141–150 of 288 posts
What we really need is a data tax. The more data you collect, the more taxes you need to pay. You can even index it against company income and have a lower data tax bracket for small start-ups and a higher data tax bracket for large orgs.
User data needs to be treated as a liability, not an asset.
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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.
[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/sell-your-own-data-bad-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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…
The people on HN, especially those who use Facebook regularly, are worth on average _significanty_ more than $17 to the company per year. It’s hard to remember, the average person makes $X,000 globally and Facebook has a huge % of the planet on their platform. HN users make in the upper echelon of wages, and are comfortable with their computers and online shopping.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Only tax the biggest players?
A better idea would be to give each user equity in the company. An even better idea would be give that equity voting rights.
Side benefit: platforms would have to KYC human beings and we'd kill off a lot of bots and other generated horseshit.
Yeh, this seems backwards, the users pay the companies for free products with their data and their attention. That's the business model. Why would Facebook and Google run those servers if they couldn't have profitably targeted ads. If you want privacy honoring products you want the users to pay money for the service.
This argument makes perfect sense, the problem starts when companies like Facebook start tracking individuals who do not use their services.
Being paid means nothing if you don't have the power to negotiate, and declare it "not for sale".
Similar to app permissions, users could choose which aspects of their data/profile to share with each company. The data could then be accessed via a federated API. With this in place, you could make it illegal for companies to store any PII themselves.
Of course whoever controls that central user repo would have great power.
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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…
> only give premium services to the most valuable users? Almost certainly. What people often miss in this discussion is that advertising is progressive--it's a transfer of value from richer people who can and will pay for both the service being used and the product that is being advertised to poorer people who cannot.