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It doesn't work. There isn't enough money in the data for anyone to care. Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. The only reason it funds massive ind

by jerf 6y ago

It doesn't work. There isn't enough money in the data for anyone to care. Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. The only reason it funds massive industries is cost-effective aggregation by dirt-cheap computer power. I ran the numbers on Facebook a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue, not profit. Cross checking my numbers against some other sources, it may be now more like $40 or $50/yr. Profits, the thing they could actually afford to share with you, look like maybe $10/year. So, what, Facebook is going to cut me a check for $5 every year? Google sends me another 5-spot, and a few other companies send me a dollar or less? What problem does that solve?

GoodJokes 6y ago
Less money in their hands makes them less powerful and more accountable to users. Lots of people get measly dividends per year for stocks relatively. The shareholder rights are probably equally or more important though in that case.
erentz 6y ago
When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers. Why not ban tracking and ad targeting and selling personal data, and force that business model to go extinct, and now they have to start charging for service and their users become actual customers.
- sida 6y ago
  Arguably without the ranking and recommendation, FB is quite boring. The feed is such an integral part of FB.
- asciident 6y ago
  I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users. Since me and the other 99% of people contribute most of the value to Facebook for you, would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% of people and pay $1700/year?
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers. > I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users. I will never understand the mind of a typical social media user(s), as I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health as well as leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon. Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good, what can you say really is worth it that you can't do with text/email? The digital life that was sold to us as an amazing replacement is actually proving to be really sad as COVID has shown and is perhaps one of the reasons I can comprehend why people are out there violating it as its proven to be an incredibly undesirable and lonely experience.
    - asciident 6y ago
      > I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health Scientific evidence on that is inconclusive and mixed. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-9535-6.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-953... > Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good Then maybe it's not for you? I like to share things with my friends, see things they share, it's mildly entertaining and somewhat informative. If you don't enjoy those things, then you don't have to participate. > leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon In a practical sense, I have never encountered any downsides with supposed data leaking / personalized ads / strangers selling information about me. I have not lost money because of it, or lost friendships, or manipulated to do something I later regret. But I have lost time and money because of wrong information shared by the credit bureaus, lost friends and messages because of a broken phone, misleading salesmen who convinced me to buy bad products at bad prices, insurance companies that didn't pay up, and landlords who scammed me. So after I finish dealing with and worrying about actual bad actors that harm me in direct ways, maybe I'll start worrying about the ghosts.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.
  - Lendal 6y ago
    Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. The motivation for Netflix is to give you just enough quality to keep you paying every month. For a free service like Facebook you the user have no expectation of quality because you're paying nothing. So Facebook's motivation is not to provide quality but to keep you engaged and clicking. They've discovered that best way to do that is to infuriate you and to radicalize you. This keeps you the user engaged which is what advertisers require, so that's what Facebook delivers. This is great except that this is not a healthy arrangement for a democracy. To constantly have users given whatever amount of negativity and disinformation is necessary to keep them enraged and glued to their phones. That's what Yang is all about trying to fix. So paying for Facebook changes the dynamic. Users will now demand quality. Facebook will have to change. If users discover that Facebook only delivers them misery, then they'll stop paying and Facebook loses revenue on both ends. The users collectively will have power to demand improvements. Facebook's algorithm will have to change in response to that new dynamic. Problem solved. (That's the hope.)
    - Mirioron 6y ago
      >Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. Nope. Few people I know have a Netflix subscription. The subscription model doesn't work for news media for example. I've never used Facebook, but there have been times where I've thought of signing up. If Facebook had cost money then that would've been a non-starter from the get go. The same goes for most other services. I don't know why, but the value proposition of something that costs money online has to be very large for me to consider it.
    - tomjen3 6y ago
      The majority would, I guess. Not enough for it to matter.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Many of the features users find useful (let's ignore for the moment whether these are good things) like content recommendations and search result recommendations rely on the same understanding of user interests that allow these companies to target advertisements. So they need to understand your interests anyway to provide the services that people find useful. So they still need forms of tracking to do the things that people find useful on the sites. So what do we do?
  - metrokoi 6y ago
