Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data | Hacker News Reader

Andrew Yang's Data Dividend Project is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

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369 pointsohjeez277 comments

It doesn't work. There isn't enough money in the data for anyone to care. Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year. The only reason it funds massive industries is cost-effective aggregation by dirt-cheap computer power.

I ran the numbers on Facebook a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402 It comes out that they're making roughly $17/yr in annual revenue per user. Revenue, not profit. Cross checking my numbers against some other sources, it may be now more like $40 or $50/yr. Profits, the thing they could actually afford to share with you, look like maybe $10/year. So, what, Facebook is going to cut me a check for $5 every year? Google sends me another 5-spot, and a few other companies send me a dollar or less? What problem does that solve?

The problem of people not knowing that privacy is valuable.

How does $10/year solve that problem? Seems more like you'll get a lot of people saying "Oh, is that all they're doing to me? Great! I guess there's no problem here!"

I mean, if people found out there was a $1000 or $10,000 vein of value to mine, yeah, people might get upset and demand a more "fair portion", but they're not going to get upset over $10/year.

The problem isn't the amount of money the companies are making on your privacy, the problem is what they are doing to make that money. I'm appalled at the damage to society they're willing to do to make that little money, but you're not going to convince anyone of any problems by focusing on the "little money" part.

Or they don't care.

I like to think they don't know. I fear they don't care.

The sense I get is in general, people worry about the average case, not the worst-case scenario, when it comes to privacy.

... and honestly, that might be the correct risk assessment for the average person. The worst-case scenario only happens to a few people.

What if it's combined with a data privacy law? Instead of accept-this-cookie-to-track-you ... You would need to opt-in to data privacy, or opt-in to data profit-sharing

If the only reason people collect all of that information about me is that it's cheap to do so, would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? That sounds like a win as well.

> would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information?

In all respect, this is a really naive view of the ad tech marketplace.

The only thing that would do what you're saying is legislation. Making it more expensive just pushes out smaller players in the marketplace, leading to consolidation towards the Google's / Facebooks of the world.

a legislation with a flat tax would not be that bad. i guesstimate that close to 70% maybe more of new ads are done online. and google and facebook are disruptive to old players who pay a lot more in taxes. this tax would definitely affect new players to the digital add buisness , but i dont see anyone even trying.

Yes, and getting the tracking/data collection to stop is more valuable than the amounts of money being floated around in this thread.

Money doesn't solve every issue, especially when your adversaries have so much more money (and power) than you.

I'd love to see a 1cent/impression tax, personally. It would consolidate the market, sure, but it would very nearly destroy it, too. The resulting Google and Facebook left behind wouldn't be left with so many resources to be anti-social with. Internalize the externalities.

Only tax the biggest players?

Personally, I have no reason or desire to add that clause, but there is ample precedent for progressive taxation so it's not an impossible idea. If I were given that as a deal-or-no-deal sort of thing, I'd take the deal to get the tax.

Tax applies to all companies with $1B + revenues?

All due respect but "law cannot fix what technology has broken" is quite true. I was going through this fairly balanced view [1] on why you shouldn't sell your data, and the power imbalance strikes me real hard. Once you legalize this circus and put a price on it, this will go exactly as thousands of other businesses go. (Hint: not in customer's favor)

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/sell-your-own-data-bad-...

Users must unionize for their data access, otherwise the price goes to zero

But that the same argument works for imposing regulation on any kind of pollution activity. We can't introduce food safety regulation, it would kill mom and pop operations and only big companies can afford to pay for the inspections and certification!

Somebody will still collect all of that information. They will simply be outside of the jurisdiction of your laws.

The only way to stop others from collecting data on you is to not give it out in the first place. We need our computers, particularly browsers, to stop leaking so much information.

Edit: this is also the downfall of GDPR. An enterprising Chinese company could collect whatever data they want and then simply sell it to someone else who can use it to sell something to Europeans.

What if the point of it all isn't to make the consumer money, but to make companies less indiscriminate about gathering and storing data?

Can't you achieve the same effect at user level by faking some data + messing with tracking via Firefox containers + Ghostery + Cookies AutoDelete?

And how many people are realistically going to go through that effort?

What portion of all users are going to do that? A fraction of a percent?

The point of making the companies change is that most users aren’t computer literate enough to understand the problem, it’s consequences, or the mitigations. The knowledge asymmetry between the average user and the companies collecting and using this data could hardly be more vast, and that creates a situation where companies can effectively prey on less knowledgable users. If the wide majority of users aren’t capable of finding/using the available user-level solutions, the problems will remain rampant.

The latter could be accomplished by shipping a privacy-championing browser that enables those behavior by default (Brave? Apple?).

You're saying the low levels of adoption of such technologies are indicative of users' subpar technical skills, but maybe it's just general apathy and disinterest? E.g., how many public protests and calls to action have we seen after Snowden revelations?

FWIW, the former is already prevalent among younger generations, with Instagram for their "public" life and f-Insta for everything private.

The government setting up an independent, trustworthy program to do this for every single person either unaware or unskilled enough to do this would cost a lot more than $10/person, or whatever this dividend is.

But if the "you" you're referring to here is actually just you, of course you can.

> What problem does that solve?

It makes the data use much less profitable for the companies involved, and therefore far less attractive, discouraging business models that rely on it from the start.

Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users [1]. If they pay each user $5/yr, that is $13 billion/year in extra costs. That might push Facebook to bias towards collecting less data about its users by default.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

You're making their main revenue stream more costly - why wouldn't they instead double down more investment to make it _more_ efficient to get your data so that they recoup those margins?

They might diversify a bit (which they already have, with their hardware plays and all that jazz,) but let's not pretend this is going to be the game changing investment mover we hope it would be.

No. They have already leverged as much as possible to profit as much as possibe.

Yeah this is really a move to make it cheap for any company to buy your data.

Currently data is held by a small number of companies who invest a lot of money protecting it as a business secret.

The goal of the pay-for-data movement is to make it easy for any fly by night operation to have access to the same data without earning your trust.

When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.

Why not ban tracking and ad targeting and selling personal data, and force that business model to go extinct, and now they have to start charging for service and their users become actual customers.

Arguably without the ranking and recommendation, FB is quite boring.

The feed is such an integral part of FB.

I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

Since me and the other 99% of people contribute most of the value to Facebook for you, would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% of people and pay $1700/year?

> When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.

> I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

I will never understand the mind of a typical social media user(s), as I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health as well as leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon.

Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good, what can you say really is worth it that you can't do with text/email? The digital life that was sold to us as an amazing replacement is actually proving to be really sad as COVID has shown and is perhaps one of the reasons I can comprehend why people are out there violating it as its proven to be an incredibly undesirable and lonely experience.

> I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health

Scientific evidence on that is inconclusive and mixed. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-953...

> Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good

Then maybe it's not for you? I like to share things with my friends, see things they share, it's mildly entertaining and somewhat informative. If you don't enjoy those things, then you don't have to participate.

> leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon

In a practical sense, I have never encountered any downsides with supposed data leaking / personalized ads / strangers selling information about me. I have not lost money because of it, or lost friendships, or manipulated to do something I later regret.

But I have lost time and money because of wrong information shared by the credit bureaus, lost friends and messages because of a broken phone, misleading salesmen who convinced me to buy bad products at bad prices, insurance companies that didn't pay up, and landlords who scammed me. So after I finish dealing with and worrying about actual bad actors that harm me in direct ways, maybe I'll start worrying about the ghosts.

> neither would 99% of users.

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> would you be willing to subsidize the other 99%

That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist.

Which is not a problem at all.

It's all well and good to survey people and have them answer "no" to the question "Do you want to be tracked?"

But if Facebook threw up two buttons, one saying I agree to allow targeted ads, and one saying "$17/year" and requires you to give your credit card information, it's naive to think a substantial percentage will hit the $17/year button for a product they've already been using for free.

This is, after all, how the internet got to be where it is. Not through the use of 'walled gardens' and paywalls. But by providing ad supported content.

> That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

On other social media websites that offer "pay to remove ads" versus "get personalized ads", like Reddit or Twitch, about 1% of users pay. Wikipedia asks for donations and very few people donate, percentage-wise. So I think if you want to show a substantially higher number, say even 10%, you'll need to provided evidence. Even if 10% of users paid, would they be willing to be $170/year?

