Computer scientist and writer Jaron Lanier, known for being the pioneer of virtual reality, during the CNBC talk show Squawk Alley, said that “Facebook should pay people” to overcome their problem with the management of personal data.
The social network should turn into a sort of Netflix or Brave, where the user pays to use the content and at the same time is rewarded for the data collected through the use of the content.
“People pay for the use of services and are rewarded for the data.”
This is because, according to Lanier, people have realised how some companies use and manipulate their data in order to obtain economic benefits, without offering transparency on the mechanisms for collecting and storing them.
Recent news about Facebook’s cryptocurrency, Libra, has rekindled the debate on user privacy. The Senate of the United States of America also intervened by asking Facebook to provide more information on how it would handle the financial data of users in possession of the Libra coin.
Facebook: an incentive-based business model
When asked if companies like Facebook and Google need to change something in their business, Lanier answers that these companies need to completely change their business model, transforming it into an incentive model, where the users with their active participation also produce wealth for themselves. Only in this way does he believe that people can regain trust.
In fact, he believes that this new model can even help to reduce unemployment.
The computer scientist, who is Microsoft’s chief technology officer prime unifying scientist, is known for his aversion to an economic model applied by some web companies in which – in his opinion – the contents of users are exploited to do business.
It is a model applied in particular by social networks and that led Lanier in 2018 to write the book “Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now”.