    They could just collect your data and not monetize it. If a paid user can decide whether or not they want those features. Facebook could easily monetize it anyway, but they could also monetize a paid user and day they aren't. Everything we are discussing is hypothetical anyway.
- deleted 6y ago
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- neilparikh 6y ago
  $17 is the global average. If you live in a country like the US, you probably generate way more revenue per year, since you have more spending power (and thus are more valuable to advertise to). I think the general problem is that those who can afford to pay for Facebook are those who are the most valuable to advertisers. So if you gave users the choice to pay or not, the users who draw the advertising revenue would pay, leaving the users who the advertisers don't really want to advertise to.
  - adventured 6y ago
    For reference it's approximately $143 per year for the US market, per user ($11.92 per month). ~220-230 million monthly active US users, $31.4 billion in sales (projected 2020 figure) for that market. That's of course not adjusting for hours of use for a given user, data contribution, and so on.
    - jlbnjmn 6y ago
      Do you know the numbers for daily active users or weekly active users? And do those numbers include messenger? It would be fascinating to see some histograms of users and usage. Especially one that compares ad buyers, page managers, and personal only users.
- Mirioron 6y ago
  You wouldn't, because other people wouldn't pay for it. The value proposition of Facebook comes from other people. If there aren't enough other people then you wouldn't want to use it.
jschwartzi 6y ago
The problem of people not knowing that privacy is valuable.
- jerf 6y ago
  How does $10/year solve that problem? Seems more like you'll get a lot of people saying "Oh, is that all they're doing to me? Great! I guess there's no problem here!" I mean, if people found out there was a $1000 or $10,000 vein of value to mine, yeah, people might get upset and demand a more "fair portion", but they're not going to get upset over $10/year. The problem isn't the amount of money the companies are making on your privacy, the problem is what they are doing to make that money. I'm appalled at the damage to society they're willing to do to make that little money, but you're not going to convince anyone of any problems by focusing on the "little money" part.
- duxup 6y ago
  Or they don't care. I like to think they don't know. I fear they don't care.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    The sense I get is in general, people worry about the average case, not the worst-case scenario, when it comes to privacy. ... and honestly, that might be the correct risk assessment for the average person. The worst-case scenario only happens to a few people.
lowmemcpu 6y ago
What if it's combined with a data privacy law? Instead of accept-this-cookie-to-track-you ... You would need to opt-in to data privacy, or opt-in to data profit-sharing
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
If the only reason people collect all of that information about me is that it's cheap to do so, would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? That sounds like a win as well.
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  > would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? No In all respect, this is a really naive view of the ad tech marketplace. The only thing that would do what you're saying is legislation. Making it more expensive just pushes out smaller players in the marketplace, leading to consolidation towards the Google's / Facebooks of the world.
  - elisharobinson 6y ago
    a legislation with a flat tax would not be that bad. i guesstimate that close to 70% maybe more of new ads are done online. and google and facebook are disruptive to old players who pay a lot more in taxes. this tax would definitely affect new players to the digital add buisness , but i dont see anyone even trying.
  - dfxm12 6y ago
    Yes, and getting the tracking/data collection to stop is more valuable than the amounts of money being floated around in this thread. Money doesn't solve every issue, especially when your adversaries have so much more money (and power) than you.
  - jerf 6y ago
    I'd love to see a 1cent/impression tax, personally. It would consolidate the market, sure, but it would very nearly destroy it, too. The resulting Google and Facebook left behind wouldn't be left with so many resources to be anti-social with. Internalize the externalities.
    - chris123 6y ago
      Only tax the biggest players?
ska 6y ago
What if the point of it all isn't to make the consumer money, but to make companies less indiscriminate about gathering and storing data?
- prostoalex 6y ago
  Can't you achieve the same effect at user level by faking some data + messing with tracking via Firefox containers + Ghostery + Cookies AutoDelete?
  - RussianCow 6y ago
    And how many people are realistically going to go through that effort?
  - SirSourdough 6y ago
    What portion of all users are going to do that? A fraction of a percent? The point of making the companies change is that most users aren’t computer literate enough to understand the problem, it’s consequences, or the mitigations. The knowledge asymmetry between the average user and the companies collecting and using this data could hardly be more vast, and that creates a situation where companies can effectively prey on less knowledgable users. If the wide majority of users aren’t capable of finding/using the available user-level solutions, the problems will remain rampant.
    - prostoalex 6y ago
      The latter could be accomplished by shipping a privacy-championing browser that enables those behavior by default (Brave? Apple?). You're saying the low levels of adoption of such technologies are indicative of users' subpar technical skills, but maybe it's just general apathy and disinterest? E.g., how many public protests and calls to action have we seen after Snowden revelations? FWIW, the former is already prevalent among younger generations, with Instagram for their "public" life and f-Insta for everything private.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
dragonwriter 6y ago
> What problem does that solve? It makes the data use much less profitable for the companies involved, and therefore far less attractive, discouraging business models that rely on it from the start.