> That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist. Which is not a problem at all.

I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services. Not sure how that's so hard to understand, that this is the business model I prefer.

Same with newspapers. I don't want to pay the full cost of making a newspaper (probably $10 or so), but rather I'd purchase a very cheap subsidized newspaper with ads for $1. Or free apps with in-app purchases. Doesn't mean it's unwanted if people aren't willing to pay the cost price for it.

> On other social media websites

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free

If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

Facebook in its current form also doesn't care about what you want. They care about how they can please their paying customers, with you being one of their many products they can sell.

> If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

The person you're replying to spoke directly to this by saying they want those services not merely for free, but for free with personalized ads. That is, by just saying "for free", you are removing an important part of the context. I suspect they would also sign up for a service that offered a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free with personalized ads, if anybody were offering such a thing.

I'm personally in the boat of preferring to pay for things that are important to me and hope to see more movement over time to subscription business models that work, but it does not make sense to write off people who want the opposite, who prefer to get things for free with personalized ads. The revealed preference in society seems to be that there are a lot more people who feel that way than people who prefer to pay for subscriptions. These people aren't just being duped, everybody knows how free services work because it is a very frequent and well publicized topic of conversation, it's just that they are ok or even happy with it.

I think what happens a lot, because I think it's what I experience personally very often, is that when we find ourselves with a minority opinion that we really think is right, that we conclude the majority with a different opinion from ours is just ignorant or being manipulated. But in reality, they are often just as knowledgeable as we are, but have simply drawn different conclusions. Speaking personally, this is always a bitter pill to swallow.

> I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services.

Exactly! I don't know why it's so hard for people to realize that there are people that 100% ok with the offerings from these companies and would rather not have legislation interfere with such transactions

I think mostly people argue that people who are OK with it don't know any better, don't know how much they're being tracked, etc. I don't think that's true today, everyone knows these companies know everything, even if they're not very tech savvy, and still they don't care as much as privacy advocates wish.

It doesn't have to be either/or. An individual could pay and opt out of data mining.

Anyway, personalized ads is just the tip of the iceberg, the real problem with that data doesn't exist on a small scale. The problem is that mountain of data could be abused, for example to manipulate public opinion, elections, the stock market, etc, and blackmail.

Even if you aren't vulnerable to these things directly, the abuse potential of such data is so high that IMO it's only a matter of time before you're indirectly negatively affected by it.

Opting out would then require trusting an organization who is incentivized to collect data to not collect it. That can't be the solution.

If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

Of course all this would be predicated on trust and a government that would actually use teeth if fraud was committed.

Hah.

> If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

I already don't, but they still build a shadow profile of me with the data my friends and friends of friends leak.

That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.

Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. The motivation for Netflix is to give you just enough quality to keep you paying every month.

For a free service like Facebook you the user have no expectation of quality because you're paying nothing. So Facebook's motivation is not to provide quality but to keep you engaged and clicking. They've discovered that best way to do that is to infuriate you and to radicalize you. This keeps you the user engaged which is what advertisers require, so that's what Facebook delivers.

This is great except that this is not a healthy arrangement for a democracy. To constantly have users given whatever amount of negativity and disinformation is necessary to keep them enraged and glued to their phones. That's what Yang is all about trying to fix.

So paying for Facebook changes the dynamic. Users will now demand quality. Facebook will have to change. If users discover that Facebook only delivers them misery, then they'll stop paying and Facebook loses revenue on both ends. The users collectively will have power to demand improvements. Facebook's algorithm will have to change in response to that new dynamic. Problem solved. (That's the hope.)

>Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix.

Nope. Few people I know have a Netflix subscription. The subscription model doesn't work for news media for example.

I've never used Facebook, but there have been times where I've thought of signing up. If Facebook had cost money then that would've been a non-starter from the get go. The same goes for most other services.

I don't know why, but the value proposition of something that costs money online has to be very large for me to consider it.

The majority would, I guess. Not enough for it to matter.

Many of the features users find useful (let's ignore for the moment whether these are good things) like content recommendations and search result recommendations rely on the same understanding of user interests that allow these companies to target advertisements.

So they need to understand your interests anyway to provide the services that people find useful. So they still need forms of tracking to do the things that people find useful on the sites.

So what do we do?

They could just collect your data and not monetize it. If a paid user can decide whether or not they want those features. Facebook could easily monetize it anyway, but they could also monetize a paid user and day they aren't. Everything we are discussing is hypothetical anyway.

$17 is the global average. If you live in a country like the US, you probably generate way more revenue per year, since you have more spending power (and thus are more valuable to advertise to).

I think the general problem is that those who can afford to pay for Facebook are those who are the most valuable to advertisers. So if you gave users the choice to pay or not, the users who draw the advertising revenue would pay, leaving the users who the advertisers don't really want to advertise to.

For reference it's approximately $143 per year for the US market, per user ($11.92 per month).

~220-230 million monthly active US users, $31.4 billion in sales (projected 2020 figure) for that market.

That's of course not adjusting for hours of use for a given user, data contribution, and so on.

Do you know the numbers for daily active users or weekly active users?

And do those numbers include messenger?

It would be fascinating to see some histograms of users and usage. Especially one that compares ad buyers, page managers, and personal only users.

You wouldn't, because other people wouldn't pay for it. The value proposition of Facebook comes from other people. If there aren't enough other people then you wouldn't want to use it.

The people on HN, especially those who use Facebook regularly, are worth on average _significanty_ more than $17 to the company per year.

It’s hard to remember, the average person makes $X,000 globally and Facebook has a huge % of the planet on their platform.

HN users make in the upper echelon of wages, and are comfortable with their computers and online shopping.

In the current political environment I can easily imagine the flame bath Facebook would take if it paid out proportionally to the value of the user and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. Don't expect Facebook to take this route. If there's going to be any sort of "per user" pay out made by the ad companies, expect it to be a flat fee.

> and this truth was baldly revealed to the public.

It's completely impossible that it wouldn't be revealed to the public, and every possible take on it will be published. All it would take is a few people posting the amounts they received, which is definitely going to happen.

> $17/yr in annual revenue per user

Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation. It is as useful as averaging the global price of a loaf of bread, which would be priced as $2-3 in the US but a few cents in a third world country. This is very applicable to ad revenue because ultimately ads are capturing the pricing levels of real economy, and bulk of the facebook users are not from high GDP nations.

> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year

This is a very simplistic way to think about data. In fact, calling it data itself is misleading. Because it all boils down to how the data is operationalized and made into information and knowledge about you when the business is interacting with you. Same demographic data is worth separately for selling you ads, driving product development to increase usage, price discriminating against you while buying airplane tickets, selling you insurance, influencing your vote etc.

Another way data is not a static, lifeless entity is something people often forget, it is the power of an SQL join. Joining table-a and table-b yields information neither of the tables had alone. So there will always be more a potential of rendering the existing data more valuable (more information yielding) by joining it with a marginal amount of new data.

In sum, data doesn't have a static value, and I don't think we have seen the end of ways it could be utilized against users yet.

> It doesn't work.

To my knowledge, we don't have empirical data that shows it doesn't yet.

"Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation."

It doesn't matter, because there's no way to torture the data until "the amount of money that Facebook can afford to remit to its users for giving them their data" is going to be anything significant. They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users.

If it were, say, $500 dollars a year, and we were arguing about whether we were an order of magnitude low or high, it might matter, because the difference between $50/yr and $5000/year is pretty significant. But you're never going to get so much as "Facebook can pay most users $15/month for their data" let alone anything worth it to anybody.

Also, I've seen people hypothesize about these other values that this data might bring before, but bear in mind I'm operating my analysis based on Facebook overall revenue. There is no hypothetical 10x or 100x amount of value sitting around in the data, which we know, because otherwise Facebook would be collecting some significant amount of the value and it would be showing up in their revenue. The fact I'm basing this sort of analysis on revenue rather than profit is already an ENORMOUS concession to the idea, just staggeringly huge, and even with that concession it's a couple of orders of magnitude away from making sense.

