
munk-a 7y ago
I strongly disagree in trying to actually cost out the usage of our personal data. I think the right to privacy should be protected and that the extreme compromise of your personal thoughts is abhorrent. A market around this data would just lead to a normalization of this behavior into the socially acceptable realm. Similar to how we don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery we should prevent people from selling off their personal history.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
oscarwroche 7y ago
I think I looked that up like 4 years ago and found a few platforms where you could resell your data - thing is it wasn't worth much, like you could make 4 bucks a month with regular smartphone usage. Even if the data we generate is profitable it's only so when aggregated (e.g. across thousands / millions of users) so the value of a given person's data is heavily diluted. Then again maybe it isn't worth that much because the price is being set by the people collecting the data and not by the users - if there is a paradigm shift in which people become aware that they're basically working for free, maybe the value would increase ? (I used to work in a company that was basically harvesting some users' GPS data (via a SDK / without their explicit consent) and using it to make consumer studies for retail companies so it made me think)
rvrabec 7y ago
Start by figuring out how much YOUR data is worth - that's the hardest part of all this. Individuals will need to create scarcity like the big ad networks do today, otherwise a market flooded with copies of personal data will have very little value. https://app.fastgarden.io/assessment https://app.fastgarden.io/assessment
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
I know this is a really unpopular opinion, but what I don't get is why all this fuss over personal data? So what if facebook records what sites you've been to? If I visit starbucks, When I go to order my latte, the owners/baristas remember my name and face and maybe even what drink I ordered - you certainly don't mind that, right? People aren't normally sensitive to these things: for example Govt on average takes 1/3 of people's incomes (thousand, tens of thousands of dollars) without the slightest hint of complaint. But when a company records where you've been online (with 0$ cost to you) it's all the sudden a disaster? i genuinely struggle to understand this. if someone could explain it, that would be interesting.
- iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
  This explained it quite well to mw previously: https://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html https://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html
- ccallebs 7y ago
  Imagine that an entity knows your worst fears, deepest desires, biggest perversions, most sensitive insecurities, the people you love, the people you hate, the things you covet. Now let's pretend that they know how to use this information to change your opinion. And not just your opinion, but the opinion of however many people fit their targeted persuasion campaign. Then understand that the moment the data is sold to another group, they have the same power. The new group might want to do things more sinister than sell you designer jeans. Finally, realize that the information will last longer than you will. It'll probably be your legacy.
  - sourthyme 7y ago
    I feel like this is a bit superfluous fear mongering. We are somewhat in control of ourselves, and should be expected to take responsibility for our actions. And this is just another way of using ads to attempt to manipulate us. Overtime we will learn to adjust the influence of ads, just as we have done before. I don't trust the government to fix this entirely, so I think its more important to learn to identify these persuasions, so they don't influence our actions.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
Could we just not let anyone use our personal data? I don't need, neither do I want to lease my personal data to google or facebook. I very much want that they don't use my personal data. Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That really has to stop.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That's a non-sequitur... Whatsapp is Facebook. The Google Play Store is Google. You are using Facebook and Google 's services. Whether you're using Google search or "Facebook" (the product not the company) is irrelevant.
theincredulousk 7y ago
In theory I agree, but the somewhat depressing realization is that your data is not especially valuable in and of itself. The marginal value of your data with respect to 10,000,000 other people's data is almost (but not quite) nothing. The value is in the whole. It might work well if significantly large groups of people got together and collectively sold their data - say 100,000 or more. That would be kind of cool - "hey we are 100,000 people with X demographics and are willing to share Y data for Z dollars. Doing it on an individual basis may be a symbolic victory, but that would likely be it. "Personal" data has a huge asymmetry in value. There is some Danny Kahneman in here somewhere - I bet people would value their own data 10x what they value a random person's at. In my opinion people would on average refuse to sell their data individually because what it is actually worth would almost certainly be lower (probably much lower) than they'd imagine, and that sounds like it would make people sad not happy.
theartfuldodger 7y ago
The initial concern of "the service would have to be paid for" is insurmountable to this generation. If the average Grandma and High School kid had to pay per query to Google in return for ad free search ( Google did have this product with CSE) what miniscule percentage of users would pay? The Brave Attention Token tackles this problem in a logical manner
dwardu 7y ago
Disclaimer: this post is very subjective and all facts mentioned here are purely my assumption So they're beliefs not facts

140 points by Igor_Wiwi 7y ago

sbhn 7y ago

usertesting.com pays you for your data. And earn.com pays you for your data

thehoomanist 7y ago

“GoGoDuck”. Clearly a user.

Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
fixed

danpalmer 7y ago

Arguably, they already do. They pay us in services such as communications software, social software, search, etc. Also, this is very common in some countries/industries. In the U.K. if you want to buy insurance or open a bank account etc, you’ll often use a comparison website, and they will likely give you an incentive (such as free cinema tickets) for choosing a service through them. This is paid for directly by the affiliate revenue. Cashback sites also exist that do this through affiliates. Credit cards do this with air miles, cashback and other rewards too.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Perfect example in picking affiliate comparison sites - they skew the market, and don't include companies or plans that aren't in the affiliate scheme, so you rarely end up with the actual best value through them. Just the sort of conflicting loyalties that leads to insurance, pension and mortgage misselling scandals. More generally the exchange seems to have become one of being scammed out of £10 of data, tracking and inferences for every £1 of value received. It's years since it's felt like a fair and equitable exchange - like search in exchange for simple keyword ads without tracking.
Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
I bet for 90% of users of Facebook(or Google) it is not clear how actually Facebook makes money
- matz1 7y ago
  Or they may just value personal data differently than you.
- sbhn 7y ago
  Facebook sells your attention. Look at your news feed, every second post is an ad.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    Your attention and your productivity. They are a leech on modern society.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Really? The ads are annoyingly obvious.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
This. Your data is already a currency. By visiting and consuming content you’re effectively paying for that content with whatever data they’re collecting. Maybe this transaction needs to be somehow more explicit?
- Igor_Wiwi 7y ago
  this is the point, if you are already paying (implicitly) for using the different services, make me the one who can control it and give me the choice to opt out if I don't want to do it
  - JustSomeNobody 7y ago
    You do have that control. Find an alternative service provider. Don’t like gmail? Choose fastmail.
    - ionised 7y ago
      Or change the law.
    - AlexandrB 7y ago
      Don't like reCaptha? Stop using 90% of websites that require login. Don't like Google Analytics? Stop using basically everything else. The only remaining "control" is in ad and tracker blockers, and a vocal minority of the tech industry considers these tantamount to theft.
velcrovan 7y ago
The argument is that the intangible costs of the current scheme (life under total surveillance) make it desirable to force a direct dollar-value recognition of people's personal data. A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up completely is an acceptable outcome of this policy. Make everyone go back to non-targeted advertising! [1] https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change
- fyfy18 7y ago
  I don't have a problem with the theory of targeted ads, in fact as a consumer it is actually useful. If you start looking for a pair of boots, then see that a brand you like but was out of your budget has a sale on, so you buy those boots you really wanted but couldn't afford. That's useful for a consumer. The problem is that targeted advertising mostly just sucks. Last year I bought wireless headphones from Amazon, and everyone I visited them again for the next two weeks I had recommendations to buy wireless headphones. So even Amazon can't do it properly. What if I'd browsed on Amazon and bought from another store? The other day I saw an ad on twitter for an wine company, in the "why am I seeing this as?" section it said that it is targeted to males (yup), aged 35 and above (no) who live in the United Kingdom (no). And to top it off, I don't even drink. The problem is targeted ads mostly don't work, their targeting is so simplistic (see something you like, then blast you with ads for that over and over) or just assign you to such a general bucket (age range and location) that it isn't useful. Even "likes" aren't that useful for targeting - just because I "like" a brand doesn't mean I want to be blasted with ads from them or am going to buy every product they sell. I like Thinkpads, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy every new ThinkPad that is released.
BonesJustice 7y ago
First parties might compensate me by providing a service in exchange. What of the third parties with whom they share my personal data? When those parties profit off my data, what compensation do I receive?
- umvi 7y ago
  You are not the IRS - you don't have a right to compensation every time your data changes hands, just for each unique copy. That's like me paying an author for a book, and then the author demanding I pay if I give (or sell) the book to my friend. I know what you are thinking: "but in this case copies of your data are being resold" in which case I would agree that each party has to buy their own copy from me, or, if they resell to each other, they have to delete the copy they previously bought from me.
  - basicallydan 7y ago
    I haven't thought it through much, but on the face of it I like the idea of receiving some compensation whenever my data is _resold_, plus a way for me to see _where_ my data has been resold, maybe even a notification. It's a bit like a songwriter receiving a royalty whenever their song is played on the radio or in public (see https://www.prsformusic.com/ https://www.prsformusic.com/). Obviously this would be a challenging thing to implement.
    - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
      here's the way this generally works for music: 1. a musician joins one or more "guilds" and pays dues. there are three major musicians guilds in the US. 2. a public venue pays subscription fees to one or more guilds. 3. the venue is licensed to broadcast music by any of the guilds' members. 4. the guild divides monies from venues proportionally amongst its members, with proportions based largely on the musician's popularity. that model wouldn't work very well for what you're imagining. firstly, it wouldn't give you the access to information that you want about who has your data. secondly, unlike music, user data for advertising purposes doesn't really have differences in value; to an advertiser, data about one person is just as valuable as data about another person. any differences in value have to do with the type of data rather than the source of the data.
atoav 7y ago
Similar to the leader of a scam sect who pays you in spiritual enlightment: you might find it to be a reasonable deal, if you even recognize it as such, but ultimately it is not a solid foundation for a stable society. The usual question arises: What would a civilized solution to the problem look like? Edit: Having a unhinged competition where the winner is he who manipulates the masses most effectively without getting cought doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better future to me.
munk-a 7y ago
I like to pay in dollars - can I pay for their services in dollars and not be tracked everywhere I go? Advertising is a negative value add on pretty much all modern interactions, it needs to go away and stop imposing such a steep cost on consumers for the atrociously marginal value it delivers to producers.