zffr 6y ago
Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users [1]. If they pay each user $5/yr, that is $13 billion/year in extra costs. That might push Facebook to bias towards collecting less data about its users by default. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  You're making their main revenue stream more costly - why wouldn't they instead double down more investment to make it _more_ efficient to get your data so that they recoup those margins? They might diversify a bit (which they already have, with their hardware plays and all that jazz,) but let's not pretend this is going to be the game changing investment mover we hope it would be.
  - gowld 6y ago
    No. They have already leverged as much as possible to profit as much as possibe.
SquishyPanda23 6y ago
Yeah this is really a move to make it cheap for any company to buy your data. Currently data is held by a small number of companies who invest a lot of money protecting it as a business secret. The goal of the pay-for-data movement is to make it easy for any fly by night operation to have access to the same data without earning your trust.
sidhanthp 6y ago
The people on HN, especially those who use Facebook regularly, are worth on average _significanty_ more than $17 to the company per year. It’s hard to remember, the average person makes $X,000 globally and Facebook has a huge % of the planet on their platform. HN users make in the upper echelon of wages, and are comfortable with their computers and online shopping.
- jerf 6y ago
  In the current political environment I can easily imagine the flame bath Facebook would take if it paid out proportionally to the value of the user and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. Don't expect Facebook to take this route. If there's going to be any sort of "per user" pay out made by the ad companies, expect it to be a flat fee.
  - creato 6y ago
    > and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. It's completely impossible that it wouldn't be revealed to the public, and every possible take on it will be published. All it would take is a few people posting the amounts they received, which is definitely going to happen.
acituan 6y ago
> $17/yr in annual revenue per user Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation. It is as useful as averaging the global price of a loaf of bread, which would be priced as $2-3 in the US but a few cents in a third world country. This is very applicable to ad revenue because ultimately ads are capturing the pricing levels of real economy, and bulk of the facebook users are not from high GDP nations. > Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year This is a very simplistic way to think about data. In fact, calling it data itself is misleading. Because it all boils down to how the data is operationalized and made into information and knowledge about you when the business is interacting with you. Same demographic data is worth separately for selling you ads, driving product development to increase usage, price discriminating against you while buying airplane tickets, selling you insurance, influencing your vote etc. Another way data is not a static, lifeless entity is something people often forget, it is the power of an SQL join. Joining table-a and table-b yields information neither of the tables had alone. So there will always be more a potential of rendering the existing data more valuable (more information yielding) by joining it with a marginal amount of new data. In sum, data doesn't have a static value, and I don't think we have seen the end of ways it could be utilized against users yet. > It doesn't work. To my knowledge, we don't have empirical data that shows it doesn't yet.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 6y ago
  "Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation." It doesn't matter, because there's no way to torture the data until "the amount of money that Facebook can afford to remit to its users for giving them their data" is going to be anything significant. They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users. If it were, say, $500 dollars a year, and we were arguing about whether we were an order of magnitude low or high, it might matter, because the difference between $50/yr and $5000/year is pretty significant. But you're never going to get so much as "Facebook can pay most users $15/month for their data" let alone anything worth it to anybody. Also, I've seen people hypothesize about these other values that this data might bring before, but bear in mind I'm operating my analysis based on Facebook overall revenue. There is no hypothetical 10x or 100x amount of value sitting around in the data, which we know, because otherwise Facebook would be collecting some significant amount of the value and it would be showing up in their revenue. The fact I'm basing this sort of analysis on revenue rather than profit is already an ENORMOUS concession to the idea, just staggeringly huge, and even with that concession it's a couple of orders of magnitude away from making sense. If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me. Show me the company and their revenue. There's Google, and then it falls off a cliff.
johannes1234321 6y ago
I haven't done any maths or research on that, but did you take global numbers or boil down to market. I assume users in "Western" countries bring more than other parts of the world. Or is my assumption wrong?
waldoh 6y ago
Wont that 100 dollars of data be worth exponentially more if companies had to pay us for collecting it?
deleted 6y ago
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austincheney 6y ago
For how much data? I would be willing to post some nonsense every month for a return of $1.50 a month. I bet I could automate that across several platforms or even turn it into a business representing various online personas.
saalweachter 6y ago
So if the goal is to discourage wide-scale collection of data without making it illegal, or at least to ensure that we benefit collectively from it, there's a much more obvious model, which is taxation. It's much easier to administer, and you end up with real money to do something with, instead of buying everyone a drink. Tax any company collecting, storing and analyzing user data some small amount, say, $1 or $0.1 or $5 per year per user-month of data stored, and use the tax revenues for ... something. So what would that something be? Is there any obvious way to spend the revenues to further discourage tracking users and storing user data? Or would it be best to just plow it into the education budget or general fund?
