California governor proposes data dividend (opens in new tab)

Honestly this is just political blame shifting, virtue signaling, and more empty promises of handouts in the face of California's disastrous finances. California takes more taxes than practically any other state to fund failed infrastructure projects, all the while allowing sky high rents in the SF, LA, and SD areas because the government is locked down by rich landlords protecting their investments. Not to mention the price hikes on toll roads, county sales taxes, and general cost of living while homelessness is still rampant. Our greatest achievement is still an underwater tunnel built in the 70s. I want to see Gavin do something to change California first.

Users are already getting value for their data - the product showing the ads. People have a choice in whether they want to use gmail and get a free best-in-class email client, backend storage, and worldwide access to their email. The trade is that they're participating in an ad platform that is required to build this infrastructure that is on a never before seen in the history of humanity scale. Of course Americans and Europeans think it's totally fine to charge a five to ten bucks a month for a service like that, even when it would mean forcing the growing lower classes, second and third world countries, and the tech illiterate to use unsafe and frankly dangerous alternatives. Ads are a communal investment that allows us to provide services to people who can't afford those services.

I think morally it's the wrong direction, much like paying a dividend to victims of a polluting chemical factory to offset their deleterious health effects.

That said, putting a price on data may be what it takes to make companies take privacy and security seriously, simply because it might make it easier to argue standing in a lawsuit where data is leaked or mishandled. Similarly, putting a price on life seems insensitive, but wrongful death lawsuits motivate safety concerns.

Good idea, bad implementation. This will legitimize and validate the data collection and nothing else will change. Will there be even less incentive for companies to secure the data they're collecting because we'd already have been paid for it? What should be targeted is how this data is: collected, secured, and used. Throwing a few dollars our way each year solves nothing.

This isn't a new idea and though it is interesting and has good intentions, it doesn't solve the problem. As others have pointed out, this will encourage more data collection and less privacy. The exact opposite of what we want. Also, the users are already paid with free service.

The problem is that people value the free service more than their data. And companies value the data more than they value the service.

The tech and hacker community might value our data and privacy more than the service, but that's clearly not the case with most people.

Imagine if there was a company FaceTome that provides the exact same service FaceBook does. But FaceTome charged you a dollar for month and collect no data while FaceBook charges you nothing but collects your data. I guarantee you that most people would use FaceBook and FaceTome will go out of business as most people simply don't care about their data or privacy.

Paying us for our data won't nearly compensate us for the loss of our democracy. Quite the opposite: it puts an exact price on how cheap that comes about.

I agree with a lot of posts below. However, my absolutely biggest worry is that it will allow these companies to get even more personally identifying information about the user than they probably have today since they will have to compensate them monetarily.

For example, they will/may start asking for address, phone number, real DoB and SSN for tax reporting purposes since this would be an income. If I have multiple gmail/FB/... accounts I may have to drop some or provide the same information for those, basically removing any doubt that I'm the owner of those and so and so forth.

Moreover, since this won't be limited to Google & FB, almost any service which collects data, which would be everyone, would potentially have to ask you for this information before they let you create an account. It may lead to the complete loss of anonymity on the Internet.

Four years ago I wrote about requiring companies to pass along x% of targeted ad revenue sales to the users: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change

I still think this is a good strategy for the purpose of snuffing out the incentives for surveillance business models.

Before a company will pay you for your data, you will need to prove beyond doubt your identity, by providing that company with all the id and data you have. “Sorry, you havn’t provided enough data to validate your ID yet”, is the get out clause in that business model. The journey to hell, is paved with good intentions, and there are preists all along the way telling you which way it is.

This kind of echoes what Jaron Lanier has been proposing. I think they get at something true, in terms of moral sentiment, but I don't understand how it would be implmented.

How do you set prices? How does this lead to better incentives and outcomes, rather than a scheme where people can get $4 a year and the industry gets a moral blank cheque.

Currently, our Google & FBs data is being monetized mostly via ad-targetting, or via (for example) optimizing the FB newsfeed algorithim so that you spend more time on FB, where they can put that ad-targetting data to work.

Google's captcha-powered self driving cars demonstrates a point, but at least for now, the value of data is mostly ad-related (or business/political/military/police intelligence, which overlaps with ad-targetting in worrying ways).

Paying consumers to be advertized to ... isn't that a black mirror premise?

As of now, I'm more inclined to the "make-the-data-public" direction. For democracy concerns, for example, it would be valuable if the public could

So, has the time for project Xanadu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#Original_17_rul...) come?

If so, do we have the technology?

Wait until people find out that the cost to implement, monitor, support and regulate something like this will be higher than the dividends they'll be getting...

bing pays you rewards, which for me adds up to like $20/yr. I'd hope there would be more competition between search engines so they compete with benefits for users. For most queries google isn't that much better, use DuckDuckGo for privacy or other engines.

This would just normalize and turn surveillance capitalism into a casino. It would create the illusion that ordinary people win, except the house actually always wins, and in this case the house would always win by a lot.

Wow, that guy looks a lot like Mitt Romney.

> “California’s consumers should also be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data,” Newsom said from the State Capitol in Sacramento.

This is such an odd sentence to read, post-GDPR, because it sounds as if consumers have no idea what their data is being used for, and/or have no control over how it's processed, and just have to subject themselves to it.

The GDPR literally starts off by recognizing personal data and the protection thereof as a fundamental right, and regulates how others must subject themselves in order to process it.