If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me. Show me the company and their revenue. There's Google, and then it falls off a cliff.

Seems like this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should we care what Facebook can and can't afford? We don't owe them a business model. The point of this is to remit to the user the value that has been extracted from them. If Facebook cannot make money, i.e. contribute value, on top of that, then they are actually a drain on society surviving off negative externalities and should go.

Deciding how much a user's data is worth is an exercise for the reader, but I would certainly pay much more to avoid Facebook, than Facebook would pay to have me[0]. That's a red flag.

[0] - as would anyone who has ever added a Facebook domain to a Pi-Hole, the total cost of which likely exceeds Facebook's per-user revenue by your numbers.

How would this work for, say, Google. Say they cut users a check and their business model no longer worked. Would they then charge for searches? Would users have the option to keep free searches in lieu of a payment?

Yes right now it's just assumed your value, your cost, their value, and their cost all balance out. But let's slap some numbers and everything and actually see if it does.

If we have the option to pay up front, or sell off my data and maybe end up in the red or black. It will all be very complex in the end, but that's just exposing the inherent complexity that already exists and is just papered over.

What number would that be though? Any number is going to be made up and subjective based on the individual. I might day my data is worth $1000 a year while it’s worth $1 to you.

If there is a pay option, you could just pay for searches. You set the price threshold by choosing to pay a la carte (or not.)

Google did have a contributor program for a while which replaced ads when you paid them and they in turn paid the websites and services you visited. My guess is the advertisers weren't happy to be cut out of the loop.

Right, so (and not to make Google look like the good guy here) we just need this new law to tip the scales so the advertisers won't be able to convince Google not to do this.

As I say in another comment, I'd be happy to put a punitive taxation level on this entire industry. But if we're going to talk about "paying users for their data", then from the very beginning the framing is being written in terms of what the companies can afford based on what they're making, and the whole conversation is going to be anchored in terms of what the companies make. The discussion won't be about internalizing externalities, it'll be about the users profit-sharing with the companies.

If you want to internal externalities, go for the tax. Probably an easier sell to the politicians.

> Seems like this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should we care what Facebook can and can't afford? We don't owe them a business model. The point of this is to remit to the user the value that has been extracted from them. If Facebook cannot make money, i.e. contribute value, on top of that, then they are actually a drain on society surviving off negative externalities and should go.

How are you going to value what has been extracted from them, though? Facebook is in a better position to value it than anyone: they're selling it. What people are willing to pay them for it is literally its value. I don't really see how you can decide that the value of the data is greater than what Facebook is extracting from it. If it were, they'd be charging that much.

My data is mine; as the seller, I can price the data about me at any value I want, that doesn’t mean that someone will buy it. If Facebook comes along and takes my data for less than I’m selling it, that’s called theft, and it’s a crime.

Of course you can price it however you want. And you do. You are in control of whether and when to give away your data. If you use Facebook, you are trading your data for their services.

Well, except that Facebook will collect data on you even if you're not using their services.

When you're getting something for free, you sell it for cheap

> They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users.

That was my point. In this thought exercise, we ought to separate the amount paid to users by country, because it will differ as much as a few orders of magnitude per country, just as the per user revenue most probably does. That is roughly the scale of GDP per capita per country between 1st world and 3rd world countries, which would be a good proxy for ad markets. I agree with rest of your argument, if per person revenue in the US was $150, would that be enough to make users care? It is unknown.

> If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me

I will concede that I am leveling an argument that entirely hinges on a hypothetical. But I don't think it is fantastical. The core of the problem is information asymmetry. These companies have huge amounts of high resolution data on us, but we don't have anything about the breakdown and how they operationalize that data. The argument that "if there was more ways to milk money out of it, we would have seen that in revenue" has several drawbacks in my opinion for several reasons.

a) The data doesn't have to be used in ways that translate to quarterly revenue but still great value to the company; this includes back channel uses (elections, famously brexit, that was won by data, and it is hard to put a revenue tag to its effects), it also includes expenditures such as acquisitions of competitors (famously instagram and whatsapp, I don't doubt for a second facebook made use of their data to assess the viability of these acquisitions), or temporarily unused data for game theoretic reasons ("I don't want to expose the fact that I can utilize racial data, health data, covert speech recognition data on my users as long as I can, but if market conditions/lobbying efforts are fruitful, I will translate that to revenue").

b) Even directly revenue increasing uses of data is subject to R&D and mining day in day out. So new combinations of existing data can be figured out, or new products might potentiate existing data to be more valuable without preceding revenue footprints. Think about self driving cars; how traffic operated has been public data, individual sensor technologies aren't that novel, but self-driving car is joining all this together in the hope of converting that data into revenue. When it does, it will be a phase shift that tremendously increases the value of that data, and we will have not been wiser to it if we only watched the revenue. I'm not suggesting FB is necessarily after such an exponential tech, but it is to keep in mind the potentiality stored with data is not readily observable, so “show me it can translate into revenue” criteria can be failed for a long while despite the fact that it eventually can.

I haven't done any maths or research on that, but did you take global numbers or boil down to market. I assume users in "Western" countries bring more than other parts of the world. Or is my assumption wrong?

Wont that 100 dollars of data be worth exponentially more if companies had to pay us for collecting it?

For how much data? I would be willing to post some nonsense every month for a return of $1.50 a month. I bet I could automate that across several platforms or even turn it into a business representing various online personas.

So if the goal is to discourage wide-scale collection of data without making it illegal, or at least to ensure that we benefit collectively from it, there's a much more obvious model, which is taxation. It's much easier to administer, and you end up with real money to do something with, instead of buying everyone a drink. Tax any company collecting, storing and analyzing user data some small amount, say, $1 or $0.1 or $5 per year per user-month of data stored, and use the tax revenues for ... something.

So what would that something be? Is there any obvious way to spend the revenues to further discourage tracking users and storing user data? Or would it be best to just plow it into the education budget or general fund?

Andrew Yang and co. would likely suggest a universal basic income ;)

Isn't that basically the same thing as just having data collecting companies pay users directly?

Yeah, it would end up being the same paltry payment.

I think the correct use did eventually occur to me: turn it into funding for open source software, that is both free as in freedom and free as in beer.

Simple solution, people bargain collectively and have a sort of data ombudsman representing their interest rather than trying to get a 10$ check individually.

If people were to negotiate the value of their data collectivelly you can have a 100k or a million people in some organisation that has stewardship over their data and negotiates say, a price with facebook, and that institution either manages the money and invests it or pays it back out.

The reason people are so disempowered today in the face of these huge companies is because everyone is operating under this atomistic, individualist, consumer mindset. People can effectively negotiate when they team up.

Very good chance most of the money is made from very few people. If you got a cut of money from advertisers targeting you, my guess is it’s be quite a bit over 5 bucks. Especially in an election year.

Yeah $5 is the cost of a couple clicks or scrolling past 200-300 ads.

On Google that's maybe one click, probably half a click.

That's the point. It prevents oligopolies forming (as we have now), short of them producing enough value per user to cut them a sizeable payment.

All the problems of big tech disappear when they're held accountable for their actions. The easiest way to hold them accountable is to reduce their clout.

That form of "accountability" sounds like a euphemism "not doing exactly what I want". The vagueness is downright concerning.

Not to mention the logic doesn't follow. Today nearly everyonr would agree that it would be a terrible idea to openly sell representation in congress or the ability levy and collect arbitrary taxes to the highest bidder because the incentived essentially only make sense for those who can make a large enough profit in short term to justify the expense. The best thing you could say about the policy is that if it is cheaper than an invasion adversaries might decide to buy you out instead of declaring war.

> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year.

That is a considerable amount for many.

I would gladly pay $17 a year for a non-ad driven version of Facebook.

If this were the limit of the value per user, they would have offered a subscription service long ago. Something is missing from your model.

It’s likely that averages are very misleading for this kind of thing. People who are willing/able to pay FB not to see ads probably tend to have a lot more disposable income, and therefore are worth more to advertisers—potentially many times more than the average.

There should be roughly as much variation in FB users’ value to FB as there is variation in disposable income across their whole userbase.

You don’t have to guess these numbers, Facebook publishes them in their quarterly and annual reports. IIRC, users in North America generate around $85 a year. Other geos are now where close, with Europe a distant second.

