I'm reminded of domain squatting - where just searching for a domain name caused the registrar to reserve it and they could sell it back to you.

Is this the endgame? Any action, anything spoken or viewed is monetized for rent seeking intermediaries? information is power -> information is money.

I believe the power disparity is the fundamental issue, not the monetization. In most situation an individual has no abilities to negotiate anything, and given that we're social animals and conformance plays an important role voting with one's data/wallet is always going to be skewed toward sellers for anything socially significant (widespread).

I can imagine honest and ethical ways where I would want to provide some of my private information to someone and ask them to process it for me - basically, recommendations as a service is a perfectly valid (and very valuable) business. What I don't want is for them to keep my information and use it for any other purposes that don't benefit me. Which suggests that I always want a way to negotiate the terms.

Given that there were some estimates than individual private data is worth mere pennies, my only explanation why such negotiations and data non-retention agreements are gated behind some enterprise plans (with "call us" pricing) is because it's either worth more than I think it does, or that it's perceived as such.

If it's the perception/bias issue, researches into value of private information may help. A legal requirement to offer an ability to have the same terms to everyone interested (aka upfront pricing and requiring data privacy related features to be individually available outside of any plans/bundles) might be the way to prompt such research (no guarantees about the results and that normal people won't be just priced out, though), but it may also have a lot of unexpected consequences.

Ultimately, I suspect this hill is probably as hard to climb as solving economic inequality (and is probably related to it).

I think the foundational problem is the privatization of information.

Information is not an object. It's not a countable good. Yet copyright demands we frame it as such.

Why? To structure our society around competition. I would much rather give collaboration a try. Unfortunately, the demand of intellectual property reframes collaboration as "derivative work", and forces us to make explicit contracts with specific people before creating it.

---- edit:

To elaborate this in the context of the article,

The very idea that we need to protect a person's right to monopolize information is ignorant of the underlying right to oblivion. Intellectual property frames the very act of existing as a person as the creation of information. That alone infringes on the right to oblivion.

I would go back even one step further... marketing itself must be curtailed or eliminated. If you could manage that, private data would only be of use to supervillains hellbent on world domination.

Getting rid of the motivation for collecting so much private info would go a long way. Advertising is not the only motivator, but currently the biggest one, and putting more restrictions on how advertising is done would be a step in the right direction.

> demonetize private information

What does this mean?