By Dennis D. McDonald

One of my early blog posts (2005!) was Proposed: A Choice-Based Approach to Controlling the Commercial Exploitation of Personal Data. In that and subsequent posts about the topic “personal data ownership” I discussed how individuals should be able to decide whether or not to license their personal information. In other words, you want to know about my personal web usage and communication details? Fine — pay me.

Fast forward to 2021. We now have Apple and Facebook arguing about whether Apple’s infrastructure should be freely available to subsidize Facebook’s business model, or whether users of that infrastructure should be fee to opt in or out of Facebook’s business model. Already popular information on how to “opt out” is appearing, a good one being the Washington Post’s Facebook now has to ask permission to track your iPhone. Here’s how to stop it.

One problem that Facebook has is that it has never been open and honest about how it uses individuals’ information — who bought it, how it was used, and how much was paid. Some people care about this while others don’t. Facebook’s negative reaction to Apple’s giving its users more control over access to their own data suggests, however, that Facebook fears that such user control is counter to its own business model which rests on buying and selling user information without direct user knowledge.

I’m not suggesting that Facebook does not provide a useful service. Even though I deleted my Facebook account long ago I did so not because I had any unrealistic expectation of privacy but because of all the junk, irrelevant advertising, and misinformation I had to wade through to use it productively.

Perhaps what Facebook should do regarding its Apple users who opt out of its tracking is simply to begin charging those who opt out a small monthly fee to make up for the revenue lost from the inability to sell targeted advertising. This would be similar to video streaming services that offer two tiers — one with ads and another without ads, the latter costing more per month.

Everyone would be happy from such an arrangement:

1. Users who want to continue to use Facebook for free would continue to have their data secretly harvested and sold to enable targeted advertising.

2. Users who want to shut off tracking would pay for the privilege of doing so - coupled perhaps with a reduction in the number of ads they are exposed to.

3. Facebook would make money from subscriptions.

4. Apple could take. cut for serving as a middleman.

What do you think?

Copyright (c) 2021 by Dennis D. McDonald

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