We should really think about who we give our personal information to, how that information is stored, and why it's being collected because the trend here seems to be that companies are expanding their collection efforts and it's reaching a point where (some) people are seeking alternatives. If you don't mind trading your information like photos, locations, address book, and browser history, then Facebook is a good tool to stay connected with people. On the other hand, if you want that information to stay private, you should still be able to connect and share online with your friends and family.
Facebook Should Pay All of Us
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#62In other news: Google should pay all of us. Yahoo should pay all of us. ...
Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment. I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for-profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc. To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's illegal piracy. In this case we'd define for-pro…
Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market?
The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term.
Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and making themselves toll keepers.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#63I'd pay more than ten dollars a year for a system that didn't treat me as the product.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#64The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…
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Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#65The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…
>> The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself.
It is valuable to the company you're giving it to since they get paid by the advertising. They also get money from their partners who we so graciously agree to allow them to "share" it with which happens to be for profit for them.
>> The data is a means to an end, which is showing you relevant ads. >> If everyone stopped using Facebook tomorrow, the value of all the information Facebook has gathered would be negligible.
They can still sell your information to whomever they want which means even in your scenario they would still be making tons of money, I'm guessing here, hundreds of millions IMHO. So your arguments are not correct.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#66Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. you call all start having my photos and blogs and other stuff if you agree to share some of the profits you make off of me. Until then, no dice.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#67The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…
What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs, and perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication ? This would mean that people who wanted to pay could turn off advertising and just use Facebook as pay-as-they-go service. I dunno what kind of accounting they're doing a…
Why would anybody offer a pay-to-avoid-advertising scheme unless they were paying significantly more than the advertisers? Furthermore, if people thought their content were valuable intellectual property, they wouldn't be posting it for free on some corporations website. So you're having to resolve a conflict between where an economic process is assumed to work based on perceptions, and where the actual value of things isn't.
I suppose you could run something like that as a co-op; users pay a subscription fee, and in exchange, they get actual shares in the company and the right to sell their own attention to advertisers.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#68The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information. What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both information about you…
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How is a platform that supports over a billion people not a meaningful investment into the content? Even if they are not directly producing content, they are more like an aggregation/distribution content system. That's not really a fair comparison.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're 100% correct. Except neither Google nor Yahoo have yet to figure out how to get people to give them the amount of personal information that Facebook has and does. I don't trust Google or Yahoo any more than I trust Facebook but at least the former two companies don't know about me what Facebook probably does. I say probably because I actually deleted my account several years ago and block their trackers. But I…
Google has far more personal information than Facebook.
In general, I like to think of it as:
Facebook knows the facade that you want to present to the world. Google knows what you want (or what you want to know).
Now, each of these is actually only addressing the front-facing portion of the business. Each company obviously has much more information when you begin to consider their link tracking, advertising network tie-ins, communication mining and external domain 'likes'.
But it's good to remember that Google's advertising is so damned valuable because you're already looking for stuff when you go there.
Re: Facebook Should Pay All of Us
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everything worthless to you is worthless to everyone. TV might be a worthless distraction to you, but not everyone. I don't understand how the sell your information argument comes in either. They run their own custom ad network. They aren't even leasing that infrastructure to anyone. I challenge you, to please go pay Facebook and buy information about where I was on Sunday in the evening. If they sell you that, I…
Your argument would be right if it weren't of a very large straw man persuasion. Nobody is saying an individual is being sold your personal information. But when Coke comes along and wants it, Facebook is selling. But even that's not a problem, really. Who cares if Coke knows where you were on Sunday evening? What about Allstate though? Or Humana? One commenter noted above that our personal information isn't valuable…
No they won't sell the information to Coke. What Facebook does as an advertiser is basically make money off of derivative of surface personal information or a large number of people. Coke would be able to target their ads to you, but will not know anything else about you.
The whole business model of Facebook is targeting, that's the derivative they get out of your information. If they start selling the information, everyone would have the derivative. In your example, if Facebook sells information to Coke, Coke can use any cheap internet advertiser on the street. Why would it buy facebook ads anymore? No company would sell their only value prop, you've got it backwards.
There is slight amount of information leak in terms of ad targeting and public profiling. Insurance companies can just put up fake beer ads and try to extrapolate how many 25 year olds are clicking in each area. But that's what you get for not living in a cave. The same insurance company can also sit on the highway and count beer trucks. They can also sit outside a shop and see how many 25 year olds are buying beer.