I’ve stated many times already that I think Facebook would easily qualify as the largest sweatshop in the history of the world, except that even those grimy outfits actually pay a wage, if not close to a living one. Sure, we get some degree of utility from Mark Zuckerberg’s company in exchange for the free content we create daily from our previously private data and ideas, but that doesn’t seem like such a bargain. We’re really just worker bees who get none of the honey.

In a Pacific-Standard piece, Jason Lanier holds forth on this same topic, suggesting such information-rich companies pay us for our data, which they handsomely profit from. It’d be awfully hard to arrange and institute but would embody much more of a free-market spirit than the model we currently have. The opening:

Big Data is actually made of people, like “Soylent Green.’’ Big Data does not come from angels or some supernatural realm or a single mathematician’s mind. We need to accept the fact that the cloud programs that are starting to run the world are actually made of the activities of large numbers of people whose behavior—whether online searches, or customer reviews, or Facebook postings or tweets, or even crossing the street—is being observed by computers and used to increase the power of networks. To deny that means stealing from very large numbers of people.

My solution: Pay the people from whom the data is gathered. That gets tricky and there has to be some real innovation. But the principle is simple. And it’s a fair, ethical solution to technologically degraded employment.

How to set a value on this data? In essence, we would ask: If we didn’t include data from this person, how much worse would the translation be, how much worse would the robot function, how much worse would the city be designed if we hadn’t been able to observe that person’s behavior? Based on an approximation of that value, people could price their data—high if they want privacy. Or somebody could be a “data slut’’ and offer all their data for very low cost. That would create individual freedom.•