This is absolute nonsense and dangerous to boot. Facebook's ARPU is still less than $20/year. If they literally paid all of their profits directly to their user it would still be a pittance. The real value of privacy has to do with freedom, manipulation and surveillance, and that is not represented by economic measures at all. Talking about the value of the data in purely economic terms is exactly the way you would want to frame the issue if you had more nefarious plans down the line.
An argument that companies should pay users for their data
91–100 of 175 posts
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: - They weren't experimenting or measuring ads, clickthroughs, or pageviews views; they were experimenting on and measuring emotions directly - It was run as a psychological study, and published as a psychological study
they were experimenting on and measuring emotions directly Every change to an interface can potentially affect the emotions of users, whether or not you try to measure it.
Except in that experiment Facebook was intentionally trying to manipulate users' emotional states.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, do you or anyone you know directly or indirectly profit from these types of services? Because I find your emphatic endorsement hard to understand. To be fair, I do use some of these services, too (carefully). But, that’s only because often I can’t find quality alternatives. For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none. Since gather…
>First, do you or anyone you know directly or indirectly profit from these types of services? Of course. No one would be using them if they weren't better off from using them.
The idea that people are perfectly rational actors with perfect information has long since been debunked.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "maximise resources", currently Western Capitalism is working towards wasting resources and externalising costs, and marginalising resources, that's going to break with massive environmental and social consequences.
I mean on an individual basis. And I'm skeptical about your assessment that this is merely a problem with "Western Capitalism". This is a problem of any system that doesn't have proper regulations to define the rules of the game in a fair way.
Who puts regulations in place about how many deer it is "fair" for a wolf to kill? And yet, the system has been running for longer than we are around to know about it. It is however when the humans tried to "regulate" the wolf population in Scotland, for example, that the forests were lost due to deer overpopulation. So I would argue that less regulations make the system regulate itself, which it does better than humans can do.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#95The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them. Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate…
And how does the idea that Facebook still collects massive amounts of data on me despite the fact that I don't use their service reconcile with all that? What do I get in exchange for all that data FB has?
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#96The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them. Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate…
They aren't free. You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits. And because the stock market machine demands greater and greater profits they need larger stronger monopolies to generate those obscene profits.
Without advertising, most of these products would be unknown, and thus wouldn't get sold at all.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
And as long as we as consumers and employees act as individuals and for profit companies act has collectives we will always be at a huge negotiating dis-advantage. The idea that corporations = people is foolish and obviously leading to a reality that doesn't fit the model.
The idea that corporations aren't people leads to evil. "Oh, yes we harvested your data from all the sites you visited and used it to manipulate you in to buying stuff that harms your livelihood (gambling, say), but it's the _company_ that did it and so none of the controlling executives can be blamed!"
Except that has never, ever been the case. Before this trend of just going after the company as a whole came about, they would go after the executives.
I don't believe yours is a valid concern.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#98There's a whole genre of articles based on conflating two senses of "your," belonging to you, and about you. If I observe that you have blue eyes, that's a fact about you, but it doesn't belong to you, at least not without redefining what "belong" means. It would be helpful if, instead of deliberately conflating these two senses of "your," articles on this subject went in the other direction and explicitly discussed…
There's a simpler, shallower issue too: 'you' in headlines is a linkbait trope, so headline writers drop it in wherever they can. This one managed it twice. Presumably we're all wired to respond to "hey you!"
Since clickbait is against the site guidelines, we replace such titles with neutral ones. Usually we do that by copying a representative phrase from the article itself. But that was surprisingly hard to do this time.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#99The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them. Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate…
First, do you or anyone you know directly or indirectly profit from these types of services? Because I find your emphatic endorsement hard to understand. To be fair, I do use some of these services, too (carefully). But, that’s only because often I can’t find quality alternatives. For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none. Since gather…
> For instance, I would pay for a high-quality service like Mint (I don’t use it) that kept my data private, but there is none.
Have you looked at ynab.com? I find their overall philosophy on budgeting to be more effective, the app is high quality, and it's solely about your budget, not about offering you credit cards.
It's one of the few products I recommend to anyone, and it's relatively expensive ($85 for the year I believe).
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worse than that. We currently don't even have the right to determine who has our data, or how its being exploited. The remedy, of course, is to establish intrinsic properties rights over our own data. No different than copyrights. Maybe we need a new catchphrase. I propose bodyrights . It captures the notions of self, privacy, identity, and sovereignty all in one.
PII, Personal Identifiable Information, is the phrase I know for this. I'd like to see a requirement for all companies receiving PII to issue an account of how they use it and who it's sold to, those receiving your PII would also have an obligation to notify you, and offer access to the same audit data (how they're using it, who they got it from, who they gave/sold it to). Legit companies would then leak information,…
You forgot the all important requirement to be able to force them to delete it. I never once chose to do business with Equifax. But, due to their extreme incompetence, now I'm the one that has to suffer.