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Imagine owning a large acreage of rural property with lots of trees and forest. You’re a nature person, and you consider the land you own to be a sanctuary for animals.
One day you hike to a place on your property you haven’t been for years. You stumble upon loggers on your property — and clear cut land. They’ve been using new technology that’s ultra quiet and low impact, making it almost impossible to notice.
Enraged, you confront the company. They explain they’re justified, you don’t use the property, they had minimal impact on the ecosystem, and that you actually bought the lumber they harvested for the new garage you built last summer.
Of course, you would feel cheated. You were robbed, and essentially bought back a product made from what was stolen from you.
But, this is how the Internet works. Social media companies, data firms, and marketers, obtain your personal behaviour data based on your internet user activity in order to better target ads to you. They know what you like and what you want to buy, and they’re getting better at using our data in order to better profit off of us.
Social media companies justify this, saying it allows them to offer their platforms to users for free.
But tech pioneer and philosopher Jaron Lanier believes internet companies have created a manipulation machine that erodes a user's dignity. He proposes a new digital data economic system known as Data Dignity.
Data Dignity is based on internet users being compensated for offering up their data to companies. It also proposes that users pay for online content, mainly in reference to access to social media or companies like Google. However, the costs are offset by what a user will profit off their data.
The following video goes into more detail on the concept:
