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Would you pay Facebook a monthly fee to keep your information private?

5 points by fgimenez ↗ HN
The common trope about "free" services is that you pay with your data. In light of the recent Instagram policy changes, I have wondered how much we actually value our data. So, I would like to know, if Facebook was willing to give us a choice to either:

1) pay with personal data

OR

2) pay with an actual monthly fee

Which would you choose?

What would be your upper limit to pay?

Is this for any data service, or would you pay different amounts for Facebook vs Instagram or others?

On a related note, Facebook revenue for 3rd quarter of 2012 was 1.26 Billion [1]. Their total user base is 1.01 Billion [2]. That translates to ~$1.25 quarter/person or ~$0.41 month/person.

Obviously Facebook's value is in huge data sets, i.e. the value of the population is greater than a sum of its parts. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable to possibly be able to pay your way to privacy.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/technology/facebook-revenue-surpasses-forecasts.html?_r=0

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html

7 comments

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oboizt
There is no chance that I would pay Facebook a monthly fee. I love Facebook, but I would start using it differently or jump ship entirely if I suddenly had to start paying for it.
geophile
Would I pay? Possibly, if the company could convince me that they are trustworthy.

Would I pay Facebook? No, they haven't proven very trustworthy.

beagle3
No!

What happens when they fail to process a payment? (e.g., I'm on vacation and Visa decided to block my card due to "suspicious activity" - this HAS happened to me before). Do they cut the proverbial pinky off my data to make me pay and show me they are serious?

bmelton
Having tried to delete my FB account a few times, I would gladly give them a $10 one-time payment to just delete my content and stop mailing me about friend requests and new "people I might know".
jamesjguthrie
I would leave Facebook rather than pay for anything. I'd spend more time on Twitter or Google Plus.
27182818284
This is the idea behind App.net, right? Although they aren't taking wheelbarrows of cash to the bank, they did prove that there is a small (dying?) demand for it.

Heck I even considered joining App.net, but I couldn't quite talk myself into it because, frankly, nothing that Facebook, Instagram, etc, have done anything that I find that terrible. (In that I"m not alone given the 1 billion users)

ixacto
If they can't make the effort to call/text, then why do you even have them as a 'friend'?