No, what we have to look at is economic incentives. There can never be enough police to shut down activities that align with economic motives. This is why prohibitions don't work. No amount of regulation can keep up with perverse incentives, given the pace of innovation. This is also why almost no one was prosecuted for financial fraud connected with the Great Recession.

The only effective point to intervene, to fight creepiness, is in the fundamental economic model. If the economic model tends to bring out noncreepy developments, then only true creeps will want to be creepy. [...]

Suppose, though, that any cloud computer operator, whether it is a social network, an eclectic Wall Street scheme, or even a government agency, is required to pay you for useful data that is derived from you. Any Siren Server will then have a full-fledged commercial relationship with you. You will have intrinsic, inalienable commercial rights to data that wouldn't exist without you.

This means, for instance, that Facebook would be sending you little payments when data derived automatically from you helped some business successfully pitch a friend of yours to buy something. If your face shows up in an ad, you get paid. If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you'd get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data.

Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what accounting will do when money is at stake.

Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we've been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.

[...] Are you still keeping people in the center? Is it still all about the people? Are you really avoiding the lazy trapdoor of falling back into thinking of people as components and a central server as being the only point of view for defining efficiency or testing efficacy?

We're still analyzing Eric's model and the results it is generating, but a few things can already be said. One is that adding a cost to information does not blow up this type of model. Insurance companies do not go out of business. In fact, there appear to be states in "paid-for" information models in which insurance companies do well.

A universal stipend, without means testing or any other qualifier, would be such a literal, blunt form of redistribution that it might become less vulnerable to the traditional pitfalls of corruption and power mongering. At least that is the thinking I have heard expressed in the valley.

I am skeptical. I worry that Siren Servers are simply too effective at targeting people with predatory offers of credit or other abuses. Also, technological advances do make some things cheaper, but other things would become more expensive. [...]