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Comment by m-p-3 | Hacker News Reader

You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing).

That way it feels more transparent to the end-user, and they have to make the conscious choice of either giving a bit of their data in exchance of a free service or be prepared to pay to keep their data private.

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>You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do.

What's the practical difference between these two scenarios?

1) I offer a free service if you let me collect your data, but charge you $3/mo if you refuse to let me collect it.

2) I offer a $3/mo service, but give you $3/mo back if you let me collect your data.

Option #1 is explicitly illegal under the new California law. If option #2 is legal, then what is the law supposed to ban?

One difference, it seems, is that under the proposed law you couldn’t advertise your $3 service as “free”, maybe?

Either way though, I’d be happy if it were just required that there BE an opt out even with a price tag. Google can then finally tell me how much money they want for their services.

The second one has a much higher barrier for users, as they now need to hand over their credit card information.

Only if that's how you design your onboarding flow. It's for your company's convenience to do it that way, though, not necessarily the user's.

The difference is mostly to do with user experience. It also has to do with the requirements of how you bill the customer. It means you can't give them a "free" sign up and then charge them a fee after the click the data selling opt out button.

What's meant by saying you can offer incentives is that you must present all information at the same time and that users are considered as opt-out by default.

Basically, the user must go through a sign up page that has a box that says "You may sell my data in exchange for a $3 discount" and it cannot be selected by default. You also cannot have a sign up page that has a box that must be selected to opt-out whether the box is selected by default or not.

The no-relatiation clause also has addition requirements that are not related to money. For example, you cannot refuse to allow a user to access your site because they didn't allow their data to be sold. You also couldn't impose access limitations like slowing the rate of page response or increasing the number of advertisements on the page or send spam only to users that opt-out.

The difference isn't really about charging a fee to users that won't let you sell their data. It's more about not allowing websites to harass users with increased advertising on behalf of whoever they wanted to sell your data to. It's only illegal for them to sell the data, internal use is still legal, so they're preventing a loopholes.

I wonder if that will have unintended consequences.

It might inadvertently assign a price to the data collected.

It also shows a direct discrimination against poor and/or young people who might not afford the service.

You need parental permission to collect data from young people in the US anyway (see COPPA). But an age gate and asking for a credit card number are very different levels of sign up friction for a young person to try to get around.

There is already a price in the data collected (for FB i think $120 / year). I think making it public is a good thing. I think the law will also force facebook to offer ad free subscription plans, something people have been asking for. My bet is nobody is going to use them though.

I didn't believe that number but it seems like it's true if you restrict it to just north america monthly active users: https://thespring.io/investing/facebook-makes-more-revenue-p...

Average revenue per user is around $25 for global users.

This brings up a related issue that not all users are equal. Even in non-data mining business models, you still have some segment of the users subsidizing another.

>It also shows a direct discrimination against poor and/or young people who might not afford the service.

As opposed to what, treating everybody badly? McDonalds discriminates between people who can afford a Big Mac and people who can't, and that's not a problem.

The internet is not the same as a food place. People expect and have gotten used to services for free. If you put a price tag on a software library, you obviously discriminate against students and poor people.

Actually, it kinda is the same.

If you don't have the money to buy a big mac, you either eat a cheeseburger on the dollar menu or go home and cook a burger yourself.

If you don't have the money for the software library, you either choose a lesser library, or go write your own.

A larger problem however is many are considering the internet a fundamental human right, which it isn't. Might be nice to have, but a fundamental right it is not.

Poor people can get other services at a discount, for instance electricity, internet or cable service.

For a short time AT&T GigaFiber was charging $30/month to opt out of surveillance and I thought they can't possibly be selling my data for that much. I wonder if this new law will also lead to some unrealistically high prices.

> You just have to change the onboarding process to include a fee, and offer an incentive/rebate of the subscription price to match the cost to basically make it free. That way if they decide to change their mind and not give their data, you're still in the clear by removing the incentive and either charge their payment method or disable their service until they do (or reenable data sharing).

The problem is that then you cannot effectively offer a service level that is ad based. Say I want to offer some web services. I provide a free tier with ads (information gathering and selling) and a payed tier with no ads. This law says that I cannot charge more for the non-ads version. OK, so then I make both cost the same, either free or some fixed cost. If they are both free, what stops everyone from just using the non-ads version, it's free too. If both aren't free and cost money, what is the point of even providing the ad version, since people can pay the same and get the no-ads version. Not to mention, everyone that is fine giving their information in order to receive the service for "free" is now not able to do that.

You can still have ads you just can’t sell the users data to get them. Which means you either have to target ads yourself or you have to use non targeted ads. So you can still have an ad supported free level.

Exactly - you can still have an ad supported model all you want, you just can't be lazy about it anymore. You'll either have to tell the ad network yourself what your audience attributes are and likely take a hit on CPC because of less targeting data, or you'll have to do what people used to do (and some still do) and manually choose the ads you want to run.

It's not the end of the world, it's the end of some business models.

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