As any savvy consumer knows, there’s big money to be made off our personal data. I'm talking gobs upon gobs of cash, potentially. You needn't look any further than Facebook’s newly launched Graph Search to back this up.The semantic search feature, which will roll out to US users throughout this week, offers more advanced, more detailed search resultes. By answering superfluously specific queries like “mothers of Jews who like bacon” or “married people who like prostitutes,” Facebook says it’s helping users find new friends with shared interests. It can also turn around and pitch super-targeted ads to advertisers or middleman data brokers. We're just digital cash cows now.
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It’s been said before: Data is the oil of the internet age. The Googles and Facebooks and Twitters are the tycoons, the Daniel Plainviews getting unfathomably wealthy off user data. But that data is our lives, our identities. So why the hell aren’t we seeing a dime?The short answer is that consumers are using personal data as currency, rather than looking at is as a commodity. We "pay" for "free" services like Gmail and Twitter with our data, instead of viewing that personal information as private property they—the Googles and Twitters and the like—should be paying us for.Until recently, we've been mostly fine with that. We've entered willingly into the deal—blindly trusting a reasonable amount of privacy was detailed in the fine print. And yet it’s becoming increasingly clear it isn’t: Graph Search is just the latest holy crap privacy invasion! moment stirring up controversy. That's why now is a good time to look at the longer answer.Which is to say that consumers taking back their own data, to say nothing of profiting from it, would be a radical upheaval of the global digital economy as we know it. It’s daunting to even think about.Jaron Lanier, famed futurist and internet pioneer best known for coining the term "virtual reality," has thought about it a lot. In his recently published book Who Owns the Future?, he argues that data miners are partially to blame for the Great Recession—that our willingness to trade privacy for cool, free shit sucker-punched the middle class and knocked out entire industries.
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To right the wrong, he argues, Google and Facebook and cops and the government and anyone that uses our private property should pay us for it, even it it’s just cutting us in a percentage. "Indeed, Lanier’s plan has a clever side benefit—it protects our privacy by making it costly to spy on us," wrote the Boston Globe in a review of the book.The utopian idea is that it could fuel the stagnant economy and redistribute earning potential back to the individual—to the tune of a trillion dollar economic bump by 2020, some experts predict. The more cynical view is that there’s just as much money-making potential in protecting privacy as there is invading it.The privacy “industry” is sprouting startup services to help folks reclaim and protect their online identity. These take the form of data vaults like Personal, or services like the Qiy in the Netherlands and Allow in the UK that help you track, understand, and control your private information online.The market still has a long way to go. How do we know we can trust the startups with all that data? Even if we gain back "control" don't the web companies first have to give up the data for this model to become profitable? To force them to play along would likely take government intervention, and I'm not holding my breath for that."The underlying regulatory, business and technological issues are highly complex, interdependent and ever changing," says a 2011 World Economic Forum report. We're talking laws, regulations, technical infrastructure, and to some degree, even consumer demand to change the status quo.
The thing is, if we stop "paying" Google and Facebook with data, we're going to have to pay them with something else. Like, say, actual money. The hard truth could be that the too-good-to-be-true free fun internet is just that: too good to be true. The majority of people aren't losing sleep over the current state of affairs; only a tiny percentage of people take even the basic precautions to protect their privacy online.What might help shake things up is if we had a better idea what our information is actually worth. People are starting to sense it’s worth a lot: The new data-rich features continuously rolling out from Web 2.0 companies, and the frantic backlash against online government surveillance have raised eyebrows. But actual numbers elude us. How much would you sell your Facebook for? What about Gmail?A New York student tried to answer that question by selling his personal data on Kickstarter. Federico Zannier "violated his own privacy," compiled loads of data, made some awesome visualizations with it and launched a Kickstarter proposing to sell it all for two dollars a day. “It might sound crazy," he admitted. "But so is giving all our data away for free."The notion of taking control of our own data is starting to take hold. We've increasingly come out of the dark about how Big Tech is using our data, and just how much information they have. In the "I give you my identity, you give me cool free stuff" equation, privacy is the insurance policy. Each time Graph Search or Google Glass or any new feature uses Big Data to provide a cool new service at the cost of being creepy privacy violators, it's hedging its bets.Eventually one will the be straw that breaks the consumer’s back, and we'll start to demand a piece of the data-filled pie.
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