alt Hacker NewsWe should tax data.
Hear me out. Google, Meta, etc. offer "free" services to a significant portion of the world's population. This isn't charitable work. They do this for data that makes them money. Lots of money. Data has real monetary value, but governments don't treat it as such. Few, if any, jurisdictions view data exports as taxable. It's simply not tracked. If data collection isn't tracked, how can one realistically enforce privacy standards?
If we tax data, then we'll have an incentive to track how data is being used and corporations will suddenly have a direct financial interest in not just casually collecting data if they don't need to. Such taxes should be gauged to be tolerable for Google and Meta, but high enough to make companies who make their money via other avenues (e.g. Smart TV sellers) to take a pass on data collection.
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I can imagine this having negative consequences for open platforms, such as Wikipedia, Bluesky, Mastodon, Common Crawl, etc. It could have implications for Stack Exchange keeping their datasets downloadable, and general API availability of most platforms. How would this make provisions for keeping the things that are currently free to access still free? People are already buckling under the weight of subscription fatigue, and I can only see this making that worse. I'm willing to give up a lot for the sake of privacy, but the people who would be most affected by such a change could stand to lose a lot more.
I am not sure what the point of this is.
If they are exporting data for sale, we can tax the value they are selling it at. If they are using data to generate ad revenue, we can tax that.
If we want to enforce privacy standards, we can make liability laws around sharing that data with third parties; we can make it harder for users to consent to the sharing of data by making users decide and approve on a case by case basis.
There is so much to do before exotic schemes, for instance way less intrusive things like making it so privacy policies legally survive bankruptcy.
How does that work for non-profit web crawls like the Common Crawl Foundation?
I like the overall direction, but how to tax it without screwing over hobbyist archivists aka data hoarders? That is, how to assess the value of some datastore, somehow distinguishing between personal preference profiles, random LLM software slop and, say, vintage anime collections?
Right, because if you want a solid solution to a problem, you ask governments to tax it! Always works.
Why not just tax the profits of the data companies?
If we start taxing data, why not tax any other underlying asset a company makes profits from?