隐私保护制度 为了隐私保护 我宁愿付费使用Facebook

为了隐私保护 我宁愿付费使用Facebook  

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 Inter platforms aren’t free
and the price they extract in terms of privacy and control is getting only costlier.
A recent Pew Research Center poll shows 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 neorking 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 Inter ads aren’t worth much. Ask Ethan Zuckerman
who in the 1990s helped found
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 Inter.
Facebook等大量蒐集用户数据的社交网站都以广告为主要收入来源。Facebook旗下的Instagram本周刚刚宣布，打算把用户信息流开放给更多广告主。这种商业模式有一个不可告人的祕密：互联网广告不值多少钱。不妨问问伊桑·朱克曼( Ethan Zuckerman)，他在1990年代帮助创办的，是最早的靠用户产生内容、靠广告获取收入的网站之一。他甚至帮忙发明了弹窗广告，因为一些公司很在意它们的广告旁边出现什么样的用户原创内容。他对推出这两样东西——即弹窗广告和以广告为基础的商业模式——感到后悔。前者很烦人，而后者则正在帮助摧毁一个丰富、多元的网络世界的基本结构。
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 pany. This paltry profit margin drives the business model: Inter ads are basically worthless unless they are hyper-targeted based on tracking and extensive profiling of users. This is a bad bargain
especially since o-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 Inter platforms
since ads that are worth so little can support only panies with hundreds of millions of users.
Ad-based businesses distort our online interactions. People flock to Inter 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 panies 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: Inter 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 Inter 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 neork
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 Inter. Big banks and large Inter 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.