why is nobody here speaking about the basic attention token? https://basicattentiontoken.org/
Basic attention token has nothing to do with the article.
An argument that companies should pay users for their data
121–130 of 175 posts
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#122This sort of data collection is inevitable with a highly commercialized Internet.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#123This 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 w…
However, this also means that they can charge users $3/mo (just to be safe) and be at least as successful as they are now, but without all the spying and manipulation. Unfortunately that will also put a cap on their profits, so it's unlikely they'll do that.
There's also precedent for companies charging users and still also making money off their data.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#124There'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…
Wow, gruseom went fully native.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#125Puppy pictures aside, I'd put it another way: I'm unique and what I do online is the product of an unique person thinking. If some corporation makes money by analyzing my behaviour, then I should be allowed to treat my data just like a song or a book: that is, intellectual property, with the clause that if and only if that data is gathered with consent and full transparency (using 100% free and open source software for example), then they're exempted from paying fees and/or lawsuits.
Just my 0.2€. I don't condemn companies for using technology to make money, and am perfectly fine if they scan my surfing habits, but people rights should always come first, and if they scan my emails or private messages or use the information in a way I don't approve then I want to be able to hit them badly.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#126An argument that having terrorcorporations get your data becoming normalized even further - the "but you do get some money in exchange!" edition.
Next step is getting some discount in the walled garden store or some crypto token payment.
Blah.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#127Earlier 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!"
>The idea that corporations aren't people leads to evil.
This seems to, at best, reside outside of practical application.
>The main target of the corporations-are-not-people crowd is the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling striking down limits on independent corporate spending in elections. After that case, groups sprang up to fight corporate personhood. Others rebranded themselves by newly taking aim at it. But they do not limit themselves to attacking the Court’s campaign finance jurisprudence. Most groups make a broader attack on corporations being able to assert any First Amendment speech rights at all; and some have called for disabusing all corporations or businesses of any constitutional right.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/if-corp...
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#128Earlier 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!"
The idea that corporations aren't people means that any blame must rest with the people acting through and in the name of the corporation, and any rights and privileges asserted by those people must be their own individual rights.
Which is pretty much the opposite of the insulating effect of both your description and, more to the point, the status quo corporate form.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hum…
Nature doesn't care whether Scotland has forests or not. Natural events can have catastrophic consequences on the environment. Ice ages and meteor strikes are pretty darn catastrophic. Invasive species were wiping out other species before humans came along (at a much lower rate). Any balance you see in nature will only last until something big enough happens to change it.
Humans have preferences about the environment we live in. When there are things we like and want to preserve, it's up to us to do something about it.
Re: An argument that companies should pay users for their data
#130This 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 w…
Facebook is probably going to hit $100+ ARPU in the US + Canada for fiscal 2018. It was $85.41 for 2017.
It was $27.76 in Q4, and $21.20 in Q3 (for the US + Canada).
It's not implausible that it'll eventually hit $200 per year in the US + Canada.
For fun, here's their quarterly ARPU over the last few years in the US+CA, starting from 1Q15, excluding all Q4 results (Q4 skews because it spikes):
$8.32, $9.30, $10.49, $12.43, $14.34, $15.65, $17.07, $19.38, $21.20
Quite the increase machine. US+CA ARPU for 4Q17 ($27.76) was triple that of 4Q14 ($9).