An argument that companies should pay users for their data

Huh. I actually believe most western societies are incredibly tilted in the "ask permission" direction. You have to petition to start a business, cut someone's hair, buy a gun, get married, copy a book... I could probably find a hundred things you're supposed to ask for permission before doing.

Personally, I prefer freedom: do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't violate someone's rights (and no, Imaginary Property doesn't count).

People aren't going to directly assist and curate the ability for 3rd parties to spew more spam & spyware on their webpages and in their email inboxes. If they could see what sort of data is being tracked, that can easily trigger their creepiness receptors and wish to distance themselves from it.

The only reason people endure the current situation is because they don't feel they can do anything about it, and really don't know the extent of what's going on. Empowering them will finally allow them to actively break out of that cycle.

It's because we've structured our society (in Western Democracies) so that people grow rich if they can trick you in to buying stuff. The better they are at tricking you, the more they earn. The higher the price compared to the cost, the more they earn. The lower the longevity of the goods, the more chance to sell to you again.

Many of the incentives are towards fooling people rather than creating useful goods that enrich society with minimal environmental impact and maximum longevity.

It's unsustainable and leads to powerful (ie rich) people who are incentivised to parasitically feed on poorer people.

It's the same thing... If they stop collecting data, they don't still get to keep the same ad revenue.

The ads are only worth the amount there are because of the hyper specific information you can target ads with. If you get rid of that, than the ad model falls apart. They might still be worth...something, but if it was just about anonymous eyeballs, probably every ad would just be for Coke and Coca Cola would pay extremely little for it.

"fair" is practically a weasel word. It doesn't have a universal standard. It doesn't mean anything until you explain what you consider to be fair. I once read a book on negotiations that called it "the F-word" - it was warning you to be wary of people using the word against you.

Think of this as a transaction between two parties doing business together. When business A is making a deal with business B, then A is not entitled to know how much money B will make out of it. It's perfectly fine to ask, but B not answering is very much within the rules (and is the norm). It is your job to do your own research to figure out how valuable your information is to them.

I also often see an attitude of "They make $20/year from the information I give them. So I should have the option to pay them $20/year for not tracking me." No business deal works that way. Each party sets their own requirements. If you demand that they offer paid services to stop tracking you, they get to say "No - you're welcome to use someone else's service if they give you that kind of a deal"

Finally, the way negotiations work: The focus will not be on what they make from your money, but how much you are willing to pay for the services you receive. The majority of people I know will not pay $10/mo for their email service. So the fact that Google may make $30/year from your use of Gmail is irrelevant. This is your BATNA.

>Remember, they're showing us ads in addition to collecting volumes of information on us, so we're paying in two ways.

And in how many ways are they paying you in services? Far more, I imagine.

>Here in the US, we cried tyranny when our security agencies were collecting metadata to monitor threats. And then we gave everything we had to Facebook and Google and didn't bat an eye as they sold us to anyone who pays.

We probably hang out in different crowds, but while government monitoring did make the news, the percentage of people I personally know who cared about it was less than those I know who say "I'm using a service other than the one provided by Google because they're already tracking me in so many ways".

BTW, although I use some Google services, by and large I do not. I do not actively use Gmail. It was very difficult for me to get used to the idea of letting them get to me via Android. I don't use my account on Youtube. I don't have a Facebook account. I don't use Twitter. I pay for my own email and web services. I tend to have privacy extensions on my browser. I don't use Whatsapp. My life is not at all miserable.

Your reasoning is extremely fallacious because you're overlooking a lot of nuance.

Yes, it is true that in aggregate part of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers. How much exactly depends on macroeconomic factors, industry dynamics, pricing power of distributors and retailers, and hundreds other variables. But you are right that in aggregate a non-zero amount of the advertising costs get passed on to consumers.

However, advertising is valuable to advertisers because it works to some degree. And it works because people are influenced by it. Now, as an individual I have no control over what other people are doing and so I have no control over how valuable advertising is and how much is being spent on it and how much is being passed on to consumers. Therefore as an individual I look around me and prices are what they are and already have in them advertising costs which will not go up by me using service. Therefore as an individual the marginal cost of me using these services is effectively zero (imagine the ratio between the value of advertising to me and the aggregate value of advertising, that's effectively zero). As an individual those services are free.

So it depends on what your definition of "free" is. A) Would prices be lower if advertising didn't exist? Yes [0]. B) Would prices be lower to me if I didn't use these services? No. The thing is that in definition A) I don't really have a choice, so it's irrelevant. I only have a choice as an individual.

[0] And even here some people will disagree with you. What I call "free market fundamentalists" will argue that No, they wouldn't, because the advertising leads to higher sales and greater operational efficiency, so that advertising costs are exactly offset by lower per-unit costs.

