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Comment by JeffreyKaine | Hacker News Reader

I'd actually be down with this, but only if facebook gave user's the ability to lock their own data down at fair market price. That way the user pays for a product, or decides to be the product. It's clean and cut & dry; and there wouldn't be any illusions of a "free" service.

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The problem is market price would be less than a penny per megabyte of data.

EDIT: Okay, I admit I pulled this figure out of my behind but my point is data is incredibly cheap.

Do you measure your privacy in megabytes?

Maybe he has a data capped VPN? ;)

Then I would have no problem paying, and Facebook would be glad to make 10x what they would have otherwise.

Facebook currently make $60 per user in the US, a little less for the EU, and basically nothing per user in the rest of the world.

It seems doubtful that to many people would pay $60 per year for Facebook, at certainly not $600 if they where to make 10x (minus the overhead of running ad sales)

Maybe Facebook shouldn't be a sustainable business, then?

The amount that Facebook makes from storing my PI is not exactly the same as the amount it makes from showing ads. Contextual ads are not completely worthless, they ran the web for years.

I'd be happy to subscribe to FB at $5/month if I had no advertizements, no promoted posts and no spammy messenger entries. With them emphatically not selling my data.

That's a completely useless metric.

200 bytes can easily contain name, adress, phone number, occupation, age and list of interests for one person.

The first 200 bytes are free then.

Winning lottery numbers for the next draw are less than 8 bytes.

That would be good under this model, wouldn't it, because you could buy back your privacy at a very low price.

I don't believe this to be the case though.

Data delivery is cheap. The data itself can be very, very expensive.

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