

Would you pay Facebook a monthly fee to keep your information private? - fgimenez

The common trope about "free" services is that you pay with your data. In light of the recent Instagram policy changes, I have wondered how much we actually value our data. So, I would like to know, if Facebook was willing to give us a choice to either:<p>1) pay with personal data<p>OR<p>2) pay with an actual monthly fee<p>Which would you choose?<p>What would be your upper limit to pay?<p>Is this for any data service, or would you pay different amounts for Facebook vs Instagram or others?<p>On a related note, Facebook revenue for 3rd quarter of 2012 was 1.26 Billion [1]. Their total user base is 1.01 Billion [2]. That translates to ~$1.25 quarter/person or ~$0.41 month/person.<p>Obviously Facebook's value is in huge data sets, i.e. the value of the population is greater than a sum of its parts. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem unreasonable to possibly be able to pay your way to privacy.<p>[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/technology/facebook-revenue-surpasses-forecasts.html?_r=0<p>[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html
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geophile
Would I pay? Possibly, if the company could convince me that they are
trustworthy.

Would I pay Facebook? No, they haven't proven very trustworthy.

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27182818284
This is the idea behind App.net, right? Although they aren't taking
wheelbarrows of cash to the bank, they did prove that there is a small
(dying?) demand for it.

Heck I even considered joining App.net, but I couldn't quite talk myself into
it because, frankly, nothing that Facebook, Instagram, etc, have done anything
that I find that terrible. (In that I"m not alone given the 1 billion users)

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jamesjguthrie
I would leave Facebook rather than pay for anything. I'd spend more time on
Twitter or Google Plus.

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oboizt
There is no chance that I would pay Facebook a monthly fee. I love Facebook,
but I would start using it differently or jump ship entirely if I suddenly had
to start paying for it.

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ixacto
If they can't make the effort to call/text, then why do you even have them as
a 'friend'?

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beagle3
No!

What happens when they fail to process a payment? (e.g., I'm on vacation and
Visa decided to block my card due to "suspicious activity" - this HAS happened
to me before). Do they cut the proverbial pinky off my data to make me pay and
show me they are serious?

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bmelton
Having tried to delete my FB account a few times, I would gladly give them a
$10 one-time payment to just delete my content and stop mailing me about
friend requests and new "people I might know".

