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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for people controlling their data and being fully informed of how it's being used, but I just don't understand the idea that you should be paid for the data that you give to companies when you choose to use their products.

The payment that you get is the products. You don't get a check from Google, but you get to use Google, which is an incredibly useful tool.

I like Yang, but I think he's barking up the wrong tree. We should be focused on giving people control over their data and awareness of how it's being used so they can make informed decisions, not insisting they get paid for it.

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By adding payouts into the mix, companies become incentivized to not sell your data if it's not material to them. I go to the store, I buy something. Transaction over. The idea that the store tracks the shit out of me when I'm in the store is creepy enough. I can accept that ship has sailed since I'm in their store.

That the store turns around and makes money off of that browsing data so Facebook can sell me ads for products I lingered in front of, is another level entirely. Thus the data dividend forces the store to truly think through wether or not it's worth it to them to the data. For mega-corp retailers like Target or Whole Foods, they may decide it is (though I'd prefer not), and in that case, since it is my data being sold it doesn't seem unreasonable that I should get something from that transaction. (Unlike physical goods, my data, eg home address/email/IP address/etc, doesn't stop being mine just because someone else also has it.)

You’re missing the point: when you go to a store, you hand them cash. When you go to a website, you hand them data, which they turn around and sell for cash. The data you give them is the payment for their product. Why else would Facebook invest billions into free products? I’m not shedding a tear for the mega corps, but people need to understand that companies will charge for products one way or another.

Many people think that "free" is a bad deal given the profits these companies make. Many people would prefer the more transparent pricing of "$5 per month" over the abstract "Whatever we can earn from your data, combined with everyone else's, by any means"

I agree that transparent pricing would be an excellent option to have, but based on some quick googling, FB's net profit is only something like 25 cents per monthly active user per month (assuming I did the math correctly...).

If FB gave people a rebate in the amount of their net profit, the whole transaction would round out to FB operating and people getting it for free, so it's not obviously that bad of a deal for users, at least not with profit as the metric.

But also if your point is true, I'd happily pay $3 a year for FB to retain all rights to the data they collect about me. My data is only worth $3 a year to others, but my privacy and peace of mind is worth more than that to me.

Yeah for sure, I think these paltry per user numbers make a great case for having a user pay option.

I agree with you as a user. From the company's perspective though, I'm guessing there's a decent correlation between "people who will pay $, instead of free" and "people who have enough disposable income to impulse-buy high-cost items from your ads".

As anecdata, if you offered me instagram without ads for $10 / year I wouldn't even blink before accepting it. Yet I've also bought a half dozen things from their ads for > $50 over the last few years, which is likely more valuable to them. Or more specifically, makes their ad platform more valuable to their ad-buying business customers.

Facebook has revenues of $70b where are you getting $3/yr??

Poster above me, reusing their number to keep the thought cogent. The point is if the revenue per user is low enough some (many?) would want to opt out of data/privacy infringement and pay for the service directly, maybe even at a greater cost than revenue share.

Also keep in mind that some percent of that revenue is from other things (ads for example). They could still make ad revenue on paid users, just marginally less.

The ads are only valuable because Facebook have lots of data to target you accurately. This is mostly what people mean when they selling your data...it's less that Facebook is handing it over, it's that Facebook are providing a platform for advertisers to target you based on this data.

Many people may want this, but it’s likely a microscopic number in the grand scheme. Look at the length people go through to share Netflix, etc. Hell, I know how deep this rabbit hole goes and I hardly care.

So we're bartering with Google.

There are a couple problems with this that I can see. First, given that the transaction is not exchanged using dollars, we don't know if we are getting ripped off. One of the useful signals that money sends is uniform price discovery. Maybe we as consumers are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Second, it's a gray economy that escapes taxation. If Google can conduct a significant fraction of its business in an untaxed gray zone, while General Motors must account and pay all suppliers for the taxes they must pay to the government, then that's a market distortion in favor of Google. This is why bartering at large scales is illegal, unless of course you're an internet company.

What do you mean “ripped off”? Do you mean you don’t know what Google sells it for? It doesn’t matter, that’s not how trade works. If you’d rather trade your data for free email, search, messaging, etc then you’re not being ripped off.

You don’t walk around all day evaluating the rest of your purchases based on COGS, you do it based on the value you receive in return.

BS. paying for internet products with personal data is nothing like a financial transaction at a store. money is a uniform unit; personal data is not that.

Those of us who are well-aware of data harvesting still forget about it all the time; it isn't at the forefront of our attention when we're shopping on Amazon or watching videos on Youtube. at a store you pull money out of your wallet, all the elements of the exchange are at the top of your attention, and when it's over it's over.

data collection is constant, has far-reaching effects on the future, and we have no intuition about the manipulation we're opening ourselves up to.

What did I say that was BS? Your entire comment is completely orthogonal to mine.

i don't mean "BS" with venom aimed at you. but you equated a cash transaction at a store to data commodification by internet companies.

data commodification is very materially different from exchanging a currency for a physical good; and i think it's wrong to lose that distinction with a metaphor that's too simplistic.

> i think it's wrong to lose that distinction with a metaphor that's too simplistic

I see your point but we are commenting on an article that is talking about "data dividends" :)

If I walk into a store and make no purchase creates no value for the store. Visiting a website with a Facebook tracker (21.9% of the web) and making no purchase creates value for Facebook.

you would be surprised, but that also creates value for the store.

i worked with a company that tracks you and your facial expressions as you move thru the store. they analysed that data to show new products and move things around.

