I wish I had copies of the decisions handy, but the supreme court appears to not believe that quantity is a quality all its own. That is, until quite recently, the amount of surveillance the police or government could pull off was severely limited by personpower: how many employees they where willing to dedicate. Technological considerations, such as the ability to shove a gps tracking device into a car or use mobile phone tower checkins to get a pretty precise idea of where people have been, have considerably changed this, but the supreme court doesn't seem to think that a change in scale means the law should change. So privacy will probably require support from congress, which is unfortunately filled with the stupid, the venal, and people like Difi who doesn't care a wit about surveillance unless and until she is surveilled.
Also, people are stupid. I saw somewhere -- again I'm missing a reference -- that fb makes on the order of $20-$40 per US user per year. Given the quantity of employees and infrastructure dedicated to monetization via advertising, you'd think they'd be willing to take that much money in exchange for no advertising and come out ahead. So if the US would agree to pay $25/year, we could have ad-free fb (and a fb executive staff motivated by users' needs, where users == you and me, not advertisers.) Unfortunately, people are stupid, so they will never bite. They will, if they can be bothered to care at all, simultaneously bitch about advertising and privacy while being completely unwilling to pay money for services. I have no solution at all for this, but it makes me sad.
Facebook may see more potential profit from advertisers than from consumers.
If Facebook can come up with a way to dramatically increase an advertiser's provable ROI, advertisers will kill each other to get to the front of the line. "You mean we can suck even more money out of Facebook users by knowing even more about them, thereby influencing them even more effectively?" In fact "advertisers" can probably make a good ROI from their Facebook spending without ever showing you an ad in Facebook, just by data mining and tailoring their non-Facebook ads. Just because you don't see an ad doesn't mean you haven't been sold.
If Facebook were $25/year for a no advertising account, would Facebook consumers elbow each other out of the way to pay $50/year for more effective ways to see what their friends ate for breakfast? Probably not. And besides, you'd probably still be sold to advertisers as data per the previous paragraph.
I pay for email and I pay for bookmarks (and I don't have a Facebook account). I have a low grade chronic fear over what will happen when my email and bookmark providers can no longer increase their profit to their satisfaction, or to their investors' or acquierers' satisfaction.
Given the option of keeping the existing model (free and subject to advertising and data mining) or the model that you describe ($25/year but no advertising or data mining), I'm convinced that there are very few people (in my set of "friends", at least) who would pay up.
The majority of my (very diverse) circle of friends simply don't care. Some of them act like they do, but they don't care enough to pay $25/year to stop it from happening. The exceptions are mostly tech/I.T. people like myself. Much like the NSA spying in general, the average person just doesn't seem to give a damn.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 19.9 ms ] threadI wish I had copies of the decisions handy, but the supreme court appears to not believe that quantity is a quality all its own. That is, until quite recently, the amount of surveillance the police or government could pull off was severely limited by personpower: how many employees they where willing to dedicate. Technological considerations, such as the ability to shove a gps tracking device into a car or use mobile phone tower checkins to get a pretty precise idea of where people have been, have considerably changed this, but the supreme court doesn't seem to think that a change in scale means the law should change. So privacy will probably require support from congress, which is unfortunately filled with the stupid, the venal, and people like Difi who doesn't care a wit about surveillance unless and until she is surveilled.
Also, people are stupid. I saw somewhere -- again I'm missing a reference -- that fb makes on the order of $20-$40 per US user per year. Given the quantity of employees and infrastructure dedicated to monetization via advertising, you'd think they'd be willing to take that much money in exchange for no advertising and come out ahead. So if the US would agree to pay $25/year, we could have ad-free fb (and a fb executive staff motivated by users' needs, where users == you and me, not advertisers.) Unfortunately, people are stupid, so they will never bite. They will, if they can be bothered to care at all, simultaneously bitch about advertising and privacy while being completely unwilling to pay money for services. I have no solution at all for this, but it makes me sad.
If Facebook can come up with a way to dramatically increase an advertiser's provable ROI, advertisers will kill each other to get to the front of the line. "You mean we can suck even more money out of Facebook users by knowing even more about them, thereby influencing them even more effectively?" In fact "advertisers" can probably make a good ROI from their Facebook spending without ever showing you an ad in Facebook, just by data mining and tailoring their non-Facebook ads. Just because you don't see an ad doesn't mean you haven't been sold.
If Facebook were $25/year for a no advertising account, would Facebook consumers elbow each other out of the way to pay $50/year for more effective ways to see what their friends ate for breakfast? Probably not. And besides, you'd probably still be sold to advertisers as data per the previous paragraph.
I pay for email and I pay for bookmarks (and I don't have a Facebook account). I have a low grade chronic fear over what will happen when my email and bookmark providers can no longer increase their profit to their satisfaction, or to their investors' or acquierers' satisfaction.
Given the option of keeping the existing model (free and subject to advertising and data mining) or the model that you describe ($25/year but no advertising or data mining), I'm convinced that there are very few people (in my set of "friends", at least) who would pay up.
The majority of my (very diverse) circle of friends simply don't care. Some of them act like they do, but they don't care enough to pay $25/year to stop it from happening. The exceptions are mostly tech/I.T. people like myself. Much like the NSA spying in general, the average person just doesn't seem to give a damn.