DavideNL 7y ago

That sounds like what Brave Rewards does... https://brave.com/brave-rewards/ https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

dijksterhuis 7y ago

https://solid.inrupt.com/ https://solid.inrupt.com/ Tim Berners Lee is already working on something similar

NoblePublius 7y ago

And let’s make them charge us for sending emails with attachments.

ergl 7y ago

I used to support this point on view, but after the Facebook VPN scandal [0][1] I think using this approach will do more harm than good. It's a good way to make sure only poor people lose their privacy, since those that can afford it will use other platforms that charge a fee in exchange for a private experience (say no ads, or better privacy defaults). Arguably, this is already happening with Apple, positioning themselves as privacy-aware, but charging a huge markup for it. [0]: Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for access to all of their personal data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-research-vpn-minors-data-access-apple https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-re... [1]: Discussion on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago

> Do you remember when you were looking for good pair of hiking boots on Google and almost imminently you start seeing promoted posts about nice shoes discounts on Facebook and Twitter. I don't think this happens? > Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company. This definitely does not happen. Google doesn't sell search history to anyone else. It may be the case that Google itself remarkets things to you. But I don't think so, since how would they get paid in that transaction? Through affiliate links? Doubtful. Instead, I think what actually happens is that people make a search, they click a link, and target of that link (be it Amazon or some other store) associates their profile with interest in a particular product, then remarkets to that profile on Facebook.

Communitivity 7y ago

This is not a new movement, and Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID is good but not the first attempt to address this. The first I heard of something like this was in the Berkman Identity Group, which grew into the Identity Commons. At the time the movement was called Vendor-Relationship-Management (VRM), an inversion of the CRM practice where customers controlled the information and could be incentivized in various ways (discounts, paid, etc.) to share that information for agreed upon durations. https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship-management/ https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship... This movement was one of the drivers for the link contract work done as part of the Extensible Data Interchange (XDI) OASIS technical committee. I don't know if this is the first instance of this kind of movement, but it was the first I heard of it. Doc Searls reports another recent development: VRM is alive and well, under a new acronym that plays on B2B, Me2B. Source: http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/ http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/

nerd7473 7y ago

Although the idea sounds nice, I think it's impractical. Large companies don't care about you, they care about profit...

jszymborski 7y ago

I've been thinking instead of paying individuals, gov't should levy a tax on PII that is stored. A $/person identified/fingerprinted would be interesting. This would allow ethical companies like Firefox and Signal to operate at much lower margins than Chrome and Messenger.

