I have often wondered why it is that we will so willingly give away our personal information for free to some fancy facade of an ad network called social networks when we wouldn’t dream of doing the same to our governments unless demanded by law.

Rick Mahn apparently also wonders the same thing in a post yesterday as he asks

Why can’t they license this data just like they license marketing research data? Why can’t they pay me royalties for my data?  Instead we all give them this valuable information.

I had previously raised the same idea when I suggested that the day may come when we start seeing people trademarking or copyrighting themselves. After all why should Facebook be worth $15Billion off of free information - shouldn’t we be getting a cut of that instead of being guinea pigs for a Google AdSense killer.

Listening to: Sarah McLachlan - Bloom: Remix Album - Fallen (Gabriel & Dresden Anti-Gravity Mix)

Conversation Tags: social networks, advertising networks, Facebook, Google, privacy, copyright, trademark