An argument that companies should pay users for their data

My ideal is Leary from Demolition Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JizGkM6gbvQ - and no, I don't think that leads to living underground.

www.databook.one

@dasil003 I agree that Facebook's ARPU is super low. However, with that statistic is related to ad revenue, not revenue from the sale of data. Facebook doesn't publically sell its consumer data. Thus, we're talking apples and oranges.

To buy raw data, you need to go to data brokers, who are currently earning $250 billion per year from selling consumer data. Raw data is super valuable because you can build predictive models with it. With very small samples of customer data, powerful models can be built that can deliver millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to a business' bottom line.

I can testify to this because I led the technology team for company that earned millions by leveraging machine learning to predict who would sell their house bellow market prices in the next few months.

The problem with buying data from data brokers is that the quality is awful. For example, the accuracy rate of America's largest data broker, Acxiom is only 50%. This problem is holding back the advancement of machine learning. If consumers linked and verified their own data, we could improve that accuracy rate significantly and deliver much more accurate models to businesses.

Thus, we expect that compensation paid by companies to individuals sharing their complete data profiles could be significant.

I've seen estimates that the value of data will reach $7,500K per American per year by 2022.

Even if we reached 10% of this estimate, I'd want that money in my pocket instead of some data broker.

What are your thoughts?

We are the problem: we don't say "Hey Facebook, if you pay me $XX, then I'll create an account on your website", but the way around.

Non sequitur and a red herring.

>To believe otherwise is to believe that a person does not have personal agency, and that a person is not in charge of themselves.

Non sequitur. Someone owning data about you has nothing to do with denying someone's "personal agency". Quite the opposite. I would suggest someone recording the actions you make is a testament to the principle of personal agency. You can own yourself and your choices all day long, but you don't control the consequences of those actions. Furthermore, if you're saying someone cannot record things that they observe, you are denying them their personal agency. (As an aside, I find your appeal to "personal agency" curious given your previous assertion that people are irrational, implying the foolishness of such a principle).

>But in the real world, that's simply not true. And in the real world

In the real world there are a myriad of legal jurisdictions, with a myriad of laws whose principles and motives often are contradictory. I am not arguing from the perspective of the status quo. Individuals can also demonstrate cognitive dissonance.

Please answer the following questions:

1) If I observe you walking down the street and I see you wearing a pair of Adidas athletic shoes, and I make a mental note to myself "s73v3r_ wears Adidas athletic shoes", do you own my thought?

1a) If yes to #1 how do you justify owning a stranger's thoughts?

2) If I write down the thought in my notepad, do you own the entry in my notepad?

2a) If yes to #2 how do you justify owning an entry in a stranger's notepad who expended their labor creating?

If you answered no to #1 and yes to #2 then you have a contradiction you need to account for (data is data whether it is in memory or persisted). If you answered no to #1 and no to #2 then you have established the principle that you do not own data about you. If you answered yes to #1 and yes to #2 then it would be good for you to at least be explicit so those who are following the argument understand your premise.