Posted on by Art Powell

The issue of internet privacy is easy to solve and in a way which should appeal to those who claim to believe in a free market economy.

Governments should pass legislation that all computer data should be publicly available without charge. This means we should be able to see what information about us is available and any business should also have access the same information. We should also be able to see who has accessed the information.

We would be responsible for deciding what personal information to make public realizing that it would be out there forever. We would also see who was using that information and would be responsible for protecting ourselves from exploitation.

Those of us who live in small communities are already used to others, including some business people, knowing quite a bit about us. It is now a question of scale. Once upon a time I worked on a small town newspaper in Ontario. As the junior reporter one of my duties was to write obituaries. Each day at lunch the elderly couple with whom I boarded wanted to know who had died. They also wanted to know which funeral home as Conservatives and Liberals were buried by separate undertakers

We often want and expect governments to protect us from people who would exploit us. But in the long run we all have to take responsibility for our behavior and our own protection. We are the ones who take the consequences.

Internet privacy is an issue because some people can make lots of money if they have exclusive access to the data. Making data free would change the dynamics of social media and some of it might become subscription based.

One of the biggest current economic fallacies is that we have a market economy. What we really have is an economy in which governments legislate to restrict competition so that some people can make profits. One of the fundamentals of a market economy is that knowledge, technical and market conditions, is known to all participants. Another fundamental principle is that customers pay the full cost of the goods or services they consume. Subsidies whether from the government, advertising or the sale of data make for an inefficient economy. What I am suggesting in this post is that we make the internet a part of a market economy.

In a true market economy there are no profits as competition keeps prices such that people can earn a wage and a return of investment but no profits. Therefor a market economy would take care of another current issue – equality.

I do not expect this idea to be taken seriously as those who profit from a noncompetitive economy have a lot of political power. Therefore internet privacy will provide a lot of work for lawyers and that Mark guy will become even more exploitive, richer and more powerful.

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Filed under: Economics | Tagged: compeition, Economics, exploitation, Facebook, free market economy, internet, privacy, responsibility, social media |