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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

> But I figure everyone knew this about 5 years ago if not earlier.

This is something that keep surprising me. This year we had stories after stories against facebook. But nothing unexpected. Only about things we said again and again would happen, for years. We wrote about it. We discussed about it with friends.

But apparently, being loud and clear about something very obvious is not enough. When things are too good to be true, people will want to keep believing it is. All you have to do to keep the frogs in is to raise the temperature slowly enough so that there is no outrage.

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I hate that frog analogy. People always use it as shorthand for "small changes over time go unnoticed" but in the actual experiment, the frogs were basically lobotomized.

So how are we lobotomized? One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important. They are convinced of this while Google and Facebook mine it to no end and the NSA stores pretty much everything you do in Utah. So maybe you don't think it's important, but Some very big players who have a lot more money and knowledge sure do.

> One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important.

When I'm wandering through my yard watering plants, I like to imagine a world where our personal data, or more precisely access to it, is treated more like mineral rights today.

Companies would be required to pay a small micro-payment royalty anytime your data was used to make them money, and you would be able to transfer/split the rights just as you could mineral rights today. This micro-payment world would supplant the current "your data is the price of admission" world we live in.

We do not live in a "your data is the price of admission" world. We live in a "your data is extra gravy we monetize for free because in small quantities it is useless to you but in aggregate it has value so we will extract that value even if you've already paid for the product and legally own it"

With people, I'd say it works like this: you tolerate ever increasing temperature, because escaping it would require you to jump out of the pot and traverse the sea of flames surrounding it, to reach a safe spot. You look around, see the hellscape of roaring fire, and decide that maybe the pot is relatively better place for you.

It's the usual way incentives work. You may or may not have realized this will keep happening, but it doesn't matter either way. At every stage of the process you're presented with a choice - do business with Facebook, or not. And every time, the deal is beneficial to you short-term. In a competitive environment, you usually cannot afford not to take that deal.

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