> $17/yr in annual revenue per user

Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation. It is as useful as averaging the global price of a loaf of bread, which would be priced as $2-3 in the US but a few cents in a third world country. This is very applicable to ad revenue because ultimately ads are capturing the pricing levels of real economy, and bulk of the facebook users are not from high GDP nations.

> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year

This is a very simplistic way to think about data. In fact, calling it data itself is misleading. Because it all boils down to how the data is operationalized and made into information and knowledge about you when the business is interacting with you. Same demographic data is worth separately for selling you ads, driving product development to increase usage, price discriminating against you while buying airplane tickets, selling you insurance, influencing your vote etc.

Another way data is not a static, lifeless entity is something people often forget, it is the power of an SQL join. Joining table-a and table-b yields information neither of the tables had alone. So there will always be more a potential of rendering the existing data more valuable (more information yielding) by joining it with a marginal amount of new data.

In sum, data doesn't have a static value, and I don't think we have seen the end of ways it could be utilized against users yet.

> It doesn't work.

To my knowledge, we don't have empirical data that shows it doesn't yet.

"Revenue per user is a very misleading way to evaluate the value when talking about a hyper-global operation."

It doesn't matter, because there's no way to torture the data until "the amount of money that Facebook can afford to remit to its users for giving them their data" is going to be anything significant. They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users.

If it were, say, $500 dollars a year, and we were arguing about whether we were an order of magnitude low or high, it might matter, because the difference between $50/yr and $5000/year is pretty significant. But you're never going to get so much as "Facebook can pay most users $15/month for their data" let alone anything worth it to anybody.

Also, I've seen people hypothesize about these other values that this data might bring before, but bear in mind I'm operating my analysis based on Facebook overall revenue. There is no hypothetical 10x or 100x amount of value sitting around in the data, which we know, because otherwise Facebook would be collecting some significant amount of the value and it would be showing up in their revenue. The fact I'm basing this sort of analysis on revenue rather than profit is already an ENORMOUS concession to the idea, just staggeringly huge, and even with that concession it's a couple of orders of magnitude away from making sense.

If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me. Show me the company and their revenue. There's Google, and then it falls off a cliff.

Seems like this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should we care what Facebook can and can't afford? We don't owe them a business model. The point of this is to remit to the user the value that has been extracted from them. If Facebook cannot make money, i.e. contribute value, on top of that, then they are actually a drain on society surviving off negative externalities and should go.

Deciding how much a user's data is worth is an exercise for the reader, but I would certainly pay much more to avoid Facebook, than Facebook would pay to have me[0]. That's a red flag.

[0] - as would anyone who has ever added a Facebook domain to a Pi-Hole, the total cost of which likely exceeds Facebook's per-user revenue by your numbers.

As I say in another comment, I'd be happy to put a punitive taxation level on this entire industry. But if we're going to talk about "paying users for their data", then from the very beginning the framing is being written in terms of what the companies can afford based on what they're making, and the whole conversation is going to be anchored in terms of what the companies make. The discussion won't be about internalizing externalities, it'll be about the users profit-sharing with the companies.

If you want to internal externalities, go for the tax. Probably an easier sell to the politicians.

> Seems like this is putting the cart before the horse. Why should we care what Facebook can and can't afford? We don't owe them a business model. The point of this is to remit to the user the value that has been extracted from them. If Facebook cannot make money, i.e. contribute value, on top of that, then they are actually a drain on society surviving off negative externalities and should go.

How are you going to value what has been extracted from them, though? Facebook is in a better position to value it than anyone: they're selling it. What people are willing to pay them for it is literally its value. I don't really see how you can decide that the value of the data is greater than what Facebook is extracting from it. If it were, they'd be charging that much.

My data is mine; as the seller, I can price the data about me at any value I want, that doesn’t mean that someone will buy it. If Facebook comes along and takes my data for less than I’m selling it, that’s called theft, and it’s a crime.