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  Andrew Yang and co. would likely suggest a universal basic income ;)
  - purplecabbage77 6y ago
    Isn't that basically the same thing as just having data collecting companies pay users directly?
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      Yeah, it would end up being the same paltry payment. I think the correct use did eventually occur to me: turn it into funding for open source software, that is both free as in freedom and free as in beer.
Barrin92 6y ago
Simple solution, people bargain collectively and have a sort of data ombudsman representing their interest rather than trying to get a 10$ check individually. If people were to negotiate the value of their data collectivelly you can have a 100k or a million people in some organisation that has stewardship over their data and negotiates say, a price with facebook, and that institution either manages the money and invests it or pays it back out. The reason people are so disempowered today in the face of these huge companies is because everyone is operating under this atomistic, individualist, consumer mindset. People can effectively negotiate when they team up.
richardw 6y ago
Very good chance most of the money is made from very few people. If you got a cut of money from advertisers targeting you, my guess is it’s be quite a bit over 5 bucks. Especially in an election year.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago
  Yeah $5 is the cost of a couple clicks or scrolling past 200-300 ads. On Google that's maybe one click, probably half a click.
radomysisky 6y ago
That's the point. It prevents oligopolies forming (as we have now), short of them producing enough value per user to cut them a sizeable payment. All the problems of big tech disappear when they're held accountable for their actions. The easiest way to hold them accountable is to reduce their clout.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That form of "accountability" sounds like a euphemism "not doing exactly what I want". The vagueness is downright concerning. Not to mention the logic doesn't follow. Today nearly everyonr would agree that it would be a terrible idea to openly sell representation in congress or the ability levy and collect arbitrary taxes to the highest bidder because the incentived essentially only make sense for those who can make a large enough profit in short term to justify the expense. The best thing you could say about the policy is that if it is cheaper than an invasion adversaries might decide to buy you out instead of declaring war.
dleslie 6y ago
> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. That is a considerable amount for many.
Zaskoda 6y ago
I would gladly pay $17 a year for a non-ad driven version of Facebook. If this were the limit of the value per user, they would have offered a subscription service long ago. Something is missing from your model.
- danenania 6y ago
  It’s likely that averages are very misleading for this kind of thing. People who are willing/able to pay FB not to see ads probably tend to have a lot more disposable income, and therefore are worth more to advertisers—potentially many times more than the average. There should be roughly as much variation in FB users’ value to FB as there is variation in disposable income across their whole userbase.
iooi 6y ago
You don’t have to guess these numbers, Facebook publishes them in their quarterly and annual reports. IIRC, users in North America generate around $85 a year. Other geos are now where close, with Europe a distant second.
minkzilla 6y ago
I don’t think this is the problem it is trying to solve but interestingly this could be really beneficial to some very poor countries were the dollar is extremely strong.
- papeda 6y ago
  It depends on how the money gets allotted. The people to whom $5 is most useful are also the people that most advertisers are not interested in targeting in the first place. So if people are compensated according to their value as advertising targets, this seems like it'll be a rich-get-very- slightly-richer program.
apahwa 6y ago
You say this like people won't get paychecks from many different companies and that checks will be extremely difficult to get. This whole thing is essentially credit card points. These credit card companies pay you for the purchase data in the form on points. And the detail from those purchases is nothing compared to what FB and others would have.
malwarebytess 6y ago
>Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. Then give it to me if no one cares. I don't want my personal information bought and sold.
blackrock 6y ago
Maybe it should be some kind of lottery instead? Everyone who logs on gets a ticket. It follows some type of grading scale. Bigger revenue generators earns more tickets. Only individuals are allowed to win, no businesses. Maybe Facebook’s goal can be to give away $1 Billion dollars a year, divided into $1 Million jackpots. Thus, 1,000 people a year can win it. Over 10 years, and you possibly have 10,000 winners. And maybe you have to meet a certain income or wealth criteria to win the jackpot? Otherwise, you only win a smaller jackpot. You don’t really want all the big influencers and wealthy to take all the money. $5/year is irrelevant. But $1 Million, this might be more interesting. And force the IRS to tax-exempt the winnings. The goal is to transfer wealth to the less-privileged, to help rectify the inequality of the capitalistic system.
rorykoehler 6y ago
They should pay it out in stock
raxxorrax 6y ago
That is missing the whole point. I would even pay for them stopping it. Getting money is certainly a misunderstanding of the issue and goal. It also underscores who is the owner of the data. Remember all the copyright claims by platforms on their user content? It is not because of 5$ a year. It would also disincentive them collecting info on me.
dpc_pw 6y ago
They should just tax data / ads. FB can send one big check to government.

