How Our Data Controls Us by Brian Spann

Should We be Compensated for Our Data? 
Recently, Meta (formerly Facebook) has been in the news for its shady business practices. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that this isn’t the first time the company has been accused of mishandling its users’ data and putting profit before people. With 2.85 billion active monthly users, Meta is by far the most popular social networking platform, boasting about of the world’s total population as users. Given this astronomical number of users, one might wonder how exactly Meta makes its money. Much like its big-tech contemporaries––Google, Twitter, Snapchat, Amazon and the like––Meta makes a significant portion of its profit through selling user data. In 2018, sixty-three percent of Meta’s earnings (that’s $35.28 billion out of $55.8 billion) came from its users’ personal information. 
Google is perhaps the other major big-tech company that rivals Meta’s vast data-selling cabal, able to track consumer preferences via its myriad of services, from email to smart phones to internet service providing. According to Washington Monthly, a low-ball estimate of how much money internet-based companies earned for data was $202 per American user. That may seem an insignificant amount of money to some, but the value of user data goes far beyond the monetary. A major consideration worth noting is what exactly big-tech companies do with our data and how it affects us.  
History shows that the selling of user data has allowed for exploitation and manipulation well beyond commerce. Many might remember the Meta and Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2016 that ultimately had a significant effect on the outcome of that year’s election. When targeted advertising can easily snowball into targeted disinformation and manipulation, it shows just how valuable the choices we make on the internet are and the power that our data provides corporations and even foreign governments. Users of the Meta social media platform, Facebook, have been targeted by interested foreign powers––regardless of their political affiliation. Russia’s tactic of appealing to large, yet specific groups by utilizing user data to track trends in user information consumption has even made it possible for Russia to get official news organizations to report on fabricated stories. But this sort of tracking of data user trends is certainly not limited to government espionage.  
To examine how using consumer data can negatively affect smaller demographics of users, Instagram––another Meta-owned company––is an excellent case study. With seventy-two percent of teenagers using the social media platform, there is cause for concern about how their mental health may be detrimentally affected. The recent whistleblower’s accusations against   highlight that there has been explicit internal knowledge about the negative effects on the mental health of teenage girls.  
So, how exactly does this relate to data? To understand this, it is necessary to know how a site like Instagram’s algorithm generates a content feedback loop for its userbase.  When a user likes a post, clicks an ad, or views a page for an extended period of time, Instagram understands this as the user liking the content, and begins to push similar content, along with advertisements for products that align with the user’s preferences. This seemingly innocuous data-driven process can sometimes become dubious when the type of content promoted does harm to those that consume it. In the case on teenage girls, seeing images of celebrities with photoshopped bodies creates the impression that these unrealistic standards are attainable. This, in turn, allows various influencers to sell products that are sometimes harmful––from fast-fashion to detox juices. 
Though some might say that we should be compensated for our data simply because tech companies profit from it, the considerations should be much broader. The driving force of the internet is targeted advertising, and it is an increasingly growing source of revenue, with a predicted amount of 460 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. But beyond that, the collection of data can have broad social ramifications for user-bases. Ultimately, the question of whether or not we should be compensated for our data becomes loaded because of its complicated value. It’s difficult to relegate compensation to a single dollar amount when control of information is more than a simple transaction.