Thread · 6 tweets · 26 Feb 2021

Many good points from @doctorow about why paying people for their data is a dumb idea that can't die fast enough. I'd like to add two more ↘️

First, inferential hazard. If you're paid for data, presumably lying is a form of theft (at least a breach of terms). So your choices are to be truthful or to abstain. If the truth is fine, then just collect your money. But abstaining from answering can reveal information.

You're a closeted gay kid in a bad environment and the new cool network has an orientation field, do you: a) Come out, possibly at significant risk? b) Lie, which is illegal? c) Abstain, which everyone will understand means (a). Can't fix that? Can't pay for data.

Second, the collective hazard. Having a single centralised entity know a lot about a huge chunk of the population is a threat to democracy. Such data can be leveraged for political gain and for top-down control in ways that have no checks & balances.

This is similar to Cory's point about shared ownership, but scaled up to society. I'm part of the way to thinking that privacy laws should be flipped around: we should forbid individuals from sharing too much. Basically treat releasing data into the network as a pollution issue.

(Evidently, you'd need a corollary being that inducement to share unnecessarily would be treated as tortuous.) It feels backwards because the way we think of privacy as only individualistic is truncated. Social-scale privacy violation is legibility. The law should prevent that.