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Comment by nneonneo | Hacker News Reader

Context: this fellow (Oli Frost) is something of a social media satirist, having previously built LifeFaker (http://lifefaker.com/, a place to buy your way to Instagram fame), and Flopstarter (http://flopstarter.com/, a Kickstarter clone for terrible ideas).

I found the latest idea pretty funny - actually trying to monetize your data instead of letting companies do it for you is kind of a cute turnabout. In any case, please do view this project as an artistic endeavour - a work of satire.

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There are a couple companies that are working in that space:

https://datacoup.com/

https://datawallet.com/#protect

A more detailed reddit thread about them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/8btjah/16_passiv...

I am quite interested in the BAT (Basic Attention Token) project. Using the Brave browser you can either block ads normally or choose to view Brave ads, and the difference with Brave ads is that the viewer gets paid--- in tokens, that is. They can then use the accumulated BAT tokens to send micropayments to platforms and content that they like or peruse frequently. Pretty cool incentive system. And Brave is a really nice browser, at least for mobile.

I use the brave browser in mobile but have everything blocked. Where can I learn more depth about this?

Yeah, but it begs the question, why would anyone want BAT tokens?

AFAIK, you can't even withdraw the tokens currently. The idea being, you use the BAT tokens to send micropayments to your favorite sites, and then they can do plenty of things--- re-use that BAT to advertise, cash it out via fiat gateway, etc.

So maybe in the future we accept payment upfront for our privacy or through incideously free services.

I believe you meant insidiously? Not sure why you make it sound so sinister.

Right word. A world where you may have no privacy and must choose how it is sold (directly, indirectly) is insidious.

Your phrasing is rather off then. Your original statement was that we might perhaps, in the future, accept payment upfront for our privacy (whatever that might mean--are we getting paid for our data or for our privacy?) or that we'd be paid through insidiously free services. So ... how are these insidiously free services paying us? In features? More specifically, because of your phrasing, how are they paying us in this potential future for our privacy?

Your clarification here makes your intention far clearer than your original comment did. It doesn't look like you're concerned with how we might be paid; instead, you're attempting to shine a light on the problem of being paid for our personal data / intruding on our privacy at all. Am I parsing you correctly now?

The new meta is no one has privacy. The default state of the internet invades your privacy. Period. So maybe down the road we’ll still have no privacy. But we can opt to sell it wholesale, all at once, instead of being lured into divulging it.

You’d be selling personally authentic data as opposed to noisy metrics. I don’t know what good the marketers would provide you. Possibly free services (email) sans trackers.

lifefaker - That one was like staring point blank down the throat of a beast that eats human futility and status-jockeying, and in the darkened distance you can faintly hear the tortured howling of a million lost souls... in other words, mission accomplished!

This is not a satire. I can easily see a service where people can simple upload their FB data and the service bundles it up in to groups of 10,000 for sell, takes 30% cut and distributes rest of the proceeds. There are tons of folks who have most of their posts public on FB would be willing to do this. There are companies who wants to model users, train/test algorithms would be willing to pay for it.

It's...still satire.

Poe's law applies.

How will it be verified if profile is real or fake?

This is a major problem. There's no guarantee the data is real, and most of the people who have to sell their old data clearly don't have much buying power regardless.

But, imagine if they were selling a real-time feed of what they're actually browsing. Imagine if authenticity verification was possible by closed software and hardware (totally not pointing android here). Then the data would definitely be worth something. And the more "clients" you have, the more they're worth.

I think you could easily train machine learning algorithm to do that.

lol this is great http://flopstarter.com/1dprinter/

If you could print very light lines and the costs were very low, I'd be interested. As someone who works a lot with handwritten formulas and pencil & paper sketches, I'm constantly annoyed by how strongly lines and squares are printed on paper. It's distracting and there is no need for it.

Print in lighter shades of grey.

As someone who shares the same frustration with normal graph paper, check out a Rhodia Dot Pad.

I think it's real data about is actual life though. Kinda blurrs the line

I wish he had an RSS feed.

http://olifro.st/feed.xml

Cheers!

This concept is being talked about a lot in crypto area. Bringing data back into the control of the user and providing ways for them to monetize it.

LifeFaker cracked me up - thanks for sharing.

"Being able to pretend I rode an elephant in Thailand really helped my confidence"

Jana is doing this by building a browser (mCent) that shows people ads in exchange for tokens that they can use to buy mobile data. It's becoming really popular in India. http://www.mcentbrowser.com/

> instead of letting companies do it for you

Yay, it's 1999, and disintermediation is the word.

P.S. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disintermediat...

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