Would you pay Facebook a monthly fee to keep your information private?

5 points

13 years ago

The common trope about "free" services is that you pay with your data. In light of the recent Instagram policy changes, I have wondered how much we actually value our data. So, I would like to know, if Facebook was willing to give us a choice to either:

1) pay with personal data

2) pay with an actual monthly fee

Which would you choose?

What would be your upper limit to pay?

Is this for any data service, or would you pay different amounts for Facebook vs Instagram or others?

On a related note, Facebook revenue for 3rd quarter of 2012 was 1.26 Billion [1]. Their total user base is 1.01 Billion [2]. That translates to ~$1.25 quarter/person or ~$0.41 month/person.

Obviously Facebook's value is in huge data sets, i.e. the value of the population is greater than a sum of its parts. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable to possibly be able to pay your way to privacy.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/technology/facebook-revenue-surpasses-forecasts.html?_r=0

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html

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