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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

#131

Post by ksdale »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #103
qeternity wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point: when you go to a store, you hand them cash. When you go to a website, you hand them data, which they turn around and sell for cash. The data you give them is the payment for their product. Why else would Facebook invest billions into free products? I’m not shedding a tear for the mega corps, but people need to understand that companies will charge for products one way or another.

Many people think that "free" is a bad deal given the profits these companies make. Many people would prefer the more transparent pricing of "$5 per month" over the abstract "Whatever we can earn from your data, combined with everyone else's, by any means"

I agree that transparent pricing would be an excellent option to have, but based on some quick googling, FB's net profit is only something like 25 cents per monthly active user per month (assuming I did the math correctly...).

If FB gave people a rebate in the amount of their net profit, the whole transaction would round out to FB operating and people getting it for free, so it's not obviously that bad of a deal for users, at least not with profit as the metric.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#133

Post by tomjen3 »

erentz wrote: post #55
jerf wrote: post #26

It 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.

That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#134

Post by redisman »

sohamsankaran wrote: post #132

In a weird way, this would be a regressive policy -- the data of the richest people is worth orders of magnitude more, so this would just make the rich, well, richer. Increasing corporate tax rates would help the poor much more.

This sounds wrong. The value of data is in the massive amount of datapoints. If I had a data company I would always pick the large masses and discard the outliers if given the choice.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#135

Post by saalweachter »

jerf wrote: post #26

It 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…

So if the goal is to discourage wide-scale collection of data without making it illegal, or at least to ensure that we benefit collectively from it, there's a much more obvious model, which is taxation. It's much easier to administer, and you end up with real money to do something with, instead of buying everyone a drink. Tax any company collecting, storing and analyzing user data some small amount, say, $1 or $0.1 or $5 per year per user-month of data stored, and use the tax revenues for ... something.

So what would that something be? Is there any obvious way to spend the revenues to further discourage tracking users and storing user data? Or would it be best to just plow it into the education budget or general fund?

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#136

Post by jerf »

acituan wrote: post #69
jerf wrote: post #26

It 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…

> $17/yr in annual revenue per user Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation. It is as useful as averaging the global price of a loaf of bread, which would be priced as $2-3 in the US but a few cents in a third world country. This is very applicable to ad revenue because ultimately ads are capturing the pricing levels of real economy, and bulk of the…

"Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation."

It doesn't matter, because there's no way to torture the data until "the amount of money that Facebook can afford to remit to its users for giving them their data" is going to be anything significant. They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users.

If it were, say, $500 dollars a year, and we were arguing about whether we were an order of magnitude low or high, it might matter, because the difference between $50/yr and $5000/year is pretty significant. But you're never going to get so much as "Facebook can pay most users $15/month for their data" let alone anything worth it to anybody.

Also, I've seen people hypothesize about these other values that this data might bring before, but bear in mind I'm operating my analysis based on Facebook overall revenue. There is no hypothetical 10x or 100x amount of value sitting around in the data, which we know, because otherwise Facebook would be collecting some significant amount of the value and it would be showing up in their revenue. The fact I'm basing this sort of analysis on revenue rather than profit is already an ENORMOUS concession to the idea, just staggeringly huge, and even with that concession it's a couple of orders of magnitude away from making sense.

If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me. Show me the company and their revenue. There's Google, and then it falls off a cliff.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#138

Post by warkdarrior »

AlexandrB wrote: post #90
tootie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it didn't provide value, no one would be using it.

I'd like to introduce you to an entire field of endeavor called "marketing". Non-industrial diamonds don't provide value, yet people are regularly buying them for ridiculous sums[1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

Diamonds do provide value in non-industrial settings, most commonly as an indicator of a person's appreciation for another person. They are in the same value class as cut flowers, although of course at a different price point.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#139

Post by sohamsankaran »

redisman wrote: post #134
sohamsankaran wrote: post #132

In a weird way, this would be a regressive policy -- the data of the richest people is worth orders of magnitude more, so this would just make the rich, well, richer. Increasing corporate tax rates would help the poor much more.

This sounds wrong. The value of data is in the massive amount of datapoints. If I had a data company I would always pick the large masses and discard the outliers if given the choice.

If you want to target ads, which is where the majority of the money in 'data' comes from, personal data about rich people that helps target ads to them is a lot more valuable than personal data about poor people.

Re: Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

#140

Post by jerf »

s3r3nity wrote: post #46
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd love to see a 1cent/impression tax, personally. It would consolidate the market, sure, but it would very nearly destroy it, too. The resulting Google and Facebook left behind wouldn't be left with so many resources to be anti-social with. Internalize the externalities.
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