I don’t think this is the problem it is trying to solve but interestingly this could be really beneficial to some very poor countries were the dollar is extremely strong.

It depends on how the money gets allotted. The people to whom $5 is most useful are also the people that most advertisers are not interested in targeting in the first place. So if people are compensated according to their value as advertising targets, this seems like it'll be a rich-get-very- slightly-richer program.

You say this like people won't get paychecks from many different companies and that checks will be extremely difficult to get.

This whole thing is essentially credit card points. These credit card companies pay you for the purchase data in the form on points. And the detail from those purchases is nothing compared to what FB and others would have.

>Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year.

Then give it to me if no one cares. I don't want my personal information bought and sold.

Maybe it should be some kind of lottery instead?

Everyone who logs on gets a ticket. It follows some type of grading scale. Bigger revenue generators earns more tickets. Only individuals are allowed to win, no businesses.

Maybe Facebook’s goal can be to give away $1 Billion dollars a year, divided into $1 Million jackpots. Thus, 1,000 people a year can win it. Over 10 years, and you possibly have 10,000 winners.

And maybe you have to meet a certain income or wealth criteria to win the jackpot? Otherwise, you only win a smaller jackpot. You don’t really want all the big influencers and wealthy to take all the money.

$5/year is irrelevant. But $1 Million, this might be more interesting. And force the IRS to tax-exempt the winnings. The goal is to transfer wealth to the less-privileged, to help rectify the inequality of the capitalistic system.

They should pay it out in stock

That is missing the whole point. I would even pay for them stopping it. Getting money is certainly a misunderstanding of the issue and goal. It also underscores who is the owner of the data. Remember all the copyright claims by platforms on their user content? It is not because of 5$ a year.

It would also disincentive them collecting info on me.

They should just tax data / ads. FB can send one big check to government.

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.

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 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Aren't companies already paying indirectly by providing free service? I am no fan of Facebook but I am using the service free of cost and in return company collects data for targeted advertising.

Shouldn't this be more targeted at cable companies which collect a monthly fee and again sell your data? And may be forcing Big Tech to provide a paid alternative which doesn't use data collected?

Facebook is also making money off of you by showing you ads. It's a question of how much is enough. Facebook is charging nothing, sure, but what if the value they take from us (our data, our ad attention+clicks) is more valuable than the value they give us (a free social media)?

Well if what they gave us was more valuable than what they took, they wouldn’t be a very profitable company, would it?

The value of what they provide isn't necessarily it's cost.

That's the whole reason we trade. The value of a good is different to different people. If a book is worth £5 to me, and £1 to you, then if I give you £2.50 for the book we've both gained more than we've lost.

No the value is decided at the moment of transaction, so that's how companies can accumulate value over transactions that are deemed "fair" by both parties. You can decide go give someone $10 for bunch of apple, and the seller can accumulate value from this.

The problem here is that one side of the trade does not fully know the value they provide. When you give $10 for an apple, you know exactly what you give and what you get. When you give $0+"your data"+"your ad view/clicks" for "free Facebook service" it's really really unclear what it is you're giving to Facebook and what it is Facebook is giving you.

Is anyone really going to weep for Zuck if he drops down to merely a millionaire instead of a billionaire? I certainly won't...

Maybe the world is starting to believe that "it was profitable" is not always a defensible position? Perhaps an age of consumption is passing towards an age of ethics. Time will show.

my friend got a kidney transplant because they found a donor off facebook. Random stranger saw his plea and decided to help. Put a value on that

It's already bad enough that the surveillance economy is threatening our civil liberties in more ways than one. It's outright dystopian when you need to organize a social media campaign to get medical treatment. Considering the sheer number of people who desperately need medical help, the chances of succeeding is very very low.

>It's outright dystopian when you need to organize a social media campaign to get medical treatment.

The above comment wasn't an example of that, though. His friend was getting medical treatment, the issue is that you can't just buy a kidney (at least not in the US), you need to find a donor.

> The above comment wasn't an example of that

That isn't just an outright baseless claim, it's wrong by definition. The said person had to go to social media to find a donor, which 100% matches what I descibed, and the fact that some felt this was necessary points to a broken system. It's also terrible to imagine what shady companies can do with targeted ads aimed at vulnerable people who can't find any donors.

You want government enforced kidney donations?

No we want a system in which pleading to a faceless mob of people on social media is not the solution to needing a kidney transplant.

I mean, we can't make kidneys in a lab, so you probably have to ask someone for theirs if you need one. FB is useful for connecting with people, so naturally people would ask there.

What solutions did you have in mind?

Perhaps better government assistance in finding donors would be nice? It shouldn't have to involve people going directly to social media so they can tell the whole world about their medical condition.

Of course not, and that's not my point. The point is that social media is the last place you'd want to go looking for donors, given a choice.

If I needed a kidney and couldn't find a donor through personal connections, I would hope a company with something to offer would ad-target me.

I'm sure your doctor would've told you if there really were other options on the table.

exactly, even in a situation where medical is all paid for you still have to find a donor yourself. There are countries where you can get a donor via "alternative" means but when going by the book, finding a donor is on you.

I cant think of any other way he could have gotten exposure without having to go on tv, radio, public areas and making his case. That power of facebook ( and other social media is undeniable )

Even Wajahat Ali on CNN, who has such a big audience, found a donor off Twitter. Not everyone has the ability to reach out to Anderson Cooper and ask for help.

For every evil thing Facebook has done, there are stories like this. Having my friend alive, his family seeing him everyday is well worth it.

The fact that you need public exposure to find a donor is the problem, not the solution. Going to social media doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to find a donor. Worse, you could be targeted by online scammers and trolls, which is the last thing you want in a difficult situation.

If there is a nationwide push to disincentive all rent-seeking then I'd be all for it. Google selling customer behavior data seems like it's far less deleterious to society than running your business with a goal of generating short-term investor value.

That’s called profitability.

That's the definition of a profitable business.

Really asking for exact equal value to an exchange is in itself isn't just /a/ fallacy but an entire stack of them. It implicitly assumes a universal equal value when the utility and demand differ greatly based upon circumstances including marginal utility. One pair of boots is worth more to someone without them than someone who has eight comparable ones. Even if such exact trades could be found there is no incentive to provide them without it functioning as a loss leader of some sort.

I think the basic premise is that the status quo of transactions (free service for user data) has resulted in an imbalance of power for tech companies, and that by increasing the cost of acquisition, users have a means to collectively negotiate better "market rates" from the tech companies for services rendered. It can be regarded as similar to "unionizing" the users.

It would be interesting to get some preliminary guidance on what tech companies would do in response (start charging for premium services? only give premium services to the most valuable users?)

Andrew Yang has also mentioned in prior podcasts on UBI (Freakanomics, etc.) that probably the best way to fund such a program would be proceeds from increased taxation on tech companies.

I for one would love to see cable companies turned into public utilities. But that goal is not mutually exclusive from the goal to give the consumer some more power over the big tech conglomerates.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, opinions my own.

Regarding the "market rates", you're right, it does sound like unionizing. I suppose it shouldn't be as much of an issue if there was more competition so that companies would need to offer "better free services" in exchange for data. With network effects, that's hard to achieve, though.

Something where a switch is easier and doesn't cut you off from the old platform would be nice, similar to how domains or phone numbers work: you own your profile and all the data, but you can switch platforms at any time without losing contacts or abilities, keeping the competition between platform-providers alive. I have no idea how that would work out though. Does FB have actually any value besides the fact that everybody you know is there? If you were able to connect with them while they're on FB and you're not, would a lot of people decide to stay in FB because it's such a great platform?

> only give premium services to the most valuable users?

Almost certainly. What people often miss in this discussion is that advertising is progressive--it's a transfer of value from richer people who can and will pay for both the service being used and the product that is being advertised to poorer people who cannot.

By convincing them to buy shit they don't need. Very progressive.

You can have a condescending attitude about it if you want, but the reality is advertising-backed business models make services available to people who would not otherwise be able to afford them.

The ramifications of creating barriers to advertising is ultimately taking these services away from the poor.

