| > actually works and isn't gamed The feeling that law is useless is good for Big Social because it helps uphold the status quo. In practice, companies don’t like doing things that are obviously illegal, especially criminal. For example, do phone operators sell your phone records? No, because the penalty is 10 years in prison. One employee with good ethics or bad mood is enough to land top management in jail. Does “records” mean actual contents of the call? No, it means simply “whom you called and when”. Does social media contain much more sensitive personal information than phone records? Absolutely. If the law does not penalize selling that information, it only means the law is inadequate, not that it is useless. > I don't think they would just say "oh, well" and actually do the hard work it would take to make all their users paying customers. If they won’t, someone else will. It can even be you or me. This is the beauty of free market where honest competition is possible. |
This is a different proposal from what you made before. This proposed law would not require users to be paying customers (so apps could still have a free tier). It would just require that sensitive personal information gained from apps not be sold to third parties for profit, as is now required for phone records. The effect would be similar, since the ad-supported business model largely relies on such selling of information. But it would be a narrower restriction, because there are many apps with free tiers that do not use the ad-supported business model.
That said, the obvious way to game this law is the definition of "sensitive information". This was never an issue for phone operators because their users are already their customers; people pay for phone service. So there is no incentive for phone operators to try to monetize whatever sensitive information they could harvest, so for them "sensitive information" basically means "whatever information you collect from phone calls" and there is no pressure to manipulate that definition. But it would be a huge issue for Big Social Media, and I would expect them to work very hard to gerrymander the definition of "sensitive information" so it doesn't really restrict their operations.
If they failed and a law like this got passed, would they then actually do the hard work to make all their users paying customers? I still doubt it, but perhaps somewhat less than for the broader law I took you to be proposing before.