Of course you can price it however you want. And you do. You are in control of whether and when to give away your data. If you use Facebook, you are trading your data for their services.

Well, except that Facebook will collect data on you even if you're not using their services.

When you're getting something for free, you sell it for cheap

How would this work for, say, Google. Say they cut users a check and their business model no longer worked. Would they then charge for searches? Would users have the option to keep free searches in lieu of a payment?

Yes right now it's just assumed your value, your cost, their value, and their cost all balance out. But let's slap some numbers and everything and actually see if it does.

If we have the option to pay up front, or sell off my data and maybe end up in the red or black. It will all be very complex in the end, but that's just exposing the inherent complexity that already exists and is just papered over.

What number would that be though? Any number is going to be made up and subjective based on the individual. I might day my data is worth $1000 a year while it’s worth $1 to you.

If there is a pay option, you could just pay for searches. You set the price threshold by choosing to pay a la carte (or not.)

Google did have a contributor program for a while which replaced ads when you paid them and they in turn paid the websites and services you visited. My guess is the advertisers weren't happy to be cut out of the loop.

Right, so (and not to make Google look like the good guy here) we just need this new law to tip the scales so the advertisers won't be able to convince Google not to do this.

> They can't afford anything "per user" or any significant number of users.

That was my point. In this thought exercise, we ought to separate the amount paid to users by country, because it will differ as much as a few orders of magnitude per country, just as the per user revenue most probably does. That is roughly the scale of GDP per capita per country between 1st world and 3rd world countries, which would be a good proxy for ad markets. I agree with rest of your argument, if per person revenue in the US was $150, would that be enough to make users care? It is unknown.

> If you think there's some huge untapped source of revenue here that might make the idea work, show it to me

I will concede that I am leveling an argument that entirely hinges on a hypothetical. But I don't think it is fantastical. The core of the problem is information asymmetry. These companies have huge amounts of high resolution data on us, but we don't have anything about the breakdown and how they operationalize that data. The argument that "if there was more ways to milk money out of it, we would have seen that in revenue" has several drawbacks in my opinion for several reasons.

a) The data doesn't have to be used in ways that translate to quarterly revenue but still great value to the company; this includes back channel uses (elections, famously brexit, that was won by data, and it is hard to put a revenue tag to its effects), it also includes expenditures such as acquisitions of competitors (famously instagram and whatsapp, I don't doubt for a second facebook made use of their data to assess the viability of these acquisitions), or temporarily unused data for game theoretic reasons ("I don't want to expose the fact that I can utilize racial data, health data, covert speech recognition data on my users as long as I can, but if market conditions/lobbying efforts are fruitful, I will translate that to revenue").

b) Even directly revenue increasing uses of data is subject to R&D and mining day in day out. So new combinations of existing data can be figured out, or new products might potentiate existing data to be more valuable without preceding revenue footprints. Think about self driving cars; how traffic operated has been public data, individual sensor technologies aren't that novel, but self-driving car is joining all this together in the hope of converting that data into revenue. When it does, it will be a phase shift that tremendously increases the value of that data, and we will have not been wiser to it if we only watched the revenue. I'm not suggesting FB is necessarily after such an exponential tech, but it is to keep in mind the potentiality stored with data is not readily observable, so “show me it can translate into revenue” criteria can be failed for a long while despite the fact that it eventually can.

If the only reason people collect all of that information about me is that it's cheap to do so, would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information? That sounds like a win as well.

> would making it a bit more expensive lead to nobody bothering to collect all my information?

No

In all respect, this is a really naive view of the ad tech marketplace.

The only thing that would do what you're saying is legislation. Making it more expensive just pushes out smaller players in the marketplace, leading to consolidation towards the Google's / Facebooks of the world.

All due respect but "law cannot fix what technology has broken" is quite true. I was going through this fairly balanced view [1] on why you shouldn't sell your data, and the power imbalance strikes me real hard. Once you legalize this circus and put a price on it, this will go exactly as thousands of other businesses go. (Hint: not in customer's favor)

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/sell-your-own-data-bad-...