jakelazaroff 7y ago
I like this. One worry I have with paying individuals is that it becomes predatory for poorer people. If you struggle come back-to-school season, it might be tempting to let companies vacuum up your data for a quick buck. Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). We should make companies value our privacy in the first place, not commoditize it.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  > Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). Heh, yes, clever spin on his part: it's expensive primarily because the default is actors (like Google) working so hard against it.
- jszymborski 7y ago
  I think that enforcing strong privacy creates a "herd immunity" similar to how vaccines work. Collecting vast information on individuals allows companies to work in the disinterest of the public. I also think that services that have become essential to receive public services like email should be regulated as such, with availability and cost guarantees. That's a whole digression on eInfrastructure though....
Nasrudith 7y ago
That sounds self defeating from matters of auditing would expose it to the government and everyone involved in compliance layers. Not to mention PII can be composite. Knowing you are 26 and in say New York City doesn't tell much. Now add "once worked at a Quiznos in 2010" and "born July 19th" starts narrowing things further.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago

This page sends your data to: - Google - Disqus - Facebook Maybe the author should practice what they preach.

Qiho 7y ago

Why not sell our data and for that money buy non - free services? In that sense we can at least control what to give and services will compete not only for a good service but also for a good price.

neilv 7y ago

Be careful, as you legitimize a practice that has been very secretive and dishonest in tech, and in many cases should be considered criminal. I suggest that we're tremendously outclassed in understanding how this all works, and how to find angles or "evil" in it. Also, it could be somewhat similar to what we get with class-action settlements that are just a minor cost of doing business to let the wrongdoer off the hook, while paying some middleperson to facilitate that.

ausjke 7y ago

Good points, I will trade money for privacy myself if there is an option, but the product quality has to be good.

jackforsight 7y ago

I have said this for the longest time ECHO, GOOGLE HOME etc... DNA tests, Ancestry et al. should pay the users and not the other way around.

martinshen 7y ago

Why would they pay you for your data? How much is it worth? If you click on 0 ads per year, you generate $0 for Facebook and therefore your data is worth $0. For a personally targeted (using your data) ad click on FB, you're looking at ~$3.25. For a web targeted ad click on a niche website, you're probably looking $0.50-$2.50. In other words, your "data" is worth $0.75-$2.75 per click of revenue FB spends 17% of revenue on direct costs and another 18% on marketing. Let's ignore R&D improvements and assume 35% of costs to serve that revenue. Profit per click for FB = $0.49-$1.79 per click. Please consider that these clicks must have real intent behind them. In other words, there should be at least 10% chance you'd actually buy that product. In other words, your data is not worth that much money. ... On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?

jtbayly 7y ago
I agree. The whole point is that they are already providing a service to you in exchange for your data—a service that is quite expensive to run. If you want to sell somebody your data, that's fine. Pick how you want to be paid. Services or cash.
rootusrootus 7y ago
> On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.? IIRC they don't make anywhere near $10/user/month. If you gave me the option to pay, say, $25/year for ad-free, tracking-free, and it was implemented in some way that I could trust, then I might be willing to participate with FB again. I'm hoping, actually, that someone will come along with exactly this business model so that we can have social networking for friends and family without the dark patterns. Needs to get everyone on board, of course, which is the hard part.
- martinshen 7y ago
  They generate ~$100 ARPU on US users. https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-user-north-america-ever/ https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...

intopieces 7y ago

I’d rather be given the option to just straight up pay for a service with assurance that my personal data isn’t being used. That is what I would like to “make them” do.

ducktypegoose 7y ago
I read a statistic that claimed Facebook would only need a single payment of like $4 from it's users to operate at the same margins without selling their data. Seems like presenting users with the option of paying $10 for premium privacy could end up make companies more money. I don't use FB, but I'd sure use Google products more often if the option were available. Maybe we're edge-case users, but I surely don't feel like one. That said it's confusing the options don't exist, because from a purely capitalist perspective, the only perspective these companies have, the option seems to make sense.
- jefftk 7y ago
  > Facebook would only need a single payment of like $4 from it's users to operate at the same margins without selling their data Facebook makes about $100/year from American users. [1] Something like $4 once can't be right. (Facebook also doesn't sell your data. They allow people to target ads against your data.) [1] 2018 Q3 data, but the right range: https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-user-north-america-ever/ https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...

