Privacy isn't dead: it's just that tech companies have made it inconvenient | Hacker News Reader

Privacy isn't dead: it's just that tech companies have made it inconvenient

inforrm.org

38 pointslatein5 comments

Tech companies made it "inconvenient" by making worthless data worth something. The only reliable way to get companies to stop stealing this data is to put a price on it. Data Trusts & Fines are a poor and arbitrary way of accomplishing what should be a market function and criminal punishment for theft.

Every request has an associated cost, this will lead to a race to the top for valuable users. While good websites will push requests costs into the negatives. It will happen sooner than you think, user data will creep towards tens of thousands per person. A situation where yearly data is worth more than their yearly take home is unsustainable. That's the Data Dividend. Bringing it back to the article, very few sane people are going to forgo tens of thousands of dollars for their search history, you are going to have to choose what's more valuable to you for each line item.

This is a fascinating idea. Has anyone written a clear argument for, or path forward for, a data dividend?

I've heard this idea before but I've never seen a proposal for how we might make a market for data in this way. Do you have any suggestions? You mention the "Data Dividend" - what is this? Can you link any articles about it? It sounds pretty interesting

When I am spied on without my consent (and burying something about it deep in the ToS is not consent), the harm is not that I could have otherwise sold out, the same way that the harm in rape is not in the woman being deprived of earnings through prostitution.

It sounds like you're trying to shoehorn surveillance telemetry into the model of imaginary property, and then assert we will have a just outcome by construction? But imaginary property has never had this outcome, rather it always benefits larger vectoralists/investors, while perhaps throwing individual creatives a bone. In fact I don't see how what you're describing differs from what we have right now - in every clickwrap "terms and conditions" there is a bit about how you're giving the company a license. This attractor is so strong that in order to buck it, the EU had to come up with a new definition of consent when it created the GDPR, lest it be nullified by the same contractual shenanigans. And I don't know how it would even be possible to adjust that to allow for "consensual licenses" that would do anything but drop right back to 0.

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