Why would you pay for something people are giving you for free? If people are volunteering that information, I think it’s fine to use it to finance the free product they’re getting. I’m totally free to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
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Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#52In terms of assessing the value of one individual's data, shouldn't there be some consideration for the fact that it's worth nothing to that person on their own? I can't sell my data on the free market. It's a transaction over an object that has value in only one direction.
Is that really true? There are "customer research" apps that will offer you small, but non-trivial amounts of money for basically selling your personal information.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#53Earlier 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)?
my friend got a kidney transplant because they found a donor off facebook. Random stranger saw his plea and decided to help. Put a value on that
It's already bad enough that the surveillance economy is threatening our civil liberties in more ways than one. It's outright dystopian when you need to organize a social media campaign to get medical treatment. Considering the sheer number of people who desperately need medical help, the chances of succeeding is very very low.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#54It 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…
Yeah this is really a move to make it cheap for any company to buy your data.
Currently data is held by a small number of companies who invest a lot of money protecting it as a business secret.
The goal of the pay-for-data movement is to make it easy for any fly by night operation to have access to the same data without earning your trust.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#55It 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…
When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.
Why not ban tracking and ad targeting and selling personal data, and force that business model to go extinct, and now they have to start charging for service and their users become actual customers.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#56Aren't companies already paying indirectly by providing free service? I am no fan of Facebook but I am using the service free of cost and in return company collects data for targeted advertising. Shouldn't this be more targeted at cable companies which collect a monthly fee and again sell your data? And may be forcing Big Tech to provide a paid alternative which doesn't use data collected?
I think the basic premise is that the status quo of transactions (free service for user data) has resulted in an imbalance of power for tech companies, and that by increasing the cost of acquisition, users have a means to collectively negotiate better "market rates" from the tech companies for services rendered. It can be regarded as similar to "unionizing" the users. It would be interesting to get some preliminary g…
Regarding the "market rates", you're right, it does sound like unionizing. I suppose it shouldn't be as much of an issue if there was more competition so that companies would need to offer "better free services" in exchange for data. With network effects, that's hard to achieve, though.
Something where a switch is easier and doesn't cut you off from the old platform would be nice, similar to how domains or phone numbers work: you own your profile and all the data, but you can switch platforms at any time without losing contacts or abilities, keeping the competition between platform-providers alive. I have no idea how that would work out though. Does FB have actually any value besides the fact that everybody you know is there? If you were able to connect with them while they're on FB and you're not, would a lot of people decide to stay in FB because it's such a great platform?
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#57No, not all users andrew. Pay the users that create content that gets popular, not people just for existing. Creating a data trail is not valuable IP.
I m actually surprised at the amount of content that people give away to these platforms, even here.
A major reason is that there is no legal mechanism for users to directly pay other users. Things like brave attention token are steps in the right direction
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#58Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#59In terms of assessing the value of one individual's data, shouldn't there be some consideration for the fact that it's worth nothing to that person on their own? I can't sell my data on the free market. It's a transaction over an object that has value in only one direction.
Is that really true? There are "customer research" apps that will offer you small, but non-trivial amounts of money for basically selling your personal information.
It's partially true. You can't sell most of your personal information. E.g., when your name, face, and weight end up in somebody's dataset it'll be because of the "free" social fitness app you used rather than because you were able to directly connect with anyone who cared about that data and work out a reasonable price.
Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data
#60I 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.
Yeah. It s like advertising to poor countries because CPMs are lower there