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0On Yang's Data Dividend Project and the Push to Treat Data as Property by@kunalOn Yang's Data Dividend Project and the Push to Treat Data as Property
A former candidate for 2020 presidential elections, Andrew Yang wants big tech platforms like Facebook and Google to pay its users for collecting, storing and using data. This effectively means that if his plans are successful, Facebook will have to pay you when you upload a post or Google will have to pay you to record your search and YouTube history to target ads.
This project, named the Data Dividend Project, fights to establish โyour-data-as-your-propertyโ right and give you the ability to control its use. Itโs basically like allowing someone to track what you do on the Internet and push ads to you based on it or even sell that data while you get a few bucks in your wallet. In other words, youโre selling your privacy.
Sounds bad, right?
The thing is, these tech companies have a ton of your personal data already, for free.
This project will just push them to pay for it.
โWeโre completely outgunned by tech companiesโฆโ
Companies like Facebook have been so profitable just because theyโve your data. They know what youโre looking for on the Internet. Brands like Amazon invest heavily in Facebook ads because Facebook knows what youโre searching for. Through a little pixel called a web beacon.
Facebook asks website owners to install this little code on their websites so they can track what the user is doing on his site.
For example, if you search for โnotebookโ on Amazon, Facebook gets to know it through the pixel. Why would Amazon let Facebook add a pixel on their site? Because they get to target users with ads and access extensive demographic information of their visitors. Back to that example, when Facebook found youโre searching for notebooks, itโll show you ads around notebooks from Amazon. Since youโre actually interested in buying notebooks, itโs highly likely that you end up buying it. Amazon gains from this.
Plus, Amazon can now see where itโs buyers live, what age group they belong to, what are their gender and more information. Because Facebook already has this data. This helps in personalising Amazon.
This has grown so much that Facebook records your data even if you havenโt ever had a Facebook or Instagram account.
That isnโt fair, right? But you can do nothing because they have permission to do it which you only gave them. Remember clicking accept button against their โterms and conditionsโ? These companies are too big for a regular user to fight against. And hereโs where Yangโs Data Dividend Project comes to play. This project has a team of legal experts who takes your permission to deal with big tech companies and fight to establish data-as-your-property right on your behalf.
Andrew Yang told The Verge โWe are completely outgunned by tech companies. Weโre just presented with these terms and conditions. No one ever reads them. You just click on them and hope for the best. And unfortunately, the best has not happened.โ
The California Consumer Privacyย Act
Yangโs Data Dividend Project works under the CCPA, short for the California Consumer Privacy Act. Introduced in early 2020, the CCPA grants netizens comprehensive data ownership and privacy rights like these:
- Right to knowย whether a company has your personal details. And if it has, you can ask them what information was collected and how.
- Right to deleteย any sort of personal information a company has. Except if the information has to be stored to complete a transaction with the user or to prevent fraudulent or illegal activity.R
- Right to opt-outย from the business selling his/her personal information to third parties๏ปฟ๏ปฟ
- Right of non-discrimination means you shouldnโt be treated differently if you choose to delete your personal information.
You can learn more about your rights under the CCPAย here.
What does data as your propertyย mean?
Treating personal data as property means you can make money off it. Itโs like youโre allowing Google to spy on what you do on the web and in return, you get paid. This is bad. But considering tech companies already track us so much for free, forcing them to pay a fee to do it might actually reduce this.
Well, that was my opinion. Some say data as a property isnโt the right approach because this incentivises users to sell away their privacy instead of protecting it.
A VICE article argues that this approach is pretty ineffective. Letโs assume Facebook pays $100 to a million users for their data each year. Now that means they have to spend $100 Million a year. In 2018, Facebookโs revenue was $70.7 billion and it had $54.8 billion on hand. Facebook even went through theย $5 billion fine by the FTCย easily in 2019. So $100 million is no big deal for them.
The VICE article mentions a dividend Alaska pays its residents, which is funded by the oil extraction industry. Why doesnโt data be treated that way? Take a share of the profit from tech giants like Facebook and give users an annual dividend.
I recommend reading VICEโs article onย Andrew Yangโs Data Dividend Isnโt Radical, Itโs Useless.
selling privacy for money isnโt new
Itโs not like someoneโs data has never been treated like a property they can earn from. Facebook had an app called Study From Facebook that works on this concept. It pays you some bucks for answering some basic survey questions and hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for that.
Thereโs also a similar one from Google. Itโs called Google Opinion Rewards. The app shows you some surveys and gives you money because โYour opinion is valuableโ. This one has more than 10 million downloads on the Play Store alone.
Both of these apps have two things in common:
- users money to get their opinion or basically personal data.
- They pay a really low amount. A reviewer of the Facebook study app said he got just $5 in 4 weeks.
- They donโt pay for data theyโve already collected.
The Facebook Study app is even restricted to some invited users, which means not anyone can download the app start earning they have to be one of the shortlisted people.
This means even if we get money from Facebook, the amount will be relatively low. Maybe $10 or even less. And thatโs not worth your privacy.
What youโve to do
When you sign up for the Data Dividend Project, you give permission to Yangโs team of legal experts to fight on your behalf to get this project implemented. This is one of the rights you get under the CCPA, to allow any third party to advocate any project related to your data.
And thatโs why this Data Dividend Project is currently restricted to only Californians. But you if you live in the US, you can still sign up and theyโll notify you whenever they expand to your state.
To sign up for the movement, you just have to enter these things:
- phone number verified via an OTP
- the email ids you have registered with Facebook, Google, Twitter etc so they know what are your accounts and how much worth is your data there.
- PayPal Email address so they can eventually send you the money.
- some basic information like name and address
After doing this, the DDP team will approach tech companies on your and otherโs (who signed up) behalf to you your data dividend. They say they may have to go the courtroom as well depending on how these companies react. For now, we donโt have a word on the progress of the project. But DDP website says they will give an update sometime in August.
Also, you donโt have to pay anything, but to keep thingโs going, the DDP team is testing some options including retaining a percentage of the final amount youโre supposed to get from your data.
Yang imagines the day to be great when tens of thousands of people will get their first data dividend. Maybe $10, $20 or maybe $100 into their PayPal wallet. He aims to mobilise a million people in California to support this project. Well, I donโt think this will be an easy journey.
Will you sign up for the Data Dividend Project if it was running in your state or country?
Illustration byย Dark Cube Studio onย Dribbble
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