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Facebook Should Pay All of Us

newyorker.com

1–10 of 112 posts

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#2
I would reckon that the market for personal data is lot bigger. 45 billion e-mails, 10 billion text messages and submit 95 million Tweets are sent in an average day. Now according to this article:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528866/researchers-test...

each piece of data is worth about $2. Now, simple maths would tell any company that making money off that data is a lot more profitable than collecting $0.20. Also, how many people would actually want to enrol in such a premium service? It would not be every person that uses Facebook, for sure. Plus, selling off the data is lot easier than soliciting people to buy their premium product (people give them the licence to do so through the ToS).

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#3
So far as I am concerned: Facebook is a token economy broker where users pay each other in likes. Just like all the "major" social networks. That is the elegance of them: the users are providing the gratification.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#5
Surely, if you value your privacy then don't bother using Facebook at all.

More precisely, she wants the company to offer a cash option (about twenty cents a month, she calculates) for people who value their privacy, but also want a rough idea of what their friends’ children look like.

They could just email with their friends. It's unclear to me, at least, that a 'feed' of data about people I know is an important service. Clearly, I must be an outlier given the number of people I see looking at Facebook every day.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#7
This is silly. Yes, if you're not the one paying, then you're the product. However, I do get things in return - I get to connect with people I don't get to see too often anymore and see what they're up to in their lives. Everyone and their grandma has one, so I know if I'm trying to find someone they're on there. It also reminds me of people's birthdays, which I'm pretty terrible with otherwise.

People do get things out of facebook. Why else would they be on it all the time, checking it at least a couple times a day?

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#8
Fun Graph API fact: while it's incredibly easy for any user to scrape data off of public Facebook Pages (https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper), it is very hard to scrape personal data from people on Facebook, even if you are Friends with them or their Facebook statuses are public. Personal data is much more valuable.

I've tried multiple endpoints to do so (for data analytics purposes) and they have all failed. The only way to get data on a person is for them to opt into granting the necessary permissions for the app.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#9
I'm not the biggest fan of FB or for the fact that I pretty much have to use it to keep up with friends and family these days.

These are some things that you get in exchange for giving up your information:

  A place to store photos
  A platform to publish your photos
  A communications platform (Messenger)
  A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates
  Near instant publication of your brain thoughts to a curated group of people
  High availability
  Maintenance of connections to other people
  IRL event management
  Mobile and web applications to use the aforementioned
  Some of the best engineering talent in the world working on the aforementioned
I think the average person does get a lot in exchange. Look at all of the other social networks that tried to solve this in the past and failed. I don't see any legitimate alternatives.

Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us

#10
Once again, someone has proposed that an ad supported company offer subscriptions for exactly its revenue-per-user, without seeming to realize that not all users are equally valuable to advertise to, and only the most valuable ones will opt out.
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