211–220 of 288 posts
Facebook is giving me much more real value than they could ever make from me in dollars.
This makes no sense. How much you value something is what you would be willing to pay. And they are making money from you in dollars. You just have no idea how much.
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What did I say that was BS? Your entire comment is completely orthogonal to mine.
i don't mean "BS" with venom aimed at you. but you equated a cash transaction at a store to data commodification by internet companies. data commodification is very materially different from exchanging a currency for a physical good; and i think it's wrong to lose that distinction with a metaphor that's too simplistic.
I see your point but we are commenting on an article that is talking about "data dividends" :)
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How would this work for, say, Google. Say they cut users a check and their business model no longer worked. Would they then charge for searches? Would users have the option to keep free searches in lieu of a payment?
Yes right now it's just assumed your value, your cost, their value, and their cost all balance out. But let's slap some numbers and everything and actually see if it does. If we have the option to pay up front, or sell off my data and maybe end up in the red or black. It will all be very complex in the end, but that's just exposing the inherent complexity that already exists and is just papered over.
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But also if your point is true, I'd happily pay $3 a year for FB to retain all rights to the data they collect about me. My data is only worth $3 a year to others, but my privacy and peace of mind is worth more than that to me.
Facebook has revenues of $70b where are you getting $3/yr??
Also keep in mind that some percent of that revenue is from other things (ads for example). They could still make ad revenue on paid users, just marginally less.
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> neither would 99% of users. That sort of statement requires data to back it up. > would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist. Which is not a problem at all.
> That sort of statement requires data to back it up. On other social media websites that offer "pay to remove ads" versus "get personalized ads", like Reddit or Twitch, about 1% of users pay. Wikipedia asks for donations and very few people donate, percentage-wise. So I think if you want to show a substantially higher number, say even 10%, you'll need to provided evidence. Even if 10% of users paid, would they be wi…
Exactly! I don't know why it's so hard for people to realize that there are people that 100% ok with the offerings from these companies and would rather not have legislation interfere with such transactions
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> $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 ye…
That was my point. In this thought exercise, we ought to separate the amount paid to users by country, because it will differ as much as a few orders of magnitude per country, just as the per user revenue most probably does. That is roughly the scale of GDP per capita per country between 1st world and 3rd world countries, which would be a good proxy for ad markets. I agree with rest of your argument, if per person revenue in the US was $150, would that be enough to make users care? It is unknown.
> If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me
I will concede that I am leveling an argument that entirely hinges on a hypothetical. But I don't think it is fantastical. The core of the problem is information asymmetry. These companies have huge amounts of high resolution data on us, but we don't have anything about the breakdown and how they operationalize that data. The argument that "if there was more ways to milk money out of it, we would have seen that in revenue" has several drawbacks in my opinion for several reasons.
a) The data doesn't have to be used in ways that translate to quarterly revenue but still great value to the company; this includes back channel uses (elections, famously brexit, that was won by data, and it is hard to put a revenue tag to its effects), it also includes expenditures such as acquisitions of competitors (famously instagram and whatsapp, I don't doubt for a second facebook made use of their data to assess the viability of these acquisitions), or temporarily unused data for game theoretic reasons ("I don't want to expose the fact that I can utilize racial data, health data, covert speech recognition data on my users as long as I can, but if market conditions/lobbying efforts are fruitful, I will translate that to revenue").
b) Even directly revenue increasing uses of data is subject to R&D and mining day in day out. So new combinations of existing data can be figured out, or new products might potentiate existing data to be more valuable without preceding revenue footprints. Think about self driving cars; how traffic operated has been public data, individual sensor technologies aren't that novel, but self-driving car is joining all this together in the hope of converting that data into revenue. When it does, it will be a phase shift that tremendously increases the value of that data, and we will have not been wiser to it if we only watched the revenue. I'm not suggesting FB is necessarily after such an exponential tech, but it is to keep in mind the potentiality stored with data is not readily observable, so “show me it can translate into revenue” criteria can be failed for a long while despite the fact that it eventually can.
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…
That is a considerable amount for many.
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You want government enforced kidney donations?
No we want a system in which pleading to a faceless mob of people on social media is not the solution to needing a kidney transplant.
What solutions did you have in mind?
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Yes right now it's just assumed your value, your cost, their value, and their cost all balance out. But let's slap some numbers and everything and actually see if it does. If we have the option to pay up front, or sell off my data and maybe end up in the red or black. It will all be very complex in the end, but that's just exposing the inherent complexity that already exists and is just papered over.
What number would that be though? Any number is going to be made up and subjective based on the individual. I might day my data is worth $1000 a year while it’s worth $1 to you.
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Can't you achieve the same effect at user level by faking some data + messing with tracking via Firefox containers + Ghostery + Cookies AutoDelete?
What portion of all users are going to do that? A fraction of a percent? The point of making the companies change is that most users aren’t computer literate enough to understand the problem, it’s consequences, or the mitigations. The knowledge asymmetry between the average user and the companies collecting and using this data could hardly be more vast, and that creates a situation where companies can effectively pre…
You're saying the low levels of adoption of such technologies are indicative of users' subpar technical skills, but maybe it's just general apathy and disinterest? E.g., how many public protests and calls to action have we seen after Snowden revelations?
FWIW, the former is already prevalent among younger generations, with Instagram for their "public" life and f-Insta for everything private.