There's a whole genre of articles based on conflating two senses of "your," belonging to you, and about you. If I observe that you have blue eyes, that's a fact about you, but it doesn't belong to you, at least not without redefining what "belong" means.<p>It would be helpful if, instead of deliberately conflating these two senses of "your," articles on this subject went in the other direction and explicitly discussed the distinction.<p>We have from time to time redefined what "belong" means, but these redefinitions tend to be very complicated and have all sorts of unforeseen consequences. My guess is that a redefinition on the scale of facts about you = your property would be a disaster.
This is absolute nonsense and dangerous to boot. Facebook's ARPU is still less than $20/year. If they literally paid all of their profits directly to their user it would still be a pittance. The real value of privacy has to do with freedom, manipulation and surveillance, and that is not represented by economic measures at all. Talking about the value of the data in purely economic terms is exactly the way you would want to frame the issue if you had more nefarious plans down the line.
The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them.<p>Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate value from the data being gathered. The cost to maintain that infrastructure and provide those great services is pretty high and has taken some brilliant engineers years of sweat. (I don't work for either so I'm not tooting my own horn, just giving credit where I believe credit is due)<p>I think as it currently stands (collect data on me and I get free 99.99% uptime, cloud available services for email, cloud drive, and social networking) is a pretty sweet deal.
There is already mechanical Turk for the cases the author described. There are many paid initiatives to label data that these companies employ. These "AI" companies sample sizes are small compared to the services they provide against them. Once divided up its pointless to think about them "paying" you and is counter to the point. They already are paying in the form of the service they are providing. I.e free storage, service etc.<p>Democratizing the data so more companies can use it to build products beyond these major concentration of platform players is a much more practical. This is similar to the personal data requests legislation that Europe already has in place. This would be an extension to enable competing services to access this data as their customers opt into the the service. Enabling more companies to build more competitive products (employ people working towards market competitive products) not trying to set "sustainable" sheep that feed from the same troff of the concentrated power of these companies. Certainly universal basic income; but that should be wholly independent of being subordinates to these service providers.
The thing is, I don't actually have my data.<p>Perhaps if I collected it and stored it, perhaps put it behind an accessible API and supplied Google et al with an API key to access it I might have a case for charging them for it.
But the value of my data alone probably is worth less than a dollar to Google and Facebook. Given the choice of getting paid a dollar, or using it for free (in exchange for them using my data), I would choose the latter.<p>Only in aggregate is it worth a lot.
This wouldn't be such an issue if they couldn't see the data on which they are computing (and individual data wouldn't be exposed in data breaches either).<p>But I'm not sure if Google even cares too much about doing that (I know they've experimented with this, but nothing on a scale that matters), and Facebook certainly doesn't. Apple seems to be the only one that does somewhat with its differential privacy approach.<p>I think they can all do much more, but they're not trying too hard.
I'll never understand why I can't pay Google and Facebook $20 to $50 per year to simply respect my privacy and not give me advertisements. I can't imagine they make more than this off my viewing behaviour (especially as I use adblock)
Seems like an is ought question that is long settled: look at the credit reporting agencies. We may be doing impressive new things and figuring out how to learn a lot more about people, but who owns data on a person is a dead and buried question.
I've had this discussion with people before. It both sounds good and not depending on the viewpoint. The good is already spoken about in the article - I generate data that a company is in turn using to make money. The analogy I have used before is imagine if I owned land and ate apples on that land. If the apple seeds I spit out grew, I'd have apple trees. It would be bothersome to me if the state came in and sold all the apples the tree grew and I never saw a dime. Refraining from political discussion, I'm upset someone else is profiting off my work. No different than using my uploaded picture to train image processing systems.<p>Now the bad, how much am I REALLY worth? Online surveys pay out pennies at most for my "opinion". I'm a middle-class, white, male, computer scientist - the market is literally flooded with data from people like me. My data is only worth something if I was, say, a single Hispanic mother or some other niche demographic, and that's only because of their rarity.<p>Now, this is where the discussion typically leads to science fiction. I think this would be a great use of blockchain currency and let the market drive the value of your data. If there's a shortage of, say, beach pictures (because why not), then you're Instagram data might be of value. Likewise, the GPS locations of an underrepresented demographic is suddenly worth a more because its hard to get that kind of data.<p>But I think the major issue still falls back to how much its all worth. The article says $20,000, which nicely would support arguments for a living wage. I generate the data that runs the world, so pay me enough to live it in. However, what if the data isn't worth $20k?