Within that statement is an ideological assumption that the only way to provide services to people is through a for profit venture. We worship market based solutions except we have things like taxes to build public infrastructure without a profit motive.

I'm not making an ideological assumptions there. I'm just referring to the status quo. The proposals I've seen are along the lines of "let's ban or add obstacles to advertising-based models", not "let's build a publicly funded Google search". I'm not saying the latter is an impossibility, but it's a much larger undertaking, and if you do the former without the latter, the effect will be as I said above--the poor lose access.

>Aren't companies already paying indirectly by providing free service?

I think it's more about changing the frame. That Tech companies have been profiting off something you actually have always intrinsically owned, your personal data, and now is the time to retake that ownership.

I think it's more complicated than that. It's not clear that users do intrinsically own this data. Without the product and the graph attached to the product, this data won't exist.

Is it fair to say that it’s user-generated or user-specific data? Without the user, the data either wouldn’t exist, or wouldn’t be worth much, as in the case of shadow profiles.

It gets hairy quickly. Do you own your DNA sequence? You could say it's essentially just data. Would you be opposed to a company patenting your DNA and profiting off it?

But there's a lot of cases where there's data about someone that is not owned by them. e.g. If I go into a store and am recorded on the CCTV, the store still owns that video, even if it is about me. This could be pretty similar to the way that if someone uses Facebook and clicks on something, Facebook would own the log which recorded this.

In other cases the data that users upload to websites is definitely owned by them. e.g. If I take a picture on my phone, and then later upload it to Facebook, the photo is still owned by me. However, for any site that allows users to upload photos, it will be part of the terms of service that the users give the site a license to display the photo.

I agree with that but we're talking about things that are really measurements of your mind right? What kind of articles do you read, what kind of posts do you like, products you like to buy etc. The Tech giants use rough simulacra of your mind to try and target you as efficiently as possible with ads. This seems like some kind of Black Mirror episode to me.

It’s not cost-free, it’s transaction-free.

I think this is a great idea but measures would have to be taken to prevent Hollywood accounting from erasing payouts to consumers.

Establishing a value for each data point gathered and an ongoing payout from derived data (e.g. training a machine learning model using your search habits should not mean you get nothing if the original data isn't kept) is crucial.

Also, keeping track of all of those payouts would also be a huge burden for even Google, I can't imagine for a small startup. This also needs to be considered so that it doesn't stifle innovation.

Some napkin math: assuming 1 billion MAU for Google Search and around $30B in revenue for Q1 2020, that's $30 in revenue per MAU per quarter or around $120/year. This would be before costs of course and represents the ceiling of what they would be able to pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/alphabet-googl-earnings-q1-2...

https://techjury.net/blog/google-search-statistics/

I know it might sound like a minor ding, but the signup form doesn't allow apostrophes or accents in the name fields. Many people (myself included) have these in their legal names. I know this is US focused, but for an org that's all about data, this feels like a big oversight.

For starters, _most_ data-hoarding websites allow these characters these days, so it's just one more obstacle when trying to match and verify "my" data. I guess let's hope I signed up to every website with the same e-mail address?

On a similar note, it also rejected my 5-digit valid zip code as "invalid", so I'm unable to sign up at all.

He tweeted about this as an idea a few days ago. It’s possible this was thrown together in a few days by a junior dev. While I’m all for data privacy, there’s much bigger issues I’m personally focused on, like the fact. Breonna Taylor’s murderers are not in jail. Andrew Yang tweeted that his solution would be to make cops wear pink. This guy is a joke.

Yang jokes around a bunch (and swears a lot in speeches too) but if you listen to his long form interviews he does go into a tremendous amount of depth, more-so than many other politicians do.

Andrew Yang talks racism in America with Bakari Sellers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfiMfPo0u6U

But what can we DO? Six ideas for police reform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gd4nx-dk0

This is another reason why I can't understand anyone who works in software of what is generally thought of as "technology" likes Yang. He does not understand. He likes to talk about "MATH". And while the numbers he uses may work out, I wonder how he acquires those numbers in the first place.

Also, it often seems like he needs "ENGLISH" more than "MATH". Because "technology" is a meaningless word. A carburetor is technology. A ramp is technology. Just about everything is technology in some fashion.

So. We already tax technology, if indirectly, through taxing goods and services.

Then there's the railing against the large targeted-advertising companies (I guess that's what they have most in common). There's technically been a trade already. Our data for their services.

And then there's the fact that he's now doing the thing he's complaining about: data harvesting.

And to top all of that off, the issues you just mentioned. This guy can't even harvest data effectively or efficiently. Or identify people who can. And I'm supposed to trust him to create legislation affecting those companies? Or identify people who can? He has just blatantly demonstrated he does not have those skills.

> Then there's the railing against the large targeted-advertising companies (I guess that's what they have most in common). There's technically been a trade already. Our data for their services.

So for whatever service they offer, we give them data. And extra secondary income from every third party they pass that same data along to. And the risk of first party data breaches. And the risk of data breaches from any other party that gets access. And likely that same data getting scraped by aggregators just from being used.

The deal is by no means equal, and we the customer pay dearly.

I'm quite happy with the idea of making it expensive to retain any data that's not required by law or explicit operational need.

Yang himself is not really a tech guy (he's an econ grad who became a lawyer, then ran companies and non-profits).

But looking at his book and platform, one can't help but notice that it heavily incorporates ideas that are popular in tech circles (UBI, automation, etc). Then on top of that he spends time talking about non-mainstream topics like Ranked Choice Voting, blockchain, etc. Who else talks about these things on the debate stage?

At least you can access the page. For a data-org that's red flags all over; how can you trust an organisation that can't even be trusted with data?

This sounds like an enforcement nightmare. It’s a nice idea, but how would it actually work?

So we would get some sort of commission from Instagram for every ad we view. And the government will need to track this for every Californian, then divvy up a couple dollars per person each year.

I know there are some Yang fans on HN and I don’t want to get too political here but his ideas are too oversimplified, from the $1k UBI thing to this they feel like the left’s version of “build a wall”. They’re simple ideas that are great for social media attention but ultimately oversimplify an inherently complex problem.

Again, I’m not trying to make a political argument either way here, just pointing out how social media seems to incentivize our leaders to oversimplify policy ideas.

> This sounds like an enforcement nightmare. It’s a nice idea, but how would it actually work?

The same way anything works. The largest players write the regulations, stand up a new regulatory body, require anyone that can be remotely considered a data collector or warehouse or whatever term they come up with to 'pre-certify' their operation at a 6 or 7 figure sum to crowd out any upstart players.

I know this is well–meaning but I think it's ultimately misguided. The root issue isn't that people aren't getting paid for their data — it's that their data is commodified in the first place.

There is an easy solution to these problems, just flood the social networks with more and more garbage until they become unusable we're making strides to that anyway

Forcing payment for the data will make some of these business model not work, and I'm all for that. It's not about users receiving a few dollars, it's companies having to pay all them.

Facebook is giving me much more real value than they could ever make from me in dollars.

hah love the sarcasm.

If it didn't provide value, no one would be using it.

I'd like to introduce you to an entire field of endeavor called "marketing". Non-industrial diamonds don't provide value, yet people are regularly buying them for ridiculous sums[1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...

Diamonds do provide value in non-industrial settings, most commonly as an indicator of a person's appreciation for another person. They are in the same value class as cut flowers, although of course at a different price point.

Right, that's why I use heroin.

Lots of people consider feeling good to be valuable. Risk to health is part of the cost that people are willing to pay. Same for alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, skydiving.

This makes no sense. How much you value something is what you would be willing to pay. And they are making money from you in dollars. You just have no idea how much.

You don't pay for everything in dollars. You pay for things with opportunity cost, time, energy, mental effort, etc. in addition to your local currency.

There are too many perverse incentives here. You end up with the most vulnerable people further their vulnerability.

What we really need is a data tax. The more data you collect, the more taxes you need to pay. You can even index it against company income and have a lower data tax bracket for small start-ups and a higher data tax bracket for large orgs.

User data needs to be treated as a liability, not an asset.

I think this is the right framing. Treat user data like pollution. If you leak it or accidentally share with others, put a big enough fine. Have strict rules around safe procedures and handling of the data, and sanction companies for violating them. Make the cost of keeping data high enough that they would stop frivolous collections.

