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Comment by makestuff | Hacker News Reader

At the very least I should get paid for my data. If I steal a patent that google has you better believe I am going to be paying up, but they can collect my personal data (or my personal intellectual property for lack of a better term) and not pay me a dime for it. I get if you are using their services for free then that kind of makes sense, but if you are not using any of their services why in the hell should they be able to act like the NSA.

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The worse is the payroll companies leaking to equifax. In some states you can “disclose” car loan data on consumers to a certain extent, mortgage balances, etc.

Each one alone is troublesome and when aggregated it’s super annoying every American can basically be a voyeur target for a few dollars, and not even have to option to consent to this happening.

I kind of like the term “digital voyeurism” for this, though it is a euphemism for “spying.”

They should not be allowed to collect any data even if they offer their services for free. Personal information is not a currency. We are not cattle to be sold to advertisers.

"We are not cattle to be sold to advertisers."

Someone just crawled out from under a rock.

No, this is not what you want - because the straightforward outcome would be that your personal data was declared to be worth $X, which you were compensated for and then traded away as consideration to use the service. So then the service has an ongoing license to your data, which they sublicense to Facebook, and absolutely nothing changes besides legally cementing their surveillance regime. What we need is the definition of consent ala the GDPR that does not allow personal information to be permanently bought but only temporarily licensed with the requirement of ongoing consent that can be withdrawn at any time.

It needs to be bid on. Garden variety capitalism and market activity.

You're going to need to expand more, because you're ultimately still implying some sort of new right to control your personal data compared to how things are.

"Market activity" occurs at the level of abstraction above the foundation of what ownership is defined as. Define ownership wrong, and it turns into just another sleight of hand where you've theoretically got rights, but in practice it's impractical to extract yourself and assert them in a meaningful sense.

Defining rights properly is what my comment was focused on. After that is done, you can build whatever system you like for companies to encourage users to allow the use of their personal data.

I don’t even want to be paid. Let me see it! It could be useful to me. Also, let me change it. I am not as interested in gambling as YouTube seems to think.

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