Users must unionize for their data access, otherwise the price goes to zero

a legislation with a flat tax would not be that bad. i guesstimate that close to 70% maybe more of new ads are done online. and google and facebook are disruptive to old players who pay a lot more in taxes. this tax would definitely affect new players to the digital add buisness , but i dont see anyone even trying.

I'd love to see a 1cent/impression tax, personally. It would consolidate the market, sure, but it would very nearly destroy it, too. The resulting Google and Facebook left behind wouldn't be left with so many resources to be anti-social with. Internalize the externalities.

Only tax the biggest players?

Personally, I have no reason or desire to add that clause, but there is ample precedent for progressive taxation so it's not an impossible idea. If I were given that as a deal-or-no-deal sort of thing, I'd take the deal to get the tax.

Tax applies to all companies with $1B + revenues?

But that the same argument works for imposing regulation on any kind of pollution activity. We can't introduce food safety regulation, it would kill mom and pop operations and only big companies can afford to pay for the inspections and certification!

Yes, and getting the tracking/data collection to stop is more valuable than the amounts of money being floated around in this thread.

Money doesn't solve every issue, especially when your adversaries have so much more money (and power) than you.

Somebody will still collect all of that information. They will simply be outside of the jurisdiction of your laws.

The only way to stop others from collecting data on you is to not give it out in the first place. We need our computers, particularly browsers, to stop leaking so much information.

Edit: this is also the downfall of GDPR. An enterprising Chinese company could collect whatever data they want and then simply sell it to someone else who can use it to sell something to Europeans.

So if the goal is to discourage wide-scale collection of data without making it illegal, or at least to ensure that we benefit collectively from it, there's a much more obvious model, which is taxation. It's much easier to administer, and you end up with real money to do something with, instead of buying everyone a drink. Tax any company collecting, storing and analyzing user data some small amount, say, $1 or $0.1 or $5 per year per user-month of data stored, and use the tax revenues for ... something.

So what would that something be? Is there any obvious way to spend the revenues to further discourage tracking users and storing user data? Or would it be best to just plow it into the education budget or general fund?

Andrew Yang and co. would likely suggest a universal basic income ;)

Isn't that basically the same thing as just having data collecting companies pay users directly?

Yeah, it would end up being the same paltry payment.

I think the correct use did eventually occur to me: turn it into funding for open source software, that is both free as in freedom and free as in beer.

When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.

Why not ban tracking and ad targeting and selling personal data, and force that business model to go extinct, and now they have to start charging for service and their users become actual customers.

I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

Since me and the other 99% of people contribute most of the value to Facebook for you, would you be willing to subsidize the other 99% of people and pay $1700/year?

> neither would 99% of users.

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> would you be willing to subsidize the other 99%

That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist.

Which is not a problem at all.

> That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

On other social media websites that offer "pay to remove ads" versus "get personalized ads", like Reddit or Twitch, about 1% of users pay. Wikipedia asks for donations and very few people donate, percentage-wise. So I think if you want to show a substantially higher number, say even 10%, you'll need to provided evidence. Even if 10% of users paid, would they be willing to be $170/year?

> That would just mean that facebook is an unwanted and unprofitable service which then wouldn't exist. Which is not a problem at all.

I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services. Not sure how that's so hard to understand, that this is the business model I prefer.

Same with newspapers. I don't want to pay the full cost of making a newspaper (probably $10 or so), but rather I'd purchase a very cheap subsidized newspaper with ads for $1. Or free apps with in-app purchases. Doesn't mean it's unwanted if people aren't willing to pay the cost price for it.

> I want Facebook, and I want it for free with personalized ads. Same with Gmail, Yelp, Reddit, Google Maps, Instagram, Youtube, and a bunch of other web services.