Puppy pictures aside, I'd put it another way: I'm unique and what I do online is the product of an unique person thinking. If some corporation makes money by analyzing my behaviour, then I should be allowed to treat my data just like a song or a book: that is, intellectual property, with the clause that if and only if that data is gathered with consent and full transparency (using 100% free and open source software for example), then they're exempted from paying fees and/or lawsuits.
Just my 0.2€. I don't condemn companies for using technology to make money, and am perfectly fine if they scan my surfing habits, but people rights should always come first, and if they scan my emails or private messages or use the information in a way I don't approve then I want to be able to hit them badly.
Ive been saying it for years - I wont allow fb, twttr, ggl, or any of the tech giants access to my data <i>until</i> they compensate me fairly for it. If theyre making billions off of us, then I want a few thousand in return. Until then, no accounts and no data from me! Privacy Badger, ABPlus, block @ DNS level, etc.<p>Also Ive been a succesful technologist, programmer, and social being for many decades, and not having any of those accounts has never been a downer in my life. I feel much healthier, sound, and happier than my peers that have FB accounts. Cant see the value in that jank. Cant see why it makes sense to empower those companies at our expense.
Can I trademark my likeness (as famous actors or musicians do) and then sue Facebook if they use it?<p>I'm sure there's some reason it wouldn't work, but it's fun to think about.
The next generation of technological progress has to be an answer to these questions.<p>Google and Facebook (and similar companies) have killed innovation with their monopolies and in order to break their monopolies new technologies must be invented that disrupt their business models.<p>It is interesting to see the NY Times advancing such avant garde ideas but it is good to see rising social consciousness of the limitations of current technology.
Can't you be paid by virtue of cheaper costs? Ad agencies filtering out value is of dubious value for society. Cheaper cars, more effective roads and transit, wiser food choices, data driven medicine, and plenty of other progress points continue to help most everyone that is at stake in this discussion. My hope is it continues to help even more.
Off course, but the steady stream of money to the rich is unstoppable. The problem is that we are conditioned to accept the extreme wealthy and even look up to them. Most people think everything is OK as long as they have a decent income. So most people only find out first about the horror of this system once they lose their job and hit the streets. But then it's all too late when the reality sinks in. With the sticker POOR on your head your kinda lost till you die in this world.<p>We live in a world of modern slavery where one needs the skill and luck to find a good job to avoid the streets. A better distribution of wealth would be great of course. Imagine all those billionaires rendering at least half of their fortunes back to the poor. But that is not realistic and will never happen. Things will get worse to the point they lock us up in some sort of "District 9" (Elysium).
An argument that having terrorcorporations get your data becoming normalized even further - the "but you do get some money in exchange!" edition.<p>Next step is getting some discount in the walled garden store or some crypto token payment.<p>Blah.
I'm astounded by the amount of blow-back in this thread. Do you all really love gathering user data that much that you can't even consider the possibility of parting with it, or at least with its <i>free</i> availability?
why is nobody here speaking about the basic attention token?<p><a href="https://basicattentiontoken.org/" rel="nofollow">https://basicattentiontoken.org/</a>
You are being compensated for it. You get to use Facebook, Gmail, Google Search, etc. without taking out your wallet.<p>Want more compensation? You’re free to negotiate or take your data elsewhere to a higher bidder.
I find the term "your data" bothersome. Just because there is a piece of data out there that pertains to you it doesn't make it "your data". Some will contend that the data is only gathered through a violation of your privacy, but I don't agree--in most cases, particularly the big tech companies who clearly spell out in their ToS, privacy policy, etc. what data they're gathering.
I see the problem but this feels like a bad solution. The way I see it there are two real problems here.<p>(1) Google, Facebook and the like do have a cost, just that it's data instead of money. The fact that we're one step removed from money obscures the true cost associated with the services. And when you combine that with the fact that the services themselves obscure what data they're collecting/have, there's no way for an end consumer to know if they're getting a 'good deal' since they have no idea what they're paying. A fix to this would be radical forced transparency - every consumer should be able to find out what data any company has on them - both collected and bought (and bought from whom for how much.)<p>(2) Data is too large a competitive advantage in certain industries. It seems similar to me to utilities. Barring local law I <i>could</i> try and start up a new water company and displace the incumbent but it would never work - the huge fixed costs make the industry prone to natural monopolization. Same here except with data. There are absolutely ginormous costs associated with collecting user data that could rival Google's or Facebook's (if it's even possible). You <i>could</i> start a company to try to beat Google but you'll never get the data to make it good enough to compete and since you're not good enough to compete you'll never get the data. The free market here has done it's work - it's generated something new and useful and beneficial to society, now we should nationalize it so that it stays that way.