Facebook, Google and other online services provide consumers free access to their platforms. However, nothing is truly “free.” We pay with our data and these companies make billions of dollars selling our personal information to advertisers and others. Now some people are starting to ask if the big tech companies should be paying us to use their services. And at least one company is doing something about it.
Advertising revenue is what makes Facebook and Google the tech giants they have become. The more demographic information these companies have, the more effectively they can target advertising and the more money they can make. TheNextWeb.com points out that, “Letting Facebook, for example, sell our data without giving us a penny of those profits, in retrospect, feels a lot like being the guy who bought a pizza eight years ago for the low price of 10,000 bitcoin: today that’d be a 8.8 million dollar pizza.”
Is it time to expect the companies exploiting our data to pay us? Everything from Facebook updates to YouTube videos and your Amazon purchase history has value to the tech giants, especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The New York Times says, “Getting companies to pay transparently for the information will not just provide a better deal for the users whose data is scooped up as they go about their online lives. It will also improve the quality of the data on which the information economy is being built.” One model suggests that the median household of four could gain income of $20,000 a year as compensation for their data.
One business is already paying users for their data, although the pay is nowhere near $20,000 a year. DataCoup pays users who give them access to their data from debit/credit cards, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr, Meetup and Instagram. You enter information for each account you wish to link. Once you connect your accounts in the Datacoup app, information is automatically pulled in from each of the authorized accounts. The type of information collected varies by account types. For financial accounts such as debit cards, the data includes merchant name, transaction date and transaction amount. For social accounts it is basic information, likes, check-ins, activity streams, friend lists and other basic social account information.
It is difficult to put a value on our personal data, but it is likely that someone will. Whether that is the current tech companies, new companies with different business models or the government remains to be seen.