by jerf 6y ago

GoodJokes 6y ago

Less money in their hands makes them less powerful and more accountable to users. Lots of people get measly dividends per year for stocks relatively. The shareholder rights are probably equally or more important though in that case.

erentz 6y ago

When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers. Why not ban tracking and ad targeting and selling personal data, and force that business model to go extinct, and now they have to start charging for service and their users become actual customers.

sida 6y ago
Arguably without the ranking and recommendation, FB is quite boring. The feed is such an integral part of FB.
asciident 6y ago
I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users. Since me and the other 99% of people contribute most of the value to Facebook for you, would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% of people and pay $1700/year?
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers. > I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users. I will never understand the mind of a typical social media user(s), as I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health as well as leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon. Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good, what can you say really is worth it that you can't do with text/email? The digital life that was sold to us as an amazing replacement is actually proving to be really sad as COVID has shown and is perhaps one of the reasons I can comprehend why people are out there violating it as its proven to be an incredibly undesirable and lonely experience.
  - asciident 6y ago
    > I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health Scientific evidence on that is inconclusive and mixed. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-9535-6.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-953... > Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good Then maybe it's not for you? I like to share things with my friends, see things they share, it's mildly entertaining and somewhat informative. If you don't enjoy those things, then you don't have to participate. > leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon In a practical sense, I have never encountered any downsides with supposed data leaking / personalized ads / strangers selling information about me. I have not lost money because of it, or lost friendships, or manipulated to do something I later regret. But I have lost time and money because of wrong information shared by the credit bureaus, lost friends and messages because of a broken phone, misleading salesmen who convinced me to buy bad products at bad prices, insurance companies that didn't pay up, and landlords who scammed me. So after I finish dealing with and worrying about actual bad actors that harm me in direct ways, maybe I'll start worrying about the ghosts.
tomjen3 6y ago
That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.
- Lendal 6y ago
  Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. The motivation for Netflix is to give you just enough quality to keep you paying every month. For a free service like Facebook you the user have no expectation of quality because you're paying nothing. So Facebook's motivation is not to provide quality but to keep you engaged and clicking. They've discovered that best way to do that is to infuriate you and to radicalize you. This keeps you the user engaged which is what advertisers require, so that's what Facebook delivers. This is great except that this is not a healthy arrangement for a democracy. To constantly have users given whatever amount of negativity and disinformation is necessary to keep them enraged and glued to their phones. That's what Yang is all about trying to fix. So paying for Facebook changes the dynamic. Users will now demand quality. Facebook will have to change. If users discover that Facebook only delivers them misery, then they'll stop paying and Facebook loses revenue on both ends. The users collectively will have power to demand improvements. Facebook's algorithm will have to change in response to that new dynamic. Problem solved. (That's the hope.)
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    >Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. Nope. Few people I know have a Netflix subscription. The subscription model doesn't work for news media for example. I've never used Facebook, but there have been times where I've thought of signing up. If Facebook had cost money then that would've been a non-starter from the get go. The same goes for most other services. I don't know why, but the value proposition of something that costs money online has to be very large for me to consider it.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    The majority would, I guess. Not enough for it to matter.
joshuamorton 6y ago
Many of the features users find useful (let's ignore for the moment whether these are good things) like content recommendations and search result recommendations rely on the same understanding of user interests that allow these companies to target advertisements. So they need to understand your interests anyway to provide the services that people find useful. So they still need forms of tracking to do the things that people find useful on the sites. So what do we do?
- metrokoi 6y ago
  They could just collect your data and not monetize it. If a paid user can decide whether or not they want those features. Facebook could easily monetize it anyway, but they could also monetize a paid user and day they aren't. Everything we are discussing is hypothetical anyway.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
neilparikh 6y ago
$17 is the global average. If you live in a country like the US, you probably generate way more revenue per year, since you have more spending power (and thus are more valuable to advertise to). I think the general problem is that those who can afford to pay for Facebook are those who are the most valuable to advertisers. So if you gave users the choice to pay or not, the users who draw the advertising revenue would pay, leaving the users who the advertisers don't really want to advertise to.
- adventured 6y ago
  For reference it's approximately $143 per year for the US market, per user ($11.92 per month). ~220-230 million monthly active US users, $31.4 billion in sales (projected 2020 figure) for that market. That's of course not adjusting for hours of use for a given user, data contribution, and so on.
  - jlbnjmn 6y ago
    Do you know the numbers for daily active users or weekly active users? And do those numbers include messenger? It would be fascinating to see some histograms of users and usage. Especially one that compares ad buyers, page managers, and personal only users.
Mirioron 6y ago
You wouldn't, because other people wouldn't pay for it. The value proposition of Facebook comes from other people. If there aren't enough other people then you wouldn't want to use it.