Exactly! I don't know why it's so hard for people to realize that there are people that 100% ok with the offerings from these companies and would rather not have legislation interfere with such transactions

I think mostly people argue that people who are OK with it don't know any better, don't know how much they're being tracked, etc. I don't think that's true today, everyone knows these companies know everything, even if they're not very tech savvy, and still they don't care as much as privacy advocates wish.

> On other social media websites

That sort of statement requires data to back it up.

> I don't see how you jumped to that conclusion, that it's unwanted. I want Facebook, and I want it for free

If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

Facebook in its current form also doesn't care about what you want. They care about how they can please their paying customers, with you being one of their many products they can sell.

> If no one wants to pay for it, it's unwanted. I'm sure you'd also want a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free. That you want something for free means nothing, and is entirely irrelevant.

The person you're replying to spoke directly to this by saying they want those services not merely for free, but for free with personalized ads. That is, by just saying "for free", you are removing an important part of the context. I suspect they would also sign up for a service that offered a mansion, butlers, a private jet, etc. for free with personalized ads, if anybody were offering such a thing.

I'm personally in the boat of preferring to pay for things that are important to me and hope to see more movement over time to subscription business models that work, but it does not make sense to write off people who want the opposite, who prefer to get things for free with personalized ads. The revealed preference in society seems to be that there are a lot more people who feel that way than people who prefer to pay for subscriptions. These people aren't just being duped, everybody knows how free services work because it is a very frequent and well publicized topic of conversation, it's just that they are ok or even happy with it.

I think what happens a lot, because I think it's what I experience personally very often, is that when we find ourselves with a minority opinion that we really think is right, that we conclude the majority with a different opinion from ours is just ignorant or being manipulated. But in reality, they are often just as knowledgeable as we are, but have simply drawn different conclusions. Speaking personally, this is always a bitter pill to swallow.

It's all well and good to survey people and have them answer "no" to the question "Do you want to be tracked?"

But if Facebook threw up two buttons, one saying I agree to allow targeted ads, and one saying "$17/year" and requires you to give your credit card information, it's naive to think a substantial percentage will hit the $17/year button for a product they've already been using for free.

This is, after all, how the internet got to be where it is. Not through the use of 'walled gardens' and paywalls. But by providing ad supported content.

> When I see these breakdowns I think I’d pay $17 per year for Facebook without all of the ads and tracking and data mining and knowing I was just getting a good service optimized for its customers.

> I would not, I'd rather they target me with personalized ads like they are doing now. I hate paying for things, and I imagine neither would 99% of users.

I will never understand the mind of a typical social media user(s), as I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health as well as leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon.

Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good, what can you say really is worth it that you can't do with text/email? The digital life that was sold to us as an amazing replacement is actually proving to be really sad as COVID has shown and is perhaps one of the reasons I can comprehend why people are out there violating it as its proven to be an incredibly undesirable and lonely experience.

> I'd rather not use it and save myself the damage on my psyche and mental health

Scientific evidence on that is inconclusive and mixed. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11126-017-953...

> Other than the supposed potential dating benefits, having an actual active social life I don't get the appeal as I probably say I meet too many people for my own good

Then maybe it's not for you? I like to share things with my friends, see things they share, it's mildly entertaining and somewhat informative. If you don't enjoy those things, then you don't have to participate.

> leaking personal information I'd rather not be in the hands of the very companies building the Panopticon

In a practical sense, I have never encountered any downsides with supposed data leaking / personalized ads / strangers selling information about me. I have not lost money because of it, or lost friendships, or manipulated to do something I later regret.

But I have lost time and money because of wrong information shared by the credit bureaus, lost friends and messages because of a broken phone, misleading salesmen who convinced me to buy bad products at bad prices, insurance companies that didn't pay up, and landlords who scammed me. So after I finish dealing with and worrying about actual bad actors that harm me in direct ways, maybe I'll start worrying about the ghosts.

It doesn't have to be either/or. An individual could pay and opt out of data mining.

Anyway, personalized ads is just the tip of the iceberg, the real problem with that data doesn't exist on a small scale. The problem is that mountain of data could be abused, for example to manipulate public opinion, elections, the stock market, etc, and blackmail.