0thgen 7y ago

worth noting that this is why Andrew Yang is justifying a tax-funded Universal Basic Income proposal in the US: if corporate research makes money of citizen's data, then citizens should be compensated accordingly.

netwanderer3 7y ago

Under the spirit of capitalism, if privacy is such a popular product that so many consumers want, then why not make it available for them to purchase? For Google users example, free-tier will allow each user account 5 searches per month that will not be tracked and recorded, so essentially users will have an option to specify right before the moment of each search to indicate whether this specific search is going to be “cognito” or “invisible” (perhaps by just ticking a checkbox). Higher tiers offering greater amounts of private searches per month will simply cost more to purchase shall those consumers desire. Ran out of private searches? Top it up just like prepaid phone credit! This way those users who are extremely privacy conscious will have a solution to protect their own privacy while Google has invented a new revenue stream and can even increase profits from their valuable services. The next generation Capitalism 2.0 will now enjoy privacy becoming a new cash cow industry overnight. The question then will be how much are people willing to pay for an unlimited account?

jakelazaroff 7y ago
This seems… very dystopian. Would we be okay with e.g. landlords placing cameras in the bathrooms of apartments for rent unless the tenant paid an extra fee? What if it were framed as a discount and targeted low-income housing? Why should we allow our privacy to be commoditized, instead of enshrining it as a basic human right?
- netwanderer3 7y ago
  It's not mandatory. Everything else would still remain the same for free users just like what we already have, this is only for those who prefer not to be included in the data so now they will have the option to pay instead. Obviously we cannot expect Google to provide their services for free as it's very costly to maintain such global infrastructure and their team of engineers, therefore in turn Google would need user data in order to provide advertising products and generate the required revenue. We must pay for using Google services in one way or another, and right now we are paying it by giving up our personal data. In the end this will simply serve as another payment option for those who value their privacy more than cash. I suspect the majority of population would still remain at free tier. However with more options available, at least the public will no longer complain about potential privacy issues, and Google can also remove much of the unnecessary heat and focus off their back. There are just so many different ways Google can tweak and optimize these offers to satisfy public demand for privacy. The current advertising in exchange for privacy model obviously does not work for all consumers so it's time to evolve.

calimac 7y ago

All arguments aside; we all can agree that the current environment is inequitable, invasive, and unsustainable in a modern internet. Why don’t we expose all the marketing execs who trade our traffic and dossiers for what they are.

nostrademons 7y ago

Pretty sure the mechanics as detailed in the article are factually wrong. Google does not sell personal data. It collects all the personal data it can and then stockpiles it, where it becomes an asset that the company can use to build products and charge rent (largely from advertisers, but also from consumers). Selling an extremely valuable proprietary asset to competitors would be a really dumb move - the money in today's economy is in owning monopoly assets and charging rent for them. The actual mechanism behind the behavior the author observed is that the user went to Google, searched for a product, and then visited the product's website. The product's website contains a tracking beacon that associates a unique cookie for the user with the visit. The website's owner can then choose to run ads on Facebook or Twitter that are shown only to people who previously visited the website. This program is well-known among Facebook advertisers (it's apparently quite profitable to them), but Facebook understandably doesn't publicize it much to the general public. Agree that it'd be cool if the person involved could actually control who and where it went to and was compensated for the use of it, but that'd likely require a fundamental change in how the web works.

delinka 7y ago
I propose that it would require a minor change in web browsers only. Consider that we have 'incognito' and 'private browsing' sessions. The implementations are slightly different between browsers (e.g. Firefox appears to allow sharing between tabs in a window; Safari keeps each tab completely isolated), but the principle is the same. Modify the browsers so they're always in 'private' mode, and to only permit sharing once the bill is paid.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  Pageviews within an individual incognito session still share cookies. If they didn't nearly every login on the web would break. When you create an incognito session just for one specific task and then close it, this doesn't matter. When you're always in incognito mode you're back where you started: a site that you're always logged into will have all the data from any site you visit with its tracking beacon.
7y ago

williesleg 7y ago

All my personal data and posta are copyright by me. Some day I'll sue. That's my retirement plan.