jschwartzi 6y ago

The problem of people not knowing that privacy is valuable.

jerf 6y ago
How does $10/year solve that problem? Seems more like you'll get a lot of people saying "Oh, is that all they're doing to me? Great! I guess there's no problem here!" I mean, if people found out there was a $1000 or $10,000 vein of value to mine, yeah, people might get upset and demand a more "fair portion", but they're not going to get upset over $10/year. The problem isn't the amount of money the companies are making on your privacy, the problem is what they are doing to make that money. I'm appalled at the damage to society they're willing to do to make that little money, but you're not going to convince anyone of any problems by focusing on the "little money" part.
duxup 6y ago
Or they don't care. I like to think they don't know. I fear they don't care.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The sense I get is in general, people worry about the average case, not the worst-case scenario, when it comes to privacy. ... and honestly, that might be the correct risk assessment for the average person. The worst-case scenario only happens to a few people.

lowmemcpu 6y ago

What if it's combined with a data privacy law? Instead of accept-this-cookie-to-track-you ... You would need to opt-in to data privacy, or opt-in to data profit-sharing

CobrastanJorji 6y ago

If the only reason people collect all of that information about me is that it's cheap to do so, would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? That sounds like a win as well.

s3r3nity 6y ago
> would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? No In all respect, this is a really naive view of the ad tech marketplace. The only thing that would do what you're saying is legislation. Making it more expensive just pushes out smaller players in the marketplace, leading to consolidation towards the Google's / Facebooks of the world.
- elisharobinson 6y ago
  a legislation with a flat tax would not be that bad. i guesstimate that close to 70% maybe more of new ads are done online. and google and facebook are disruptive to old players who pay a lot more in taxes. this tax would definitely affect new players to the digital add buisness , but i dont see anyone even trying.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  Yes, and getting the tracking/data collection to stop is more valuable than the amounts of money being floated around in this thread. Money doesn't solve every issue, especially when your adversaries have so much more money (and power) than you.
- jerf 6y ago
  I'd love to see a 1cent/impression tax, personally. It would consolidate the market, sure, but it would very nearly destroy it, too. The resulting Google and Facebook left behind wouldn't be left with so many resources to be anti-social with. Internalize the externalities.
  - chris123 6y ago
    Only tax the biggest players?

ska 6y ago

What if the point of it all isn't to make the consumer money, but to make companies less indiscriminate about gathering and storing data?

prostoalex 6y ago
Can't you achieve the same effect at user level by faking some data + messing with tracking via Firefox containers + Ghostery + Cookies AutoDelete?
- RussianCow 6y ago
  And how many people are realistically going to go through that effort?
- SirSourdough 6y ago
  What portion of all users are going to do that? A fraction of a percent? The point of making the companies change is that most users aren’t computer literate enough to understand the problem, it’s consequences, or the mitigations. The knowledge asymmetry between the average user and the companies collecting and using this data could hardly be more vast, and that creates a situation where companies can effectively prey on less knowledgable users. If the wide majority of users aren’t capable of finding/using the available user-level solutions, the problems will remain rampant.
  - prostoalex 6y ago
    The latter could be accomplished by shipping a privacy-championing browser that enables those behavior by default (Brave? Apple?). You're saying the low levels of adoption of such technologies are indicative of users' subpar technical skills, but maybe it's just general apathy and disinterest? E.g., how many public protests and calls to action have we seen after Snowden revelations? FWIW, the former is already prevalent among younger generations, with Instagram for their "public" life and f-Insta for everything private.
- pessimizer 6y ago

dragonwriter 6y ago

> What problem does that solve? It makes the data use much less profitable for the companies involved, and therefore far less attractive, discouraging business models that rely on it from the start.

zffr 6y ago

Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users [1]. If they pay each user $5/yr, that is $13 billion/year in extra costs. That might push Facebook to bias towards collecting less data about its users by default. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

s3r3nity 6y ago
You're making their main revenue stream more costly - why wouldn't they instead double down more investment to make it _more_ efficient to get your data so that they recoup those margins? They might diversify a bit (which they already have, with their hardware plays and all that jazz,) but let's not pretend this is going to be the game changing investment mover we hope it would be.
- gowld 6y ago
  No. They have already leverged as much as possible to profit as much as possibe.

