This would have saved a lot of problems if proposed in 2008. Now that FANG has trillions in the back, if it's not a retroactive dividend, Ill-gotten gains get retained and this is not much more than closing the barn door after the cows are gone.
Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
41–50 of 288 posts
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook is also making money off of you by showing you ads. It's a question of how much is enough. Facebook is charging nothing, sure, but what if the value they take from us (our data, our ad attention+clicks) is more valuable than the value they give us (a free social media)?
Well if what they gave us was more valuable than what they took, they wouldn’t be a very profitable company, would it?
Maybe the world is starting to believe that "it was profitable" is not always a defensible position? Perhaps an age of consumption is passing towards an age of ethics. Time will show.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#43It 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 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue , not profit . Cr…
> 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.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#44I foresee tech companies creating paid and non-paid versions of their products. If you don't want your data monetized, please pay $50/month for Google Search, GMail, Maps, and YouTube. If you are okay with the value exchange of ads and free services, then you are opting into a mutually agreed upon arrangement with no compensation.
This would create a weird paradox: Advertisers want people with disposable income. People without much disposable income get really targeted ads (they won’t pay for the privacy). People with disposable income pay for the privacy service and don’t get ads or get poorly targeted ads. It then becomes more like traditional ads that get broadcast to everyone. So the policy shoots itself in the foot.
I think you overestimate how much people with disposable income value internet privacy.
I'm sure Google has good numbers on this from YouTube premium.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#45It 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 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue , not profit . Cr…
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...
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#46It 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 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue , not profit . Cr…
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.
> 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.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#47If Facebook's abuse of everyone's personal data was as strikingly abhorrent as say, organ theft, Andrew Yang would write the policy to give me a $4.56 USD check while I lay bleeding in a tub of ice.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#48how much would you pay monthly for Google ? Im paying for Google Storage, Youtube Premium and would like one fee where I dont see any ads at all.
$50 a month for a family plan would be acceptable to me.
Side topic: do parents who hand kids iPads to watch YouTube worry about the advertisements? That used to be a concern on regular cable television.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#49I know this is well–meaning but I think it's ultimately misguided. The root issue isn't that people aren't getting paid for their data — it's that their data is commodified in the first place.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#50It 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 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue , not profit . Cr…
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...
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.