Maybe I am old school or too naive, but I don't see how I would make a personal margin with my own data.
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.
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.
Pay no attention to the fact that you’re not getting versions of these things that maximize your benefit either...
“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” -Larry and Sergey in 1998
2. They are giving you value (via free services)
"Okay, cool"
"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.
Just bored people trying to win an argument for fun.
Good job paxys! You win. You are so smart! Here is pat on the back old chap.
Sure there are a few companies you pay that also collect your data and I wish they didn't but even then they'd raise the price (maybe willing to pay more) if they didn't subside the service via your info
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...
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 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 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.
You could, but you don't.
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)?
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!
1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent? (Hint: they shouldn't.)
2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should just do it my damn self and actually get something out of it. It's like we need an open source community for personal data collection, aggregation, and analysis.