This is a mistaken approach. The problem with data harvesting is the threat to future human freedom, not an injustice about paying people fairly

Economic inequality and freedom are closely linked

Having a few extra dollars a month doesn’t prevent the government from punishing you for doing something they don’t like. For example, Hong Kong is relatively wealthy compared to the rest of China, but participating a protest in Hong Kong can still lead to jail time (or far worse now). Paying them a few dollars for their data does nothing for them but potentially let them take one extra day off work per year to protest, although with the censorship and monitoring that China does, is that safe?

> The project’s signup form asks for people to put in all of the email addresses they use online to help identify how many platforms are currently profiting off of an individual’s data. It also asks for users to provide their PayPal information so any money that could eventually be gained from platforms could be deposited directly into a user’s account.

This seems like a wild thing to be asking for at this stage in the project.

Hey HN, I wanted to share this very related, but completely unaffiliated and independent initiative I’ve been a part of: https://datadividends.org . To quote the website, we’re “an ad-hoc team of scholars and practitioners (without any political affiliation) that formed to answer the questions: What are data dividends? Why should we have them? How should they work? “

Very coincidentally, we just presented on the topic of data dividends at the RadicalxChange conference two days ago (https://www.radicalxchange.org/2020-conference/, VODs still processing) and launched a website with a summary of our report yesterday. Was very surprised (and excited) to see this very similarly named project launch today!

While we’re very much interested in tackling the same core problem, I think the group agrees with many of the concerns raised in this thread (paychecks will be small, administrative challenges, etc.). We’re also very concerned about the potential for “privacy as a luxury good” and the fact that a data dividend could exacerbate existing inequalities.

Our main philosophical difference is that we argue that this discussion should be framed around the idea that the data fueling profitable intelligent technologies is “our data”, not “my data”. As such, our ideas for “disbursing the dividend” are focused on promoting collective benefit, e.g. through programs well-known to reduce inequality, support for "data unions", and new infrastructure to support the sharing of data (and ideally, increase innovation, competition, etc.).

Overall, I think increased discussion around this topic is really great!

No, not all users andrew. Pay the users that create content that gets popular, not people just for existing. Creating a data trail is not valuable IP.

I m actually surprised at the amount of content that people give away to these platforms, even here.

A major reason is that there is no legal mechanism for users to directly pay other users. Things like brave attention token are steps in the right direction

In terms of assessing the value of one individual's data, shouldn't there be some consideration for the fact that it's worth nothing to that person on their own? I can't sell my data on the free market. It's a transaction over an object that has value in only one direction.

Is that really true? There are "customer research" apps that will offer you small, but non-trivial amounts of money for basically selling your personal information.

It's partially true. You can't sell most of your personal information. E.g., when your name, face, and weight end up in somebody's dataset it'll be because of the "free" social fitness app you used rather than because you were able to directly connect with anyone who cared about that data and work out a reasonable price.

So you're saying a marketplace hasn't been built yet. That's like saying your car had no value until Uber was built (only taxis have value), or short term rental homes had no value until Airbnb was built (only hotels have value).

Your data today has value. It's how you get access to Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, for the monetary cost of $0.00. That is value, and yes, you can't cash that out to $ _yet_. That's because a marketplace hasn't been built yet, but maybe legislation could create such a market and give consumers a fair shake.

Kind of. I think we're talking past each other.

The ancestor comment said they "can't sell [their] data on the free market," and we contested that statement and each other a bit.

Bringing up that a marketplace hasn't been built yet and that the data still has value is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation I thought we were having. FWIW, I agree with you -- a marketplace hasn't been built (not that I'm sure it should be), and our data definitely has value.

Fair. Although it's also non-rival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

That depends on how much you value the free market as a means to an end versus an end in itself. Machine learning meta-models aren't very valuable by themselves, and raw personal data isn't valuable by itself, but their union creates a huge surplus of value. If you value the free market then any allocation of that surplus that happens in practice is a good allocation. If you don't, then it makes sense to look at properties you would like such an allocation to have and try to find a way to distribute the profits to meet your criteria.

As an example, the Shapley value in simpler, similar scenarios would allocate half the profits to whomever trained the model and distribute the other half equally among those individuals whose data was used (or equivalently, it would treat every interaction between the model-maker and a data-provider as splitting the profits 50/50). Actually calculating the Shapley value for something as nonlinear as the hypothetical profits from a trained model on various data subsets seems...problematic...but splitting some percentage of the profits equally among the participants won't be too far off the mark.

No. The price of a good is set by the demand. The suppliers of most goods don't have much use for their goods themselves.

The project site was also posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23599774), but we merged those comments hither because people were complaining that they couldn't view that page.

This seems to be an area full of quandries.

If data is your property, then you can sell it to someone else permanently without royalty. Expect to see signup forms that say your first month of SaaS app is $0.01 and you will receive a credit for $0.01 for selling your data to them.

If data is Intellectual Property subject to royalty like other intellectual property (say, stock photos for example) then you can assign away the royalties and we can expect it to be assigned away in the signup form or EULA.

If data is a form of labor it will be subject to minimum wage laws and other employment law.

If data is intrinsic to the individual it cannot be sold or reassigned (like i cannot sell or reassign my other human rights).

A divident, while logically possible, may be practically quite difficult to implement and regulate effectively. Not that we shouldn't try to do it, it'll just be hard.

I think there's a simpler way to solve this. This is just an exchange, you're getting a product, and you're giving away to them and all subsequent third parties all the rights to your data in exchange. That's your payment.

The problem here is that this is your only form of payment by default for that tier of product and that sucks.

In my opinion it should illegal to do that by default without first giving the customer the option to pay in money in exchange that exact same product.

And if I'm paying I don't want you sharing my personally identifiable information shared with no analytics, no tracking, no third-party consulting and if you can't pass a security audit or can't figure out how to anonymize/encrypt my information properly, I don't want you accessing it in clear form at all outside your company promises including from your remote employees. I think that's fair.

If you're startup and can't afford to pay for a credible audit, then you shouldn't be allowed to even know my first name. You'll have to use a secure and audited intermediary to provide you that in anonymized form and you figure out how to handle on your own.

I’d be much more comfortable if I could pay Big Tech to not share my data.

Me too, in exchange for a product I don't want to be confined to a form of payment which only allows one to give away rights to their data in exchange for the product.

I'd like the legal right to always be shown the option to pay money instead.

What is interesting is that in essence, our data is the payment that we make to use facebook, instagram etc.... So if companies are now taxed on data or required to pay people for the right to use their data this would seriously alter incentives which would also change the content that we, the users, have access to. These companies will not have the incentive to provide the same quality content and product as their profits have been slashed. Data is also used not to just send targeted ads but to conduct beta testing and software updates. Without access to free data, Facebook would start charging people for having an account and I'm sure many would rather not do that. This basically got me to thinking about how consumers can get a greater hold of their data without dismantling the relationship between these consumers and online platforms.

I don't want to get paid for letting big tech use my data. I want big tech to not use my data in the first place.

I wish Facebook didn't exist. The sad truth is that if I delete my Facebook there are a couple hundred people I would never hear from again. Countless community events I would never be invited to because Facebook is all anyone uses to get the word out around here.

"We are asking you to sign a written authorization giving DDP the authority to act as your authorized agent to exercise your legal rights under the CCPA."

OK, so first question - what is this DDP entity?

A "movement" doesn't tell me who or what entity I am assigning agency to, endorsing, giving money to, etc.

The article omits this key piece of information and nor does the website disclose on a cursory glance! Is it a gov org? nonprofit, for profit, coop, other? And equally important: who legally runs/owns it? Am I missing the obvious here?!

Without a clear and upfront answer to the basics here, I would not recommend anyone blindly engage with / opt into anything like this regardless of whose brainchild it is.

Why would you pay for something people are giving you for free? If people are volunteering that information, I think it’s fine to use it to finance the free product they’re getting. I’m totally free to not use Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

I would like you to explain to me how you could avoid using Google given that Google Analytics is present in some 70% of the top 10,000 websites and reCaptcha also has huge penetration.

