Facebook and Others Should Pay Us for Our Data. Here’s One Way.
A California group proposes taxing data companies on their “data dependency.”
It’s obvious that data companies make profits by using their customers’ data without paying for it. What’s not obvious is how to get them to cough up. Ten cents for every dog or cat picture you post on Facebook? Five dollars a month for your searches on Google?
A new white paper from an ad hoc group of scholars says paying individuals based on their usage is the wrong way to go about it. Customer data becomes valuable when billions of bits of it are aggregated and analyzed. So governments should tax data companies based on their dependence on user data, and then, rather than parceling out cash to individuals, they should spend the revenue on projects that serve the general public, the scholars say.