SquishyPanda23 6y ago

Yeah this is really a move to make it cheap for any company to buy your data. Currently data is held by a small number of companies who invest a lot of money protecting it as a business secret. The goal of the pay-for-data movement is to make it easy for any fly by night operation to have access to the same data without earning your trust.

sidhanthp 6y ago

The people on HN, especially those who use Facebook regularly, are worth on average _significanty_ more than $17 to the company per year. It’s hard to remember, the average person makes $X,000 globally and Facebook has a huge % of the planet on their platform. HN users make in the upper echelon of wages, and are comfortable with their computers and online shopping.

jerf 6y ago
In the current political environment I can easily imagine the flame bath Facebook would take if it paid out proportionally to the value of the user and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. Don't expect Facebook to take this route. If there's going to be any sort of "per user" pay out made by the ad companies, expect it to be a flat fee.
- creato 6y ago
  > and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. It's completely impossible that it wouldn't be revealed to the public, and every possible take on it will be published. All it would take is a few people posting the amounts they received, which is definitely going to happen.

acituan 6y ago

> $17/yr in annual revenue per user Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation. It is as useful as averaging the global price of a loaf of bread, which would be priced as $2-3 in the US but a few cents in a third world country. This is very applicable to ad revenue because ultimately ads are capturing the pricing levels of real economy, and bulk of the facebook users are not from high GDP nations. > Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year This is a very simplistic way to think about data. In fact, calling it data itself is misleading. Because it all boils down to how the data is operationalized and made into information and knowledge about you when the business is interacting with you. Same demographic data is worth separately for selling you ads, driving product development to increase usage, price discriminating against you while buying airplane tickets, selling you insurance, influencing your vote etc. Another way data is not a static, lifeless entity is something people often forget, it is the power of an SQL join. Joining table-a and table-b yields information neither of the tables had alone. So there will always be more a potential of rendering the existing data more valuable (more information yielding) by joining it with a marginal amount of new data. In sum, data doesn't have a static value, and I don't think we have seen the end of ways it could be utilized against users yet. > It doesn't work. To my knowledge, we don't have empirical data that shows it doesn't yet.

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jerf 6y ago
"Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation." It doesn't matter, because there's no way to torture the data until "the amount of money that Facebook can afford to remit to its users for giving them their data" is going to be anything significant. They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users. If it were, say, $500 dollars a year, and we were arguing about whether we were an order of magnitude low or high, it might matter, because the difference between $50/yr and $5000/year is pretty significant. But you're never going to get so much as "Facebook can pay most users $15/month for their data" let alone anything worth it to anybody. Also, I've seen people hypothesize about these other values that this data might bring before, but bear in mind I'm operating my analysis based on Facebook overall revenue. There is no hypothetical 10x or 100x amount of value sitting around in the data, which we know, because otherwise Facebook would be collecting some significant amount of the value and it would be showing up in their revenue. The fact I'm basing this sort of analysis on revenue rather than profit is already an ENORMOUS concession to the idea, just staggeringly huge, and even with that concession it's a couple of orders of magnitude away from making sense. If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me. Show me the company and their revenue. There's Google, and then it falls off a cliff.

johannes1234321 6y ago

I haven't done any maths or research on that, but did you take global numbers or boil down to market. I assume users in "Western" countries bring more than other parts of the world. Or is my assumption wrong?

waldoh 6y ago

Wont that 100 dollars of data be worth exponentially more if companies had to pay us for collecting it?

deleted 6y ago

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austincheney 6y ago

For how much data? I would be willing to post some nonsense every month for a return of $1.50 a month. I bet I could automate that across several platforms or even turn it into a business representing various online personas.

saalweachter 6y ago

So if the goal is to discourage wide-scale collection of data without making it illegal, or at least to ensure that we benefit collectively from it, there's a much more obvious model, which is taxation. It's much easier to administer, and you end up with real money to do something with, instead of buying everyone a drink. Tax any company collecting, storing and analyzing user data some small amount, say, $1 or $0.1 or $5 per year per user-month of data stored, and use the tax revenues for ... something. So what would that something be? Is there any obvious way to spend the revenues to further discourage tracking users and storing user data? Or would it be best to just plow it into the education budget or general fund?