Even if you aren't vulnerable to these things directly, the abuse potential of such data is so high that IMO it's only a matter of time before you're indirectly negatively affected by it.

Opting out would then require trusting an organization who is incentivized to collect data to not collect it. That can't be the solution.

If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

Of course all this would be predicated on trust and a government that would actually use teeth if fraud was committed.

Hah.

> If you don't trust them, don't give them your data or your money.

I already don't, but they still build a shadow profile of me with the data my friends and friends of friends leak.

Many of the features users find useful (let's ignore for the moment whether these are good things) like content recommendations and search result recommendations rely on the same understanding of user interests that allow these companies to target advertisements.

So they need to understand your interests anyway to provide the services that people find useful. So they still need forms of tracking to do the things that people find useful on the sites.

So what do we do?

They could just collect your data and not monetize it. If a paid user can decide whether or not they want those features. Facebook could easily monetize it anyway, but they could also monetize a paid user and day they aren't. Everything we are discussing is hypothetical anyway.

That doesn't sound so bad on the surface, but it would mean that most of my friends aren't on facebook, or any other social network, which would mean that it is close to pointless.

Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix. The motivation for Netflix is to give you just enough quality to keep you paying every month.

For a free service like Facebook you the user have no expectation of quality because you're paying nothing. So Facebook's motivation is not to provide quality but to keep you engaged and clicking. They've discovered that best way to do that is to infuriate you and to radicalize you. This keeps you the user engaged which is what advertisers require, so that's what Facebook delivers.

This is great except that this is not a healthy arrangement for a democracy. To constantly have users given whatever amount of negativity and disinformation is necessary to keep them enraged and glued to their phones. That's what Yang is all about trying to fix.

So paying for Facebook changes the dynamic. Users will now demand quality. Facebook will have to change. If users discover that Facebook only delivers them misery, then they'll stop paying and Facebook loses revenue on both ends. The users collectively will have power to demand improvements. Facebook's algorithm will have to change in response to that new dynamic. Problem solved. (That's the hope.)

>Most of your friends probably pay for Netflix.

Nope. Few people I know have a Netflix subscription. The subscription model doesn't work for news media for example.

I've never used Facebook, but there have been times where I've thought of signing up. If Facebook had cost money then that would've been a non-starter from the get go. The same goes for most other services.

I don't know why, but the value proposition of something that costs money online has to be very large for me to consider it.

The majority would, I guess. Not enough for it to matter.

$17 is the global average. If you live in a country like the US, you probably generate way more revenue per year, since you have more spending power (and thus are more valuable to advertise to).

I think the general problem is that those who can afford to pay for Facebook are those who are the most valuable to advertisers. So if you gave users the choice to pay or not, the users who draw the advertising revenue would pay, leaving the users who the advertisers don't really want to advertise to.

For reference it's approximately $143 per year for the US market, per user ($11.92 per month).

~220-230 million monthly active US users, $31.4 billion in sales (projected 2020 figure) for that market.

That's of course not adjusting for hours of use for a given user, data contribution, and so on.

Do you know the numbers for daily active users or weekly active users?

And do those numbers include messenger?

It would be fascinating to see some histograms of users and usage. Especially one that compares ad buyers, page managers, and personal only users.

You wouldn't, because other people wouldn't pay for it. The value proposition of Facebook comes from other people. If there aren't enough other people then you wouldn't want to use it.

Arguably without the ranking and recommendation, FB is quite boring.

The feed is such an integral part of FB.

What if the point of it all isn't to make the consumer money, but to make companies less indiscriminate about gathering and storing data?

Can't you achieve the same effect at user level by faking some data + messing with tracking via Firefox containers + Ghostery + Cookies AutoDelete?

What portion of all users are going to do that? A fraction of a percent?

