Response Magic 
FACEBOOK. Instagram. Google. Twitter. All
services we rely on — and all services we believe we don’t have to pay for. Not
with cash, anyway. But ad-financed Internet platforms aren’t free, and the
price they extract in terms of privacy and control is getting only costlier.
A recent Pew Research
Center pollshows
that 93 percent of the public believes that “being in control of who can get
information about them is important,” and yet the amount of information we
generate online has exploded and we seldom know where it all goes.
Facebook and other social
networking sites that collect vast amounts of user data are financed by ads.
Just this week Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, announced
plans to open users’
feeds to more advertisers.
The dirty secret of this
business model is that Internet ads aren’t worth much.
Ask Ethan Zuckerman, who in
the 1990s helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s earliest
ad-financed sites with user-generated content.
He even helped invent the
pop-up ad because corporations were wary of the user content appearing next to
their ads.
He came to regret both:
the pop-up and the ad-financed business model.
The former is annoying but
it’s the latter that is helping destroy the fabric of a rich, pluralistic
Internet.
Mr. Zuckerman points out that Facebook makes about 20 cents per
user per month in profit.
This is a pitiful sum,
especially since the average user spends an impressive 20 hours on Facebook every month, according to
the company.
This paltry profit margin
drives the business model: Internet ads are basically worthless unless they are
hyper-targeted based on tracking and extensive profiling of users.
This is a bad bargain,
especially since two-thirds of American adults don’t want
ads that target them
based on that tracking and analysis of personal behavior.
This way of doing business
rewards huge Internet
platforms, since ads that are worth so little can support only
companies with hundreds of millions of users.
Ad-based businesses
distort our online interactions. People flock to Internet platforms because
they help us connect with one another or the world’s bounty of information — a
crucial, valuable function. Yet ad-based financing means that the companies
have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers,
instead of letting us connect as we wish.
Many users think their
feed shows everything that their friends post. It doesn’t.
Facebook runs its
billion-plus users’ newsfeed by a
proprietary, ever-changing algorithm that decides what we see.
If Facebook didn’t have to
control the feed to keep us on the site longer and to inject ads into our stream,
it could instead offer us control over this algorithm.
Many nonprofits and civic groups that were initially thrilled about
their success in using Facebook to reach people are now despondent as their
entries are less and less likely to reach people who “liked” their posts unless
they pay Facebook to help boost their updates.
What to do? It’s simple:
Internet sites should
allow their users to be the customers. I would, as I bet many others would,
happily pay more than 20 cents per month for a Facebook or a Google that did
not track me, upgraded its encryption and treated me as a customer whose
preferences and privacy matter.
Many people say that no
significant number of users will ever pay directly for Internet services.
But that is because we are
misled by the mantra that these services are free. With growing awareness of
the privacy cost of ads, this may well change.
Millions of people pay for
Netflix despite the fact that pirated copies of many movies are available free.
We eventually pay for ads,
anyway, as that cost is baked into products we purchase.
A seamless, secure
micropayment system that spreads a few pennies at a time as we browse a social
network, up to a preset monthly limit, would alter the whole landscape for the
better.
There are other obstacles.
Someone has to build those viable, privacy-preserving micropayment systems —
but Silicon Valley is known for its entrepreneurial spirit, right? And we’re
not starting from scratch.
Micropayment systems that
would allow users to spend a few cents here and there, not be so easily tracked
by all the Big Brothers, and even allow personalization were developed in the
early days of the Internet.
Big banks and large
Internet platforms didn’t show much interest in this micropayment path, which
would limit their surveillance abilities. We can revive it.
Our payments could
subsidize access in poorer countries the way ads already do.
If even a quarter of
Facebook’s 1.5 billion users were willing to pay $1 per month in return for not
being tracked or targeted based on their data, that would yield more than $4
billion per year — surely a number worth considering.
Facebook’s chief
executive, Mark Zuckerberg, seems to
have plenty of money, but I’d like to give him some of mine.
I want to pay a small fee
for the right to keep my information private and to be able to hear from the
people I want — not the sponsored-content makers I want to avoid. I want to be
a customer, not a product.
Mr. Zuckerberg has
reportedly spent more than $30 million to buy the homes around his in Palo
Alto, Calif., and more than
$100 million for a
secluded parcel of land in Hawaii.
He knows privacy is worth
paying for. So he should let us pay a few dollars to protect ours.
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