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I don’t like 1 because then it creates the issue of price negotiations. How can you put a standard price on privacy? Also, privacy isn’t really the focus of this lawsuit.

And I don’t like 2 because the news isn’t the only industry being negatively affected by Google’s monopoly.

> How can you put a standard price on privacy?

Interesting question, with a lot of scope for answers. Different people have different feelings about privacy. The Nobel prize for economics this year was awarded for auction theory.

Google's ad revenue model implements a form of Vickrey-Grove auction.

https://www.adviso.ca/blog/tech/google-adwords-what-kind-of-...

One possibility for "pricing privacy" is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata. Google already has a vast IT infrastructure for managing every individual's metadata history. The price dividend could simply be an output of that IT infrastructure, paid to users in some form.

> is for google to compensate users for their metadata using a price that is derived from the commercial gain yielded from harvesting the metadata

But then the compensation users receive depends on whether Google gets a good deal or not, and it still leaves Google with immense power and control.

And what about the users who value their privacy higher? They might decide not to use Google, but that's only useful if there is an alternative that can actually compete with Google. Maybe the compensation thing will increase Google's costs and make it easier for others to compete, but that seems unfair; why should Google have to compensate users, but not others? Any ruling would have to apply to everyone, because that's how common law systems work. So if everyone has to compensate users, then no one will gain an advantage over Google. So the end result is just that Google makes less money while still maintaining their monopoly, and innovation doesn't happen.

As a user, I consider myself compensated for my metadata harvesting by the fusion of that data into products I use.

Assistant knows a hell of a lot about me and does a pretty decent job keeping up with what I ask of it.

The human right to privacy, like other human rights, should not be saleable.

It's not commonly one of the inalienable rights. In fact some degree of un-privacy is required in order to be a citizen anywhere. And if some private property like your metadata is not sellable, is it really yours?

I disagree strongly. Look at the 3rd and 4th amendments. They are rooted in privacy. The problem is at the time such rights were being enumerated, such as done by the founding fathers in America, they never imagined a world in which a third party would read every letter you send to another party, a world where a man who chooses not to identify himself in a city he's never been to would be tracked with cameras and facial recognition, a world where camera automatons automatically catalog his whereabouts based on cameras & license plates, a world where he has on him at essentially all times in order to function in society a tracker that records his location data to be sent off to a powerful third party with ties to government intelligence agencies for analysis.

I find it greatly detached from the reality of what is known about the historical personalities that framed the constitution to imagine anything other than them being absolutely horrified.

Privacy has been an assumed right for a LONG time. And if you, right now, went up to someone on the street and offered them $20 to learn their GPS whereabouts for a day, to learn what their voice sounds like and record it, to learn what their face looks like and be able to search it in photos, to learn when they are menstruating, what kind of condoms they like to buy, who all their friends are, who they hook up with, and where they live, hiw many kids they have and where they go to school, I assert that you would find the vast majority of the population would be deeply offended you even had the audacity to ask such a thing, and a few might even call the police.

Privacy is deeply ingrained in our basic social interactions and assumed by most. I think most people just don't have a clue how much it's being invaded because the collectors of such information are careful to hide it behind free gifts, and bury the truth in long, overly broad, complex, highly veiled and obscured EULA's. Then they are more careful still to try and never quite reach the level of using that information in a way that creeps people out by carefully hiding relevant advertisements in enough noise so you won't notice, trading and selling all that information in secret, all while carefully trying to systematically normalize ever more collection and otherwise creepy uses of that data.

>Look at the 3rd and 4th amendments. They are rooted in privacy.

Eh, I don't think that's a reasonable take. They're much more rooted in property rights. I guess you could argue they're just restatements of each other. Privacy applies to your person, while property rights apply to your stuff.

But notice the 3rd amendment specifically says "owner", not resident or something similar. For example, if a apartment building owner wanted to allow a soldier to live in your apartment, you couldn't stop them. Obviously any sane lease wouldn't allow that but my point is you couldn't make a constitutional argument against the government saying it's a violation of your rights.

Also, SCOTUS didn't extend the 4th amendment to imply privacy until 1967. Before then it only applied to property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

I think you raise a valid objection to the interpretation, but I counter that in context, privacy and property rights were one and the same in many ways.

Obviously we are not talking about extremes nor abdolutes. Privacy is already sold, we can't pretend it isnt happening. But regulation can set limits which will move the market out of the grey area

I agree that we need to discuss how inalienable is the right to privacy, especially digital privacy.

But note that you can not sell your organs, because that will (and does on the black market) quickly create highly coercive contracts between individuals, or worse organ robbery. You can, however, donate your organs.

I would see a similar scheme for your digital data. That, most of it cannot be sold [1]. It can be donated by your positive assent, but the receiver (businesses and such) are highly regulated to ensure they don't exploit you or society using that data.

[1] I concede that there might be certain types of data that could be sold, though I cannot think of an example.