Browse in incognito mode. It shouldn't give GA any tractable info. That's the easiest way without installing a browser plugin, but if you do a 2 second plugin search, you'll find many that block Google and the 1000's of other companies that are tracking you that you don't know about

This is completely a technical problem that can be solved in software

Simple use a DNS that blocks them. It will break many things but nobody said it was free.

> If people are volunteering that information

Given the articles and comments I've read in the past year, I don't think a lot of people are exactly thrilled with the exchange.

Outside of HN I think there's some feeling of unfairness to see so much money being made off "our data", for better or worse. It's complicated because the data isn't worth much until it's processed and analyzed, and that's where much of the value-add is. But nonetheless unfairness is a very strong emotion.

> It's complicated because the data isn't worth much until it's processed and analyzed, and that's where much of the value-add is

It isn't worth much, per user, even after it's processed and analyzed.

True, I looked it up and per quarter it was maybe $30 in the US per quarter per big ad-tech company. A digital VAT would be easier to reason about IMO, but this idea of handing money directly to people has some populist appeal I suspect.

Personally I much rather preferred his original plan to fund a UBI with consumption taxes, but I suppose the primary voters weren't bought into that plan.

It is certainly an emotion alright and not a rational one.

A lot of it is - expecting a pony with their can of coke while not considering such arrangements now mean thousands of dollars per can and a massive reserve of ponies outside every vendor.

The information provided in this article is sparse; Yang discusses the vision of where this project was probably inspired by in his "Yang Speaks" podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmNCVHcZp5s episode w/ Jaron Lanier (re: data unions, brokers, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-WuwG_fYJ4 pre-launch episode

Make sure to check out the FAQ and Privacy Policy of the project to get a better grasp of what legal framework and actions they are taking.

In a weird way, this would be a regressive policy -- the data of the richest people is worth orders of magnitude more, so this would just make the rich, well, richer. Increasing corporate tax rates would help the poor much more.

This sounds wrong. The value of data is in the massive amount of datapoints. If I had a data company I would always pick the large masses and discard the outliers if given the choice.

If you want to target ads, which is where the majority of the money in 'data' comes from, personal data about rich people that helps target ads to them is a lot more valuable than personal data about poor people.

Really depends how you measure the value of data. Rich people being served ads is more valuable, but the targeting algorithms probably churn on all the data at large. I imagine given Yang's history he'd argue for the latter and cut a flat fee to everyone like they do in Alaska for oil.

The online "user data" business model is identical to the highway, or the magazine, or the mall, or the airport business model. You create traffic by providing access at or below cost, and make money by selling ads to all the traffic you create. Should highways, airports or magazines pay users money from the revenue they generate by selling ads around their high traffic properties? Another consideration is about the proportion of an ad's cost that can be attributable to the data these companies have, which depends on the degree to which the ad is targeted or not. For example, are keyword-tied search ads and the money Google makes from them related at all to any data they may have on you?

Furthermore, any attempt to account for the "price" of used data (basically just something to id you online) should be matched by a valuation of the true value this companies offer in compensation. In the case of google: what's the value to users from having fast, accurate search; petabytes upon petabytes of free content (from the mundane to the educational) on youtube ($5 - $9/mo if you go by Disney+/Netflix prices); and entire office suite ($5 - $12/mo looking at many SaaS/Office 365) kept up to date; a quality email client ($99/yr for Hey); a free OS for your phone and computer (Android/Chromebooks); a high quality global mapping service w/ turn-by-turn GPS ($300 devices back in the day?); a Calendar ($3 - $9/mo looking at competitors), 15GB of cloud storage; unlimited storage for all your photos in the cloud (say the average user has 50Gb of photos, thats $3 - $9/mo).... and I could go on. In the case of Facebook I believe there is genuine value in having a directory of all your friends/acquaintances/family, and a repository for memories either there or on instagram.

I see the techlash and policies like this data-dividend as a very natural impulse from society to get a spoonfull from the honeypot these companies created. Just because it is natural doesn't mean it is right. Our economic model is premised on the idea that the fruits of your labor/property/ideas are yours to keep, however spectacular they may be. Keep in mind that this policy does nothing to change the way this companies operate, or question their overall effects on society.

The analogy between online ads and highway is very weak.

#1 highway is essential, they provide transport. Online ads on the other hand, is not. In the sense that most ads are for arousing consumerism impulse. (No I am not arguing ads is wrong or something, I was saying if they are not as essential ad highway)

#2 highway is physical and does not infringe privacy. Online ads are virtual, and blindly intrusive to privacy.

#3 highway is regulated as infrastructure, internet ads companies are not. And they are ferociously resisting being treated as infrastructure.

... Anyone else having issues verifying their phone? I've never had such a buggy experience verifying my phone.

It seems like after you complete the application, the green submit button, as well as the text fields in the following sequences, are buggy -- single click doesn't seem to pick up the action, double click seems to upset it, tab into the button to press Enter doesn't work. This is all via Chrome.

I foresee tech companies creating paid and non-paid versions of their products. If you don't want your data monetized, please pay $50/month for Google Search, GMail, Maps, and YouTube. If you are okay with the value exchange of ads and free services, then you are opting into a mutually agreed upon arrangement with no compensation.

This would create a weird paradox:

Advertisers want people with disposable income.

People without much disposable income get really targeted ads (they won’t pay for the privacy).

People with disposable income pay for the privacy service and don’t get ads or get poorly targeted ads.

It then becomes more like traditional ads that get broadcast to everyone.

So the policy shoots itself in the foot.

I think you overestimate how much people with disposable income value internet privacy.

I'm sure Google has good numbers on this from YouTube premium.

Yeah. It s like advertising to poor countries because CPMs are lower there

Podcasts already have premium versions without ads.

Video streaming (and music streaming though not as much anymore) also have premium versions without ads.

I think people are willing to pay for an "ad-free" experience on some services and still see ads elsewhere.

I'm not sure that can work with so many of those services being built on a social graph.

You may not want your data monetized, but if you are in the contacts list of somebody else who has opted in, your half of any conversation isn't going to be excluded.

This business strategy has been known to fail time and time again. Once a product is launched with the "Freemium" model, it is very difficult to switch to a subscription model without losing the majority of the customer base.

This article argues that freemium is a marketing tool, not a business model:

https://medium.com/m8-ventures/why-freemium-doesnt-work-so-w...

The M&Ms example is delightfully succinct in explaining why the transition never works.

I cant imagine this type of model existing without a large number of companies continuing to monetize that data regardless of if they charge the user or not. Unless data privacy laws get much better why wouldn't they? Just say sorry when caught and keep on doing it.

This shows why it wouldn't work. What someone may expect to pay is something like $50/month.

In the US, the Fed did a study to figure out how much they would have to pay users to stop using products like Facebook, YouTube, or to stop using search engines altogether.

The median value for Facebook was $48/month, YouTube $1,173/month, and search $17,530/month. [1]

I think many people might pay $50/month to use Google Search, GMail, Maps, and YouTube. But what if they were to pay $18,703/month, just for Google Search and YouTube? Because that's the median price that US users valued these at.

This shows that the advertising model is way better than paid subscriptions, because users are getting much more value out of them (>$18,000/month) than they would realistically pay for them. If all these services were subscription-based and there was no advertising or data collection, almost nobody would pay for them and then the business model wouldn't be scalable so the service wouldn't work. TLDR: The advertising business model is awesome!!

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/fed-tries-to-figure-out-valu...

Yeh, this seems backwards, the users pay the companies for free products with their data and their attention. That's the business model. Why would Facebook and Google run those servers if they couldn't have profitably targeted ads.

If you want privacy honoring products you want the users to pay money for the service.

This argument makes perfect sense, the problem starts when companies like Facebook start tracking individuals who do not use their services.

Agreed, and that should be illegal. Having companies pay for data of non-users as part of Yang's proposal doesn't change anything.

What we really need is a new amendment to the Constitution about digital privacy rights, end to surveillance without a warrant, digital documetns are the same as "secures in your papers" from a constitutional perspective, etc. Half measures like Yang's simply won't work.

Perhaps a "digital bill of rights"?