The point of making the companies change is that most users aren’t computer literate enough to understand the problem, it’s consequences, or the mitigations. The knowledge asymmetry between the average user and the companies collecting and using this data could hardly be more vast, and that creates a situation where companies can effectively prey on less knowledgable users. If the wide majority of users aren’t capable of finding/using the available user-level solutions, the problems will remain rampant.

The latter could be accomplished by shipping a privacy-championing browser that enables those behavior by default (Brave? Apple?).

You're saying the low levels of adoption of such technologies are indicative of users' subpar technical skills, but maybe it's just general apathy and disinterest? E.g., how many public protests and calls to action have we seen after Snowden revelations?

FWIW, the former is already prevalent among younger generations, with Instagram for their "public" life and f-Insta for everything private.

And how many people are realistically going to go through that effort?

The government setting up an independent, trustworthy program to do this for every single person either unaware or unskilled enough to do this would cost a lot more than $10/person, or whatever this dividend is.

But if the "you" you're referring to here is actually just you, of course you can.

Yeah this is really a move to make it cheap for any company to buy your data.

Currently data is held by a small number of companies who invest a lot of money protecting it as a business secret.

The goal of the pay-for-data movement is to make it easy for any fly by night operation to have access to the same data without earning your trust.

> What problem does that solve?

It makes the data use much less profitable for the companies involved, and therefore far less attractive, discouraging business models that rely on it from the start.

Wont that 100 dollars of data be worth exponentially more if companies had to pay us for collecting it?

Simple solution, people bargain collectively and have a sort of data ombudsman representing their interest rather than trying to get a 10$ check individually.

If people were to negotiate the value of their data collectivelly you can have a 100k or a million people in some organisation that has stewardship over their data and negotiates say, a price with facebook, and that institution either manages the money and invests it or pays it back out.

The reason people are so disempowered today in the face of these huge companies is because everyone is operating under this atomistic, individualist, consumer mindset. People can effectively negotiate when they team up.

I would gladly pay $17 a year for a non-ad driven version of Facebook.

If this were the limit of the value per user, they would have offered a subscription service long ago. Something is missing from your model.

It’s likely that averages are very misleading for this kind of thing. People who are willing/able to pay FB not to see ads probably tend to have a lot more disposable income, and therefore are worth more to advertisers—potentially many times more than the average.

There should be roughly as much variation in FB users’ value to FB as there is variation in disposable income across their whole userbase.

>Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year.

Then give it to me if no one cares. I don't want my personal information bought and sold.

That is missing the whole point. I would even pay for them stopping it. Getting money is certainly a misunderstanding of the issue and goal. It also underscores who is the owner of the data. Remember all the copyright claims by platforms on their user content? It is not because of 5$ a year.

It would also disincentive them collecting info on me.

You say this like people won't get paychecks from many different companies and that checks will be extremely difficult to get.

This whole thing is essentially credit card points. These credit card companies pay you for the purchase data in the form on points. And the detail from those purchases is nothing compared to what FB and others would have.

You don’t have to guess these numbers, Facebook publishes them in their quarterly and annual reports. IIRC, users in North America generate around $85 a year. Other geos are now where close, with Europe a distant second.

For how much data? I would be willing to post some nonsense every month for a return of $1.50 a month. I bet I could automate that across several platforms or even turn it into a business representing various online personas.

I haven't done any maths or research on that, but did you take global numbers or boil down to market. I assume users in "Western" countries bring more than other parts of the world. Or is my assumption wrong?

Very good chance most of the money is made from very few people. If you got a cut of money from advertisers targeting you, my guess is it’s be quite a bit over 5 bucks. Especially in an election year.

Yeah $5 is the cost of a couple clicks or scrolling past 200-300 ads.

On Google that's maybe one click, probably half a click.

I don’t think this is the problem it is trying to solve but interestingly this could be really beneficial to some very poor countries were the dollar is extremely strong.

It depends on how the money gets allotted. The people to whom $5 is most useful are also the people that most advertisers are not interested in targeting in the first place. So if people are compensated according to their value as advertising targets, this seems like it'll be a rich-get-very- slightly-richer program.

