Probably already everyone knows or at least suspects that companies on the internet are using for free our personal data. Do you remember when you were looking for good pair of hiking boots on Google and almost imminently you start seeing promoted posts about nice shoes discounts on Facebook and Twitter.
Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company. This happens not only with search requests but with almost everything. I'm pretty sure that your Uber's trips, photos on Samsung cloud or liked songs are being collected, analyzed, formatted and eventually sold to other companies.
I completely understand this business model and partly support it, otherwise all service which I mentioned will become paid one or much more expensive. Even so, you can opt out of using Google search and Chrome in favor of Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
In reality it is really hard or even almost impossible to stop services collect your data. If I can't stop them from using my personal data, let's make them pay for it!
I really want to see such application where:
I can control who can consume my data and which particular type of data. Let's say I agree that Google can use my search requests for internal use but I prohibit it from reselling it to other companies.
Companies should start paying for usage of my personal data. For example every time Facebook re-sell my likes and viewed post to 3rd party companies it should pay me some percentage from it (if I agreed to these terms before).
I agree it looks quite ambitious and probably impossible to implement (primarily because companies will never agree to such terms in favor of continue providing free services), but I believe it is really important to start talking and shaping the way of working with personal data in the future now.
That's a great idea AF, there you go Patrick write a program that randomly searches all day and night. If enough people use it maybe google would get bogged down and there data would be worthless.
patrick.net
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