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
Andrew Yang and co. would likely suggest a universal basic income ;)
- purplecabbage77 6y ago
  Isn't that basically the same thing as just having data collecting companies pay users directly?
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    Yeah, it would end up being the same paltry payment. I think the correct use did eventually occur to me: turn it into funding for open source software, that is both free as in freedom and free as in beer.

Barrin92 6y ago

Simple solution, people bargain collectively and have a sort of data ombudsman representing their interest rather than trying to get a 10$ check individually. If people were to negotiate the value of their data collectivelly you can have a 100k or a million people in some organisation that has stewardship over their data and negotiates say, a price with facebook, and that institution either manages the money and invests it or pays it back out. The reason people are so disempowered today in the face of these huge companies is because everyone is operating under this atomistic, individualist, consumer mindset. People can effectively negotiate when they team up.

richardw 6y ago

Very good chance most of the money is made from very few people. If you got a cut of money from advertisers targeting you, my guess is it’s be quite a bit over 5 bucks. Especially in an election year.

jlbnjmn 6y ago
Yeah $5 is the cost of a couple clicks or scrolling past 200-300 ads. On Google that's maybe one click, probably half a click.

radomysisky 6y ago

That's the point. It prevents oligopolies forming (as we have now), short of them producing enough value per user to cut them a sizeable payment. All the problems of big tech disappear when they're held accountable for their actions. The easiest way to hold them accountable is to reduce their clout.

Nasrudith 6y ago
That form of "accountability" sounds like a euphemism "not doing exactly what I want". The vagueness is downright concerning. Not to mention the logic doesn't follow. Today nearly everyonr would agree that it would be a terrible idea to openly sell representation in congress or the ability levy and collect arbitrary taxes to the highest bidder because the incentived essentially only make sense for those who can make a large enough profit in short term to justify the expense. The best thing you could say about the policy is that if it is cheaper than an invasion adversaries might decide to buy you out instead of declaring war.

dleslie 6y ago

> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. That is a considerable amount for many.

Zaskoda 6y ago

I would gladly pay $17 a year for a non-ad driven version of Facebook. If this were the limit of the value per user, they would have offered a subscription service long ago. Something is missing from your model.

danenania 6y ago
It’s likely that averages are very misleading for this kind of thing. People who are willing/able to pay FB not to see ads probably tend to have a lot more disposable income, and therefore are worth more to advertisers—potentially many times more than the average. There should be roughly as much variation in FB users’ value to FB as there is variation in disposable income across their whole userbase.

iooi 6y ago

You don’t have to guess these numbers, Facebook publishes them in their quarterly and annual reports. IIRC, users in North America generate around $85 a year. Other geos are now where close, with Europe a distant second.

minkzilla 6y ago

I don’t think this is the problem it is trying to solve but interestingly this could be really beneficial to some very poor countries were the dollar is extremely strong.

papeda 6y ago
It depends on how the money gets allotted. The people to whom $5 is most useful are also the people that most advertisers are not interested in targeting in the first place. So if people are compensated according to their value as advertising targets, this seems like it'll be a rich-get-very- slightly-richer program.

apahwa 6y ago

You say this like people won't get paychecks from many different companies and that checks will be extremely difficult to get. This whole thing is essentially credit card points. These credit card companies pay you for the purchase data in the form on points. And the detail from those purchases is nothing compared to what FB and others would have.

malwarebytess 6y ago

>Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. Then give it to me if no one cares. I don't want my personal information bought and sold.

blackrock 6y ago

Maybe it should be some kind of lottery instead? Everyone who logs on gets a ticket. It follows some type of grading scale. Bigger revenue generators earns more tickets. Only individuals are allowed to win, no businesses. Maybe Facebook’s goal can be to give away $1 Billion dollars a year, divided into $1 Million jackpots. Thus, 1,000 people a year can win it. Over 10 years, and you possibly have 10,000 winners. And maybe you have to meet a certain income or wealth criteria to win the jackpot? Otherwise, you only win a smaller jackpot. You don’t really want all the big influencers and wealthy to take all the money. $5/year is irrelevant. But $1 Million, this might be more interesting. And force the IRS to tax-exempt the winnings. The goal is to transfer wealth to the less-privileged, to help rectify the inequality of the capitalistic system.

rorykoehler 6y ago

They should pay it out in stock

raxxorrax 6y ago

That is missing the whole point. I would even pay for them stopping it. Getting money is certainly a misunderstanding of the issue and goal. It also underscores who is the owner of the data. Remember all the copyright claims by platforms on their user content? It is not because of 5$ a year. It would also disincentive them collecting info on me.

dpc_pw 6y ago

They should just tax data / ads. FB can send one big check to government.