Ask HN: Could a VPN that pays you work?

[hansy]

Recently I've been thinking a lot about the Facebook VPN that paid its users to collect data from them. There was a ton of backlash around this story, but it left me wondering, could something similar achieve success?

What if there existed some open-source "keylogger" that tracked and monitored everything you did on your desktop. It could provide a dashboard of every action you took. You could maybe edit the things you did or did not want recorded.

Then, if you wanted to get paid, you could sync your data up to some server. Your data would be anonymized and merged with data from all the other users of the service. 3rd party companies could pay to get access or insight for that treasure trove. Whenever that happens, the end-user is paid some small amount for their contribution.

Could it work?

[kjksf]

No, because people generally vastly over-estimate the value of data to advertisers.

Google and Facebook make lots of money because they have near duopoly on online advertising.

They make money by taking a cut of ad impression. Data helps in extracting as much value out of an ad impression by more precise targetting but it's not what makes that business work.

If Facebook or Google gave all that targeting data to me or their advertising clients, that would result in $0 profit and therefore it has $0 value.

Ad network is the business and tracking and demographic data helps to run that business.

Without ad network, all that data is worthless.

As a corollary, Facebook can over-pay a subset of their users to get strategic data. Even if they loose money it makes sense as a sort of insurance (e.g. if VPN data was deciding factor to them purchasing Instagram, it more than paid off for the life time of company).

But you can't sell such data at a price that would make it possible to buy it from people.

Not to mention that your company would be completely villified possibly to the point of attracting attention of Congress.

[jimrhods23]

It could definitely work if you could get more money selling the data to companies than the money you are paying out to your users.

It's been proven time and time again that most people don't really care about their privacy...so finding users for your service will be fairly easy.

If you are tracking this much information, what happens when your users are going to illegal sites?

[al2o3cr]

Ignoring the whole privacy angle, I don't see how you could prevent paying most of the money out to scammers who submit fake logs.