They don’t pay their users, but take our private information and turn it into profit. Kate MacKenzie thinks that’s wrong.
The Setup:
How do Facebook and Google make money? Advertising. What is their product? For Facebook, it’s self generated content, whereby you and I, the users, generate the content that Facebook needs to attract users and to sell advertising. For Google, it’s data; information captured from you when you search online, visit various websites, view or click on advertising.
The Premise:
Facebook and Google are advertising companies. That’s where the revenue and profits come from, but both also collect immense volumes of data from users. Since both companies are crazy profitable based upon their users and not based upon actual product sales, I have a theory.
The Idea:
Facebook and Google should pay us to use their services. The more we use, the more we should get paid. It’s only fair, right?… Wherever we travel online we are being stalked by Google. Whatever we do while on Facebook we generate data and content. Both companies prosper while we users have our privacy violated and used against us with advertising and information designed to manipulate us.
There are no legs in the argument but what a great idea.