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Companies that obtain and sell your user information should have to pay you royalties. Agree or disagree? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by K3zi4@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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Privacy concerns are a very popular and valid talking point on Lemmy, so I would like to gather your thoughts and opinions on this. (Apologies if it's already been discussed!)

Would you support this? Would it work or even be viable? (If it could somehow overcome the rabid resistance from these big companies). What are your thoughts?

Personally, I'm getting more and more agitated at the state of this late stage global capitalism, where companies have the gall to ask you to pay or subscribe to their products, while they already make money from you for selling your data. It's been an issue for a long time now, but seems to really be ramping up.

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[-] Steeve@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023

525 points (95.7% liked)

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