I strongly disagree - it is my data and I should be able to do whatever I, not you, want with it - even if it's something extremely stupid like publish my SSN to the internet. I would never use that right, but I will still fight for it.

(needless to say, I completely approve of the idea of government controls on what other companies can do with my data without my consent)

This is kind of like saying “it’s my kidney, and I should be able to do whatever I, not you, want with it”. At some point we just have to draw the line and say we can’t in good conscience commoditize this.

You have reality stars selling a 24/7 video feed of their life, it is pretty hard to argue that the relatively small amount of data I sell to tech giants should be illegal for me to sell.

That's an interesting point. However, reality TV is no different from biographies, which people have been commissioning since time immemorial. The reason why people don't want to ban biographies is that this market has rarely resulted in systematic exploitation of people or harm to society [1]. Moreover, what is being sold is not usually easily processable data about the star, but a persona whose main value comes from how popular the star is, rather than it being an entry in a database.

On the other hand, the main value of your meta data and social media content comes not on it's own, but as part of the larger database. Each individual person could be locally happy with the sale of data (as are sellers of organs on the black market), but globally, you quickly land in a very suboptimal nash equilibrium, which is plagued by coercive relations.

[1] Though recent trends in the reality tv market or adult streaming market are worrying.

If someone wants to sell their kidney for money, why should anybody step in to stop them? Advise them of the short-term benefits and the long-term drawbacks and let them make the decision.

Because we should try to protect people from being exploited. You can use this exact same logic to argue against minimum wage, consumer protection laws, building codes, etc.

If someone can point to tangible harm from Google having your data, comparable to subsistence wages or exploding batteries or subsistence wages, or losing an irreplaceable kidney, that would be relevant.

Because it is obviously an unconscionable incentive that would harm the poor and the desperate for the benefit of those with more money.

The difference is in Google is getting our kidneys for free.

There’s a strong argument that is currently is, just sold for $0. (Or negative money if you consider ads)

These sorts of things remind me of standardized tables for insurance payouts for say an eye vs an arm or leg.

Agreed. I also have the feeling that “selling your privacy” as a commodity is not worth whatever measly dividends that could come of it.

So if I write a diary, I can't decide to publish it later, because I would be violating my own privacy?

funny enough bing does offer coupons for searches and possible redemption prizes such as skype credits, xbox and other stuff... too bad bing sucks

This seems a cure to privacy, not necessarily to antitrust. I think most technologists here believe that the current regulatory and legal environment is wholly inadequate in the face of surveillance capitalism and something like your approach is needed to solve it, but it doesn’t seem to pertain to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint.

Slightly tangential to the original discussion but why can't I just pay them for the service they (or their competitors) provide?

You can. Why don't you?

Lots of businesses have shrunk in the last 20 years. Forcing a big donation to a specific industry seems odd. And can you imagine the whinging if conservatives view the funding as going to left leaning outlets?

Lots of businesses that were direct competitors to the internet.

It makes 0 sense for journalism to shrivel in the age of the internet, it's just dying because its revenue (selling ads, newspaper prices were never what covered expenses) was disconnected from the value it provides.

It's a public service, we should have a way to fund it somehow.

I can agree that funding journalism is important. I'd love more government funded work like PBS and NPR. I just see it as independent of this context.

Journalism is also the only main thing that holds lawmakers to account. Lawmakers are what set the rules by which google et al operate.

?? According to TFA, the complaint does not hinge on user metadata harvesting.

Who evaluates the value of metadata?

> Who evaluates the value of metadata?

Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services.

Google uses the metadata to supercharge its advertising business, which outperforms all other forms of advertising previously invented, because google knows that ads users will click on as a result of analysing their metadata. William Randolph Hearst, Lord Northcliffe, Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch and all the other media barons who went before google could only ever dream of this sort of control.

Google's advertising revenue is in the order of $162 billion per year.

>Currently, users give it away for free, or else they can't access google's services.

More accurate to say that users give it away in exchange for Google's services.

I think your solution is better than what we currently have, but the real question is whether or not it's better than the DOJ's solution. To compare the two, it is necessary to understand what constitutes metadata and how the monetary value of that metadata would be determined.

> require google to either compensate users for harvesting their metadata

This. Youtubers get compensated, why not ordinary users. Search, shopping and social media is work... It's the current year and billions are stuck home , many without even jobs.

> How would this work?

First you need a legal framework that allows users to sell their metadata. GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong. If this data has value (apparently it has a lot of value) , it should be tradeable for services.

Incidentally, i think one of the benefits of the DoJ action is that it gets people talking about solutions that people called 'crazy' until yesterday.

> GDPR makes it illegal, but that's wrong.

Where does the GDPR make that illegal?

Because a business cannot ask for private data in exchange for an unrelated service. The service has to be rendered even in the user does not give them. It can only be part of a contract for which they are necessary

GDPR does not ban selling data. It bans using data as currency.