archagon 7y ago

If anyone is interested in some long-form writing, Vi Hart posted a very well-reasoned article about the same subject (and much more besides) a few weeks ago: https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/ https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/

buboard 7y ago

The thing is, without those companies your data is absolutely worthless, users are not holding any cards. To own your data,put it in RSS format and let competitors bid to license them from you. (Also author doesnt seem to know how google,fb work)

munk-a 7y ago

I strongly disagree in trying to actually cost out the usage of our personal data. I think the right to privacy should be protected and that the extreme compromise of your personal thoughts is abhorrent. A market around this data would just lead to a normalization of this behavior into the socially acceptable realm. Similar to how we don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery we should prevent people from selling off their personal history.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

oscarwroche 7y ago

I think I looked that up like 4 years ago and found a few platforms where you could resell your data - thing is it wasn't worth much, like you could make 4 bucks a month with regular smartphone usage. Even if the data we generate is profitable it's only so when aggregated (e.g. across thousands / millions of users) so the value of a given person's data is heavily diluted. Then again maybe it isn't worth that much because the price is being set by the people collecting the data and not by the users - if there is a paradigm shift in which people become aware that they're basically working for free, maybe the value would increase ? (I used to work in a company that was basically harvesting some users' GPS data (via a SDK / without their explicit consent) and using it to make consumer studies for retail companies so it made me think)

rvrabec 7y ago

Start by figuring out how much YOUR data is worth - that's the hardest part of all this. Individuals will need to create scarcity like the big ad networks do today, otherwise a market flooded with copies of personal data will have very little value. https://app.fastgarden.io/assessment https://app.fastgarden.io/assessment

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

I know this is a really unpopular opinion, but what I don't get is why all this fuss over personal data? So what if facebook records what sites you've been to? If I visit starbucks, When I go to order my latte, the owners/baristas remember my name and face and maybe even what drink I ordered - you certainly don't mind that, right? People aren't normally sensitive to these things: for example Govt on average takes 1/3 of people's incomes (thousand, tens of thousands of dollars) without the slightest hint of complaint. But when a company records where you've been online (with 0$ cost to you) it's all the sudden a disaster? i genuinely struggle to understand this. if someone could explain it, that would be interesting.

iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
This explained it quite well to mw previously: https://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html https://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html
ccallebs 7y ago
Imagine that an entity knows your worst fears, deepest desires, biggest perversions, most sensitive insecurities, the people you love, the people you hate, the things you covet. Now let's pretend that they know how to use this information to change your opinion. And not just your opinion, but the opinion of however many people fit their targeted persuasion campaign. Then understand that the moment the data is sold to another group, they have the same power. The new group might want to do things more sinister than sell you designer jeans. Finally, realize that the information will last longer than you will. It'll probably be your legacy.
- sourthyme 7y ago
  I feel like this is a bit superfluous fear mongering. We are somewhat in control of ourselves, and should be expected to take responsibility for our actions. And this is just another way of using ads to attempt to manipulate us. Overtime we will learn to adjust the influence of ads, just as we have done before. I don't trust the government to fix this entirely, so I think its more important to learn to identify these persuasions, so they don't influence our actions.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

Could we just not let anyone use our personal data? I don't need, neither do I want to lease my personal data to google or facebook. I very much want that they don't use my personal data. Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That really has to stop.

0xffff2 7y ago
>Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That's a non-sequitur... Whatsapp is Facebook. The Google Play Store is Google. You are using Facebook and Google 's services. Whether you're using Google search or "Facebook" (the product not the company) is irrelevant.

theincredulousk 7y ago

In theory I agree, but the somewhat depressing realization is that your data is not especially valuable in and of itself. The marginal value of your data with respect to 10,000,000 other people's data is almost (but not quite) nothing. The value is in the whole. It might work well if significantly large groups of people got together and collectively sold their data - say 100,000 or more. That would be kind of cool - "hey we are 100,000 people with X demographics and are willing to share Y data for Z dollars. Doing it on an individual basis may be a symbolic victory, but that would likely be it. "Personal" data has a huge asymmetry in value. There is some Danny Kahneman in here somewhere - I bet people would value their own data 10x what they value a random person's at. In my opinion people would on average refuse to sell their data individually because what it is actually worth would almost certainly be lower (probably much lower) than they'd imagine, and that sounds like it would make people sad not happy.

theartfuldodger 7y ago

The initial concern of "the service would have to be paid for" is insurmountable to this generation. If the average Grandma and High School kid had to pay per query to Google in return for ad free search ( Google did have this product with CSE) what miniscule percentage of users would pay? The Brave Attention Token tackles this problem in a logical manner

dwardu 7y ago

Disclaimer: this post is very subjective and all facts mentioned here are purely my assumption So they're beliefs not facts