I don't think so. It is not the data itself that has value. It is a game of information asymmetry and that corporations can make you desire things you wouldn't desire without that interaction. They then convert a fraction of that desire into money flowing from you to them that you otherwise would have kept.

Maybe I am old school or too naive, but I don't see how I would make a personal margin with my own data.

If you had a clear list of "these sort of news items/OC from friends makes me more susceptible to being convinced by questionable ideas/donate money/stay up at night." then you could perhaps take steps to preserve your ability to stay more rational, more the way you want yourself to be and less easy to manipulate by ads/partisans/etc.

That sounds like it would be very useful, but doesn't really have a (monetary) "value" in the sense that most people use when talking about sharing the profits of the Data Economy.

It'd be much more interesting to see that sort of data sharing/access occurring than simply saying that people are entitled to some percentage of the profit that was "generated using their data" (which would be highly susceptible to creative accounting).

Preserving the privacy of individuals would still be challenging though.

Let's say on average you need to see one hundred ads before you see something you want to buy. Now if you had personalized ads, maybe on average you need to see ten ads before you want to buy something.

If you are already looking through a bunch of ads for the sole purpose of trying to buy something, then your personal data is valuable to you because it saves you time. But that's definitely not the situation with most big tech products.

The response to expect with #2 is that you get paid back in the form of fast search results, map directions, live communications, personalized news feeds, targeted advertisements, etc.

Pay no attention to the fact that you’re not getting versions of these things that maximize your benefit either...

It wasn't that long ago that you'd buy a GPS unit for a few hundred dollars and updating the maps would be another $100+.

And then there's https://www.openstreetmap.org which is arguably better than both.

Google search being free is an absolute enormous amount of value. How much would you pay for a subscription to Google if it weren't free?

Maybe a decade ago. Now using Google is an exercise of filtering out Amazon affiliate blogspam clogging the first several pages of results.

“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” -Larry and Sergey in 1998

I don't know, I still would prefer the way it is now to a paid service

This has been fulfilled in full with YouTube and how creators fear demonetization.

I don't think that's the same thing. If you are a youtube creator and you want your videos to be monetized, you need advertisers to want to advertise on your content. As amply demonstrated by many youtube creators, you are free to go out and land your own sponsorship deals, and then you don't need to worry about demonetization.

I think many people find lots of value in search, free email, Android, and other services dependent on this model. The argument that you're not getting anything out of it rings false.

1. They are getting your consent

2. They are giving you value (via free services)

What do you think consent means?

"If you use Facebook we will collect and sell all your data"

"Okay, cool"

"If you don't use Facebook we will still collect[1] and sell all the data about you we can"

"But I never agreed to that."

"Too bad."

Under what circumstances would you describe that as consensual?

And that's not even getting into the concept of _informed_ consent; something that they clearly don't have given the amount of user anger that gets directed at Facebook every time when a new leak/breach/data collection method is revealed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921092 In addition to the fact that they collect information about people who don't join Facebook (and agree to the ToS) by virtue of the information that others (often unwittingly) submit to Facebook, like group photos, mobile phone address books, etc.

Not sure why the above got downvoted, it seems to echo the other sentiments.

As a developer I have a hard time imagining building an application that doesn't use data to provide a higher level of experience in some way. Of course there is a very long rabbit hole on how data collected to create a novel experience then gets used in other ways to provide revenue.

We just live in a world where applications are able to hide almost everything that is happening behind the scenes from the user, and advertising drives the majority of free applications, and this opens a gateway to major abuse...

You are getting free searches, email, messaging, photo storage etc

I would pay a fee to some sites to keep using their service, without tracking/advertising. But they don't offer it as an option.

There are paid options for example for email, but still people prefer the free options. Market has spoken. People just don't care about being tracked, specially if they get free goodies.

As an anecdote: I am the only one in my extended family who does not use the car insurance tracker. Everyone is calling me out on why I dont get the "free" discount.

"People just don't care"

People are being massively lied to about what is veing tracked and what is being done with that info.

Or maybe these services are a monopoly, where they could start eating babies and not loose their audience anyway

The best is when a service is paid and it still traks you, like amazon

I'm with you

I pay for email services (and make some use of gmail for junk/transactions).

I also would never use one of the insurance trackers. They literally have zero clue of what they are doing and interpret things backwards. E.g., they interpret higher g-forces as bad driving. Yet, as someone who has been through countless high-performance driving and race schools, had racing lisenses, and won multiple racing championships, I can tell you that what high-performance driving, whether racing or getting out of emergencies, is about wringing out of the vehicle, suspenseion and tires, every last bit of grip to maximally accelerate, brake, and/or turn. Of course, I'm usually very smooth and low-g on public roads, but if I do something like maneuver around an animal in the road, they'd see a high-G maneuver and charge me for bad driving, when in fact, I probably saved them from a claim.

It is a lovely concept, but the institutional idiocy really bothers me.

The fee you pay would almost certainly be less than the value they can extract from your metadata (especially since it can only grow more valuable as time passes)

There are open source map applications, paid email services (I use one), private-cloud office stacks like NextCloud.

You could, but you don't.

I get free searches from DuckDuckGo without paying with my personal information. It is absolutely possible to provide free services, supported by ads, while collecting little to no personal information.

I don't get why this is so easily glossed over all the time... yeah, absolutely you should be able to control your data and know how it's being used. You should be able to opt out of unnecessary data collection. But the idea that you're not getting compensated for your data just isn't true - you get some really amazing tools without paying a dime for them.

value is in aggregation across the board, not at an individual level. a single signal is hardly a reliable metric

I think the root problem is the indirect nature of that dollar value. It's not concrete / obvious enough for normal people to understand it. Seems to be a sales / marketing problem as much as a technical one.

And I could imagine a similar line of reasoning being applied for the value of the land native Americans “sold” to the colonists - when they themselves didn’t have a conception of such ownership before or after that encounter.

Too late. You already clicked "I agree" on that EULA.

Since the civil war, you can’t sign ownership of yourself over to another. The ownership of data that intensive seems the same thing.

Ownership is the wrong word, since you will always own your data. The problem is others claiming to own it too.

This is a fundamental, and perhaps insoluble, problem with the moral principle of liberty and self-ownership: to what extent should you be permitted to voluntarily limit, surrender, or exchange that ownership?

One can certainly make a case that even limited-scope non-compete clauses in employment contracts are an affront to human dignity; on the other extreme, there are those who would claim that freedom necessarily includes the "right" to sell one's self into indefinite servitude. Where do we draw the line? I don't see an intrinsic "bright line" or Schelling Focus on the question. What is the "statute of limitations" on the Present Self being constrained by the choices of the Past Self (at least, in the context of contract enforcement)?

> Where do we draw the line?

I can't claim to have a complete answer to that question, but it seems that every time that the line is drawn too far towards the direction of slavery (i.e. away from individual liberty) there is a substantial power-imbalance.

That seems to suggest that any situation where there is a large power (information, monetary, etc.) asymmetry between two parties will lead to one side being heavily disadvantaged, almost certainly due to the intentional structure of that arrangement.

If true, that would suggest that any circumstance where there could be a large power imbalance between parties must be carefully moderated and that limiting "individual freedom" by not allowing people to sign away their rights in a way that mostly benefits someone else could be a reasonable way of approaching this problem.

Hopefully that made sense!

there are ways to be paid, just don’t expect google/apple/fb to do that until they will be forced. eg see new eu laws coming forward, and some companies soon will disrupt this space. it will happen like gdpr, someone is already preparing for it, without making too much noise...