Ask Lemmy

Only I should be able to rent out my personal data to selected companies and they should pay rent monthly to retain that information. I should have termination rights with a 60 day notice.

Companies who obtain and sell your user information should be put out of business and have their executives and board go to prison for thousands or millions of counts of stalking.

Do people here responding with “It’s a free service!” not realize paid services sell your data just as much? The ISP you’re using to read this is selling your data.

And the T&C terms are not anywhere near informed consent. They’re just permission to do anything they want with your data. Quit acting like consumer protection laws aren’t needed as long as someone clicked “I agree” to use a service required for modern life. We all know you can click “Cancel” and go live in the forest. We’d rather a third option besides exploitation and going feral.

Also, quit licking boot. You’re killing the jobs of PR people when you shill for corporations for free.

It all comes down to one thing:

You agreed to the terms and agreements. You don't have to.

But in general.. imo.. it should be absolutely forbidden to sell data and governments should finally do something and stop sleeping.

Not just in the initial sale, but for every time my data is used.

They shouldn't be able to obtain data beyond what's strictly necessary for the service, never mind sell it.

People don't understand the value of the data, and there's no good way to put a price on it, honestly. As in, no, just because Reddit or whoever can make 5£$€ a year off me, doesn't mean I'd be ok to sell it for 2£$€.

I don't care about royalties. They should pay a gigantic tax for selling it tho

And I should get to set the price since it's my data in the first place.

yeah honestly the fraction of a cent I'd get negotiated wouldn't make a dent in my life. I'd much rather we as a collective hold companies accountable for selling off our data. Politicians too; they're all trying squeeze us for everything they can, and we consent by being apathetic.

Generally, I personally, disagree. Usually companies do not get your data from the air, they provide people service and often for free in exchange. This is a model which made internet available for masses.

What I agree with - a transparency and control, more or less like GDPR suggests (not like it is usually implemented, though).

I agree. I’ve always thought it was weird that companies can sell our personal data including health data without our consent most of the times. And we can’t get any money in return for the value our data generates. If they said, yeah you make $1 couple of hours of you using your phone, I’d probably be a little more keen, but I also value privacy lol

Edit: also just the amount of data collected and how much they can figure out about anyone is fucking terrifying. I like my privacy not because I have something to hide, but because no one would want a stalker who knows everything about you

If you use a company's service without agreeing to pay them with money, you likely agreed to share your information with no strings attached. Problem there being once that's done, your information is liable to be resold ad infinitum with no legal protection for you. What should happen is legislation that federally declares that agreement null and void, and put in its place nationwide law that dictates what companies and citizens can and can't do with intellectual property as it pertains to someone's personal information.

I'd prefer it if they simply weren't allowed to collect it in the first place.

And I don't think it would be viable, because no fucking way am I giving these parasites any banking information so they could pay me a pittance of what they get. They'd fucking sell that too!

It should be a requirement that you can see your own profile at any time, see everything they know about you, be able to edit it (including clearing it, and not with a billion checkboxes either), and lock it to prevent further modification and addition by themselves.

How much do you think your data is actually worth? Let's take Google for example, their ad revenue in 2022 was ~$224B and they have 4.3B monthly active users. That's only $52 per user, but if you take into account their operating expenses of $208B that drops down to $3.7 per user.

But that's not all, they don't make their revenue by "selling your data", that's a common misconception. They make revenue by selling targeted advertisements on their systems, and targeted advertising is only useful if you actually click the ads and purchase the products.

Now the correlation between your interests might be useful in aggregate, but for a single person this correlation data rounds down to a big fat zero, and since Lemmy users pride themselves in ad blockers and avoiding online advertisements I'm going to say that the value you personally add to Google's revenue is a big fat zero.

So should Google cut you a check for ~$0 per year? Honestly this conversation is a waste of time.

Yes

It would be to be a completely mutual agreement where all parties understand all the details and implications. It will probably never happen so it makes way more sense to make data harvesting and selling of user data illegal.

Agree

Disagree. Privacy should be the default.

Collecting information should be legal only in so far as it supports the customer's use of a product/service. E.g. It's nice if my doctor can keep a medical history on file, or my mechanic can do the same for my car.

Selling/disclosing information to third parties should be illegal.

It depends, at the very least there should be more transparency about what is being shared with who. But what do you do in situations where they’re providing some sort of “free” service, like Gmail or something? I feel like there’s some sort if trade-off happening there, but we should be fully informed about what is that’s being given about us.

How is value determined? There are many different usage scenarios each of different values.

I would love to receive payment (or the ability to opt out entirely) but imagine that it will be similar to the Holywood scenario where a film makes billions but "accounting" eats 99% of what is due.