We All Work for Facebook

YouTube, which is part of Google, runs more ads, while collecting valuable data about the viewing patterns of users like my kids.

"It's impacting AI's ability to make a broad impact on the economy." Writing in the Harvard Business Review with Jaron Lanier, a prominent critic of social media, Weyl argues that if Americans were paid for our data, many would make $500 to $1,000 a year the way things stand now.

"First of all, it has got a hell of a lot of work almost for free, and it has made sure that we, far from struggling against it, would seek that work as the best thing online." Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and a much-cited example of the utopian promise of collective online work.

The idea of demanding pay for data depends on internet users coming together in something like a labor union or a craft guild, bargaining with data buyers and using strike threats to win contracts.

Trebor Scholz, a culture and media scholar at The New School who writes about paid and unpaid digital labor, points to MIDATA, a Switzerland-based nonprofit cooperative that collects data on everything from blood tests to debit card usage, and then allows people to determine how their own information used.

Big tech companies frequently propose organizing these kinds of projects, but are met by local communities with well-justified skepticism, since it's easy to glean information on individuals from collections of supposedly anonymous data.

"They can then pass on data models to those companies. That means that they are able to financialize the data, but not the raw data. They could never identify a person." Ultimately, any fight for digital workers' rights depends partly on action by government, on the municipal to the national and international levels-to affirm rights to personal data, force companies to improve their terms of service, change copyright law, and grant labor protections for data creators.

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