I think there's a category error here around 'choice'.

Who is choosing? I can walk into a store and look around without making a commitment to buy a product. I may leave realizing that there is nothing for me here. I chose not to become a customer. Or I chose to be a customer and there was a ritual exchanging of gifts and information which is relatively clear to all parties.

Websites don't work that way. I can't 'browse' without them already tracking me. I haven't agreed to anything yet. The transition happens without my awareness. It's predatory.

The difference is that a store doesn't spend significant amount of their resource on you when you just look around, but most of websites do.

Suggesting that sites do not have right to retain information about what you asked them to do after you've read an article or created an account, would be similar to saying that bookstore should allow you to read entire books standing in the store, or that they can't use their security cameras because you may be visible on them.

You may be (un)pleasantly surprised by the amount of physical/real-world tracking of in-store traffic that stores are engaging in now. In many physical stores, you don't really have the option of "'browsing' without them already tracking me" either. Worse yet, there's not even a pretense of viewing/accept some Terms and Conditions when you physically enter the store (at least websites pay the lip service of having a T&C posted or a cookie consent pop-up).

One random example from 2018 (so, probably a lot more advanced and widespread by now): https://www.adweek.com/digital/adobes-newest-labs-project-ca...

I would characterize this as "the situation has been bad for so long in the online world that it has now metastasized into the physical world".

Could be I'm wrong about that, but how long do you have to embolden people before they do something truly brazen?

They have been engaged in that sort of marketing and tracking at least back when computers were big iron only - although to a lesser degree by watching customers and tweaking stores accordingly. Milk is in the back of the grocery store? Not because of insulation or anything like that but because people often pop into the grocery store for it and "running the gauntlet" results in them picking up more items than their initial goal. Not entirely comparable in capabilities of course.

Sure, which is precisely why my point is that the solution here is transparency, not giving people money. If people are educated about what information they're providing and what it's being used for, then they do have that choice.

Imagine you had a screen like you do when you connect two integrated services that tells you exactly what data is being sent (e.g. if you authorize this mobile game to access your Facebook account, it will be able to access your profile picture, friends list, etc.) before you access a site. If that happens, you know that the site is going to collect your location data, browsing history, etc., and you know that they are going to use it to both serve you ads and will sell it to third parties. From there, you can make a decision as to whether that use of your data is worth access to the site, and the market will eventually decide what value people place on their data.

not only are physical stores tracking you, but i still remember the documentary about the perfume that is spread out across the store to make you buy more.

I absolutely love the idea of imposing a cost for holding personal data. It should be an expensive, carefully weighed decision whether anyone's data is kept for any longer than absolutely necessary.

The only incentive companies generally respond to is financial, that's where we need to impact them to make them think.

(Yes, some companies do try to do right, but they are sadly outnumbered. So far.)

The gap in your reasoning is the assumption that giving them your data is an exact and fair payment in exchange for using their service. We actually have no idea how much data is worth, because these companies have created a culture that simply takes data from you. There is no market. Isn’t that convenient for facebook and google?

For those who are comfortable sharing their data, it is a fair payment by definition. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. Especially because Google has alternatives that you're not forced into.

The issue is that people generally don’t think “I’m using this in exchange for google recording and selling my data”. They mostly think it’s free. My dad mostly thinks it’s free, mostly because he believes in the law and doesn’t think google would be allowed to do nefarious things.

If Google charged for the same services instead of providing it for free, would they make the same amount of billions? I assume everyone would agree that they would make way less. So the exchange in value is asymmetric and it still sort-of makes sense that you get some money for the outsize value that your personal details represents to them.

What's wrong with that, though? That's the essence of a lot of business - I take something with a certain amount of value to you and find a way to make it more valuable to someone else, then I capture the value I added along the way. The guy who sells flour to the baker isn't getting cheated because the baker can sell the flour for more than he pays for it once he puts it into a cake.

Nothing wrong with that, but likewise, what is wrong with trying to make money off of Google making money off of your information? At some-point, if the asymmetry is so large, it does make sense to try and capitalize on that.

I recommend Jaron Lanier's "Who Owns The Future?" [0] on the subject. Trading data for services is not an unreasonable mechanism for value exchange, a priori, and arguably better than nothing at all (the social externalities of "engagement algorithms" notwithstanding).

Rather, I think consumers are getting a poor exchange rate, not least because they have very little agency or transparency into the nature of the transaction. It's all or nothing: cede massive economic power to a small number of centralized corporations and enjoy (admittedly significant) trickle-down utility value; or, live as a quasi-Luddite and eschew these services entirely [1].

It's also worth noting the hidden costs behind the scenes: the massive power of data consolidation, and the accompanying "winner take all" dynamics, creates near-monopoly power in which the centralized networks (Amazon in particular) can dictate terms and prices, usually through the supply side rather than the demand side as was done by trusts and monopolies of old. (This also isn't new to internet services: the centralization of purchasing data through debit/credit cards pioneered the model.)

Lastly, Lanier likes to point out the curse of normalizing the price of "free" for software and services: while consumers obviously prefer it, every consumer is also a producer in one way or another, and so will find when it's their turn to sell some digital service / creative work / non-excludable good, the market is largely intractable to actually paying for things. The "surveillance capitalism" model crowds out other business models in many cases, making a small number of centralized winners the only players with the economy of scale to make money on "free" services.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Owns_the_Future%3F

[1] Even then, one's data is often swept up indirectly through one's social graph. If I avoid using Google services, but send an email to a @gmail.com, the contents of that email are ingested and profited from all the same.

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