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Comment by abofh | Hacker News Reader

I think you make an interesting strawman, but look in the reverse direction. If companies put the same revenue figure per customer as a pricetag, and then offered a discount of 100% to opt out, would it work?

Have two pennies if you can answer that without a presumptive bias.

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That's simple enough: I don't know. But I get the a vague feeling you are being rhetoric and you think you do? If that's the case, please, just offer up the answer alongside your thoughts leading up to it.

Also I don't think I made a strawman (of any quality) but it's somewhat telling you think I did. To be super lame: I have very conflicted feelings about this topic and no conclusive opinion.

Occam hits the nail on the head - those with valuable data will pay, the value of "privacy" is not a long tail graph, it's a diminishing return.

So the products for the poor are subsidized by the information of the able at a cost to everyone. That doesn't feel sustainable to me - we're barely twenty years into the Google era, and how many hours have been wasted opting out of tracking? How many useful things could have been created for a dollar per user instead of mesothelioma ads?

That the indigent get 'free' service is a byproduct of the fact that companies abuse everyone else to subsidize it.

"Your" data may be worth a buck, but to the right person, targeting "you" is worth a fortune - the value you extract from your Gmail address is the same, the value they extract is not.

There is an adverse selection problem: the users who would pay are probably the richer -and most profitable- ones. The only equilibrium is a very high price to opt out, far above the average revenue per user, and essentially nobody would pay for it.

Insurance has similar problems since a long time: search for Stiglitz and “unraveling“ for literature on the topic.

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