What if it's combined with a data privacy law? Instead of accept-this-cookie-to-track-you ... You would need to opt-in to data privacy, or opt-in to data profit-sharing

Facebook has 2.6 billion monthly active users [1]. If they pay each user $5/yr, that is $13 billion/year in extra costs. That might push Facebook to bias towards collecting less data about its users by default.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

You're making their main revenue stream more costly - why wouldn't they instead double down more investment to make it _more_ efficient to get your data so that they recoup those margins?

They might diversify a bit (which they already have, with their hardware plays and all that jazz,) but let's not pretend this is going to be the game changing investment mover we hope it would be.

No. They have already leverged as much as possible to profit as much as possibe.

They should just tax data / ads. FB can send one big check to government.

> Your entire data load might be worth $100 a year.

That is a considerable amount for many.

Maybe it should be some kind of lottery instead?

Everyone who logs on gets a ticket. It follows some type of grading scale. Bigger revenue generators earns more tickets. Only individuals are allowed to win, no businesses.

Maybe Facebook’s goal can be to give away $1 Billion dollars a year, divided into $1 Million jackpots. Thus, 1,000 people a year can win it. Over 10 years, and you possibly have 10,000 winners.

And maybe you have to meet a certain income or wealth criteria to win the jackpot? Otherwise, you only win a smaller jackpot. You don’t really want all the big influencers and wealthy to take all the money.

$5/year is irrelevant. But $1 Million, this might be more interesting. And force the IRS to tax-exempt the winnings. The goal is to transfer wealth to the less-privileged, to help rectify the inequality of the capitalistic system.

They should pay it out in stock

The problem of people not knowing that privacy is valuable.

How does $10/year solve that problem? Seems more like you'll get a lot of people saying "Oh, is that all they're doing to me? Great! I guess there's no problem here!"

I mean, if people found out there was a $1000 or $10,000 vein of value to mine, yeah, people might get upset and demand a more "fair portion", but they're not going to get upset over $10/year.

The problem isn't the amount of money the companies are making on your privacy, the problem is what they are doing to make that money. I'm appalled at the damage to society they're willing to do to make that little money, but you're not going to convince anyone of any problems by focusing on the "little money" part.

Or they don't care.

I like to think they don't know. I fear they don't care.

The sense I get is in general, people worry about the average case, not the worst-case scenario, when it comes to privacy.

... and honestly, that might be the correct risk assessment for the average person. The worst-case scenario only happens to a few people.

That's the point. It prevents oligopolies forming (as we have now), short of them producing enough value per user to cut them a sizeable payment.

All the problems of big tech disappear when they're held accountable for their actions. The easiest way to hold them accountable is to reduce their clout.

That form of "accountability" sounds like a euphemism "not doing exactly what I want". The vagueness is downright concerning.

Not to mention the logic doesn't follow. Today nearly everyonr would agree that it would be a terrible idea to openly sell representation in congress or the ability levy and collect arbitrary taxes to the highest bidder because the incentived essentially only make sense for those who can make a large enough profit in short term to justify the expense. The best thing you could say about the policy is that if it is cheaper than an invasion adversaries might decide to buy you out instead of declaring war.

The people on HN, especially those who use Facebook regularly, are worth on average _significanty_ more than $17 to the company per year.

It’s hard to remember, the average person makes $X,000 globally and Facebook has a huge % of the planet on their platform.

HN users make in the upper echelon of wages, and are comfortable with their computers and online shopping.

In the current political environment I can easily imagine the flame bath Facebook would take if it paid out proportionally to the value of the user and this truth was baldly revealed to the public. Don't expect Facebook to take this route. If there's going to be any sort of "per user" pay out made by the ad companies, expect it to be a flat fee.

> and this truth was baldly revealed to the public.

It's completely impossible that it wouldn't be revealed to the public, and every possible take on it will be published. All it would take is a few people posting the amounts they received, which is definitely going to happen.