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Comment by montag | Hacker News Reader

I think this effort is positive, but a bit misdirected. Think data breach liability. Facebook and YouTube are willing and capable defenders of sensitive customer data. Watch the AshleyMadison documentary. Arrogant disregard for customer privacy and almost no culpability. These smaller, irresponsible players are where consumers are most vulnerable.

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Agreed. Mid-sized/smaller players are the places which have very poor data & security practices. Especially when they require PII as part of their operations.

Meta, Google are much better stewards of their users data. One misconception I see is claiming these companies sell user data. I'd instead say that they sell user attention.

They don’t sell user data for a very simple reason - it’s a crappy business, as you can charge much much more with to recurring sales for heavily obfuscated access to the data than just one off selling of said data.

When you think about it - initiatives are kind of aligned with user privacy (kind of, as there’s much more to the story than this simplistic point of view)

The way I've always seen it is that they'd never directly sell user data because that is their most valuable and prized asset. It's what allows them to sell targeted access to users for so much money.

sort-of agree .. the accuracy, timeliness and completeness of any real-world data will change.. many comments assume some kind of perfect knowledge, which is never the case. Selling snapshots of current profile understanding is not only better business, but can also evolves with the enterprise over years; meanwhile selling raw user profiles as a whole is more like "damaged goods at a discount" for quick profit maximizers. This said, "surveillance capitalism" is rife and inherently a step backwards from a democratic society IMHO due to information asymmetry, secrecy and income generation.

The data was always a commodity to produce other goods (ads)

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