> Earlier in his campaign, Yang said that data should be classified as property, and users should have certain rights over how their data is collected and used by tech companies. Yang offers more insight on what these rights would look like in Thursday’s proposal, and he pledges to pass a “Digital Bill of Rights, ensuring ownership of data, control over how it’s used, and compensation for its use” if he is elected president.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/14/20964834/andrew-yang-dig...

And for a balance of opinion, a counter-argument on why this might be bad:

> Or let's take the central element of yang's proposal, establishing data as a property right and allowing individuals to be compensated for the use of that data if it is used by a big tech company like Google or Facebook when selling to advertisers. This again is a bit of a problem as tech expert Gigi sohn said on this show recently.

> Gigi makes a pretty convincing case there that actual ownership of your data could have a lot of problems, while the core underlying concern is more about data privacy. why not just tackle that instead?

https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/470719-saagar-enjeti-yangs...

This brings up a concept I never really thought of. Is it better to approach this problem from the perspective of privacy vs ownership. If it is not a tangible asset, ownership seems tricky. It's like IP law. Do you really own the observation of your behavior?

This would have saved a lot of problems if proposed in 2008. Now that FANG has trillions in the back, if it's not a retroactive dividend, Ill-gotten gains get retained and this is not much more than closing the barn door after the cows are gone.

Ironically they’re using CCPA as an excuse to push this.

CCPA is supposed to help keep my data more safe. How exactly will my data be more safe upon giving Facebook some of my banking info and government id so I can officially receive payment for my data?

The entire meme of "selling their data" is deeply wrong. They take pains to minimize the leakage - if it was all available they could practically DYI it when targetting customers losing only the hosted ads themselves.

What a useless policy to spend time on. No one cares except the vocal geeks and if it did go through I’m sure people will be excited to get a $5 check once a month.

Your missing the forest for the trees. Unionizing workers isn’t about everyone getting a penny more because they are organized. It’s about restoring power balance by organizing the many who contribute more than the few.

If you get everyone who contribute data to Facebook, google, twitter etc. organized, then you can do a hell of a lot more than just get a couple of dollars for each person. You might even get them to clean up major parts of their act. Because a threat of “tomorrow we will request GDPR removal of all content from 1million users unless you do x” is much more of a threat than #quitfacebook will ever be.

It's ironic that they require you to input "as many of your emails as possible" in order to fight on your behalf.

Fighting fire with fire, I guess? Seems wrong though...

It's more ironic that they apparently can't be trusted with data because they geoblock GDPR-countries which you would only do if you know ahead of time that you can't deliver your website without datamining your visitors.

Beside the few penny, I want diversity of internet back ...

An incentive for people to post a greater volume of shit to the web than they do already? I approve this acceleration toward total data anarchy.

What I'd like to see come out of this is some way to evaluate the value of data collected so that it can be compared year-to-year. One reason the antitrust argument is hard to make is that the average Facebook user pays nothing and it's hard to argue that, for example, Facebook's monopolistic behaviour is harming the consumer. If we could track the "cost" to the consumer in terms of the value of data collected and observe an increase over time it would lend credence to a case for antitrust action.

Funny, I'd consider it more valuable to me to not give FB my payment info than to accept whatever pittance my data is worth.

Being paid means nothing if you don't have the power to negotiate, and declare it "not for sale".

A system that allows you to be the broker of your data really seems like the right way to go.

Similar to app permissions, users could choose which aspects of their data/profile to share with each company. The data could then be accessed via a federated API. With this in place, you could make it illegal for companies to store any PII themselves.

Of course whoever controls that central user repo would have great power.

So now I'm rewarded with $ for posting more crap people will blindly like?

So my data will now be even less about me?

How about profit sharing. If you make money by selling my data, I should get a cut.

It's his right to claim highly valued services for free and then cash compensation for when he uses them. It is also the right of every sensible corporation in the world to forward that audacious claim directly into the trash bin and not entertain it for another moment.

how much would you pay monthly for Google ?

Im paying for Google Storage, Youtube Premium and would like one fee where I dont see any ads at all.

$50 a month for a family plan would be acceptable to me.

Side topic: do parents who hand kids iPads to watch YouTube worry about the advertisements? That used to be a concern on regular cable television.

About a year and a half ago, the credit card I was using to pay for YouTube Premium expired and for about a day, I was subjected to ads on YT—it was horrifying.

Once you go ad-free, it's hard to go back. I'd happily pay for an ad-free version of every service I use.

Scott Galloway has been suggesting that Twitter move to a subscription model, with all accounts with less <5000 followers be free, subsidized by a progressive monthly fee for larger accounts based on number of followers above 5000.

This would serve dual purpose of eliminating a whole heap of bots and fake accounts, forcing them to be tied to a credit card. With Twitter earning recurring revenue from whales, along with reducing or eliminating personal data aggregation for ad-targeting, I can't see a downside.

I'm curious on how the dynamics would change in that system. Frankly I think it would make everything quite a bit worse. I think one of the only benefits of twitter is that it allows organic popularity. Once you add penalties for getting too popular, people will need to make up that cost. What will happen is large accounts will start to advertise in their tweets, essentially defeating the purpose of removing advertising.

Plus, you could then weaponize bots against smaller accounts on a large scale

There was actual study conducted by the Fed and an MIT prof.

They surveyed how much they would have to pay users to stop using these services:

For the median US user: $48/month for Facebook, $1,173 for YouTube, and $17,530 for internet search altogether.

For a sample of students in Europe: €2.17/month for Snapchat, €1.52 for LinkedIn, €536 for Whatsapp.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/11/fed-tries-to-figure-out-valu...

your individual data is worth nothing alone. When aggregated with great many others, it then means something.

The fediverse is already here and more or less offered a working solution to aggregated data abuse. Fediverse instances are mostly crowd-funded, the software is typically open source, and there are no direct paths to placing ads, which disincentivises data collection or selling. The only attack vectors are web scraping, really.

It's just a matter of educating the (boomer and zoomer) public, that "official companies" with proprietary services aren't the only legitimate platforms, and that the actual internet isn't 5 websites, but millions of interoperable and bustling websites and fediverse instances.

https://fediverse.party/

https://joinmastodon.org/ (recomended) https://pleroma.social/ https://joinpeertube.org/ and many more.

Instead of the lunatic, "lead balloon" BS like this (or UBI, for that matter), I'd rather someone worked on requiring US websites to honor "do not track" by law. Right now there's this idiotic arms race where browser vendors (other than Google, of course) are baking in more and more anti-tracking, and adtech companies are piling on more and more sophisticated tracking on the other end. Because the problem is asymmetrical, tracking always beats anti-tracking.

Ideally, I'd like to have a switch that would just disable tracking on everything, and if I find out I'm still being tracked, I need to be able to sue. The whole tracking bullshit will solve itself in no time at all.

And no, GDPR cookie warnings are basically deliberate sabotage of this idea, because presented with an option with lots of text the user always clicks "yes".

GDPR doesn't say you have to 'warn' for 'cookies' but that you have to ask consent for data processing before doing it and you can't deny people if they don't want that. If you happen to use a cookie to track a user for data processing then you may pop up a cookie-specific message.

In the end what needs to happen is exactly what GDPR is made for: don't grab people's data and track them unless they say it is OK to do so.

In all countries except Iran, the trade of human organs has been made illegal. Organ donation is legal, of course, but under strict regulation to ensure that it's being done ethically for everyone involved.

We had good reasons to prohibit the sale of human parts (even if the donor consents to getting paid for the transplantation). Now, we have very good reasons to protect personal data too.

Why not forbid the trade of personal data for the same reasons we banned it for our physical parts, and implement strong regulations (GDPR 2.0) to make sure that organizations only access and use our personal data for ethical, commonly-approved purposes?

This is the kind of bullshit solution that results in class action lawsuits paying millions of people $5 each (only the lawyers win)

A better idea would be to give each user equity in the company. An even better idea would be give that equity voting rights.

Side benefit: platforms would have to KYC human beings and we'd kill off a lot of bots and other generated horseshit.

If Facebook's abuse of everyone's personal data was as strikingly abhorrent as say, organ theft, Andrew Yang would write the policy to give me a $4.56 USD check while I lay bleeding in a tub of ice.

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