> You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits.

I don't think this is falsifiable. It sounds sort of feasible in the abstract, but how can we empirically measure that effect? As it stands, I could just as easily respond that, no, these companies make prices more efficient, because their advertising methodologies are more effective so companies spend less on their platforms than they would for equivalent ad campaigns elsewhere. Then we'd have to figure out how to investigate whether modern companies advertise more due to growth of the market, or because they have to due to catch up with everyone else using the tech advertising platforms. Narrowing down the answer, if there is one, would be nontrivial. Then I could also say that advertising makes tech services cheaper, because Facebook and Google earn more from user data than they would if they forced everyone to pay $20/month.

Which of us is right? We can't really say, it's effectively an opinion because, even if technically falsifiable, these claims are far from being empirically demonstrable.

Companies use advertising to increase their sales, either from 0 to something or from something to something more. Along with R&D, production costs, running costs and profit, the advertising cost is part of the planning from the start.

This is not how the stock market works. Where did you get this idea?

In my opinion, you're mistaking apathy for ignorance. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not the exchange is fair. I work in tech, have heard everything you just wrote many times, and my response is continually, "Eh, I'm okay with that." People I've spoken to about this outside of tech often don't know about the data collection to quite the extent you're talking about and don't care about it. When I mention how extensive the data collection is, they're often surprised, but often they still don't care. The most I've personally seen is a vague discomfort that didn't seem to persist, given the person's behavior didn't change at all.

It gets kind of frustrating for people like myself to hear this argument rehashed over and over in the way you've just presented it, as though people who are okay with their data being used simply "don't understand" or haven't been paying attention. Everything you wrote is - while clearly not neutrally presented - in the zeitgeist on HN. There's nothing really new about it, and you're only convincing the people who already agree with you. Yes, we know our data is being used, we get it. We're picking up what you're putting down. Right there with you. We just don't really care.

You can draw a normative conclusion about me based on that statement if you'd like. It probably sounds callous and asinine from your perspective, but like I said: reasonable people can disagree. Anecdotally speaking, most people I "enlighten" about the data hoovering you describe don't meaningfully change their behavior or preferences. Consider that when people are not aware of how their data is being used, it doesn't always mean they're being victimized; it can also mean they are vaguely aware that their data is "out there", and they implicitly don't care enough about it to investigate further. That's a valid position to take.

I've always wondered: How is that different from A/B testing, or any other marketing experiment?

>Since gathering / ad-selling services are so lucrative, they essentially subsidize the development of the highest-quality products in the market. The best engineers work for these companies. They have massive teams of people refining their products. And, these companies use IP laws to prevent clones. Essentially, they lock out for-fee competitors.

> 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.

The only real difference is your use of the phrase "lock-out", but I don't think that's a reasonable way to look at it. If enough people really want to be part of a fee-based ecosystem, no one is stopping a company from engaging those people. You bring up IP laws, but that's really an independent issue, since fee-based and ad-based businesses can both use IP laws in the same way.

Have you looked at ynab.com? I find their overall philosophy on budgeting to be more effective, the app is high quality, and it's solely about your budget, not about offering you credit cards.

It's one of the few products I recommend to anyone, and it's relatively expensive ($85 for the year I believe).

Of course. No one would be using them if they weren't better off from using them.

I'd like to see a requirement for all companies receiving PII to issue an account of how they use it and who it's sold to, those receiving your PII would also have an obligation to notify you, and offer access to the same audit data (how they're using it, who they got it from, who they gave/sold it to).

Legit companies would then leak information, by design, showing companies using/selling your data without notifying you.

Real fines like those anticipated in the GDPR would be needed to encourage companies to adhere to the legislation.

/ifiwereemperoroftheworld

When we talk about "big data" and data collection, the vast majority of what we're talking about basically just boils down to web logs, and derived data that's inferred from those logs. So is an entry in a web log that corresponds to something you did now your property? Is anything someone writes down about me now my property? If I walk in a store and the store owner writes down that I was there, is that my property?

But the notion of getting paid for your data, when its worth so little by itself is not appealing.

No it's not. You're mixing up the value of the data with the value of your attention. The world has made a killing off of advertising long before personalization came about so saying it's all due to personalization is a bit silly imho.

Okay, fine, its the cost for using their land.

But THEN, you find out that your flowers (or, again, the combination) are so unique, that person begins making millions of dollars in revenue off the honey.

As the primary producer of the income, I'd feel a bit shafted if I didn't get some of type of reciprocation.

Doubly so if that person accidentally let a malicious entity on the land who then stole my unique breed of flower and then started selling/reproducing it.

While you've presented a compelling counter-argument, I'm still not convinced.

>And when did I agree to Equifax's terms?

You didn't need to because they never stored "your data".