Sorry, but how is that any different than the role Google and Facebook play today? You're just proposing handing even more personal data over to what will become the next generation of big tech monopolies.

Compared to Google & Facebook, the neutral third party's business model would be to process payments as opposed to advertising, thus they won't have any incentives to collect/misuse personal data beyond what's necessary to provide the service.

I don't agree. Payment data are just as easily sold off as you seem to think advertisement data is. The incentives are the same, except one is pseudo-anonymous and the other is directly linked to your bank account.

This idea's selling point is that you are not tracked nor subject to marketing. If people start having any suspicions they will stop using the system (why pay and get tracked anyway ?) and the payment processor no longer has a business, thus everyone here would have an incentive of being honest otherwise they ruin the entire business model.

If you view it from a game theory perspective, both the ad business (your Google's and Facebook's) are subject to the same incentives as your Flattr's.

At the core of both of them is an economic transaction (direct dollars vs. ad impression), both of which use personal data like web history (to know which article has been "bought").

The big difference is the ad supported model is not linked to your bank account, and has some pseudonymous properties, but there is still the classic three-party structure of reader, publisher and platform, and still the huge pressure to be profitable.

1) So you're still having your personal web history tracked by a technology company, possibly even worse because it's linked to your bank

2) Economic pressures and incentives are roughly the same

3) End result is your data will eventually get sold anyway, much the same way that cable companies always introduced ads

I also have a belief but no hard data that advertisers pay more per impression than consumers ever will, which leads to this cycle happening in the first place. People seem to forget that the internet wasn't really profitable until targeted advertising, cutting that would mean the end of most web technology companies.