I’ve referred to this bargain, in which people get content and services for free in exchange for having persuasive messages psychographically targeted to them, as the “original sin” of the internet. It’s a dangerous and socially corrosive business model that puts internet users under constant surveillance and continually pulls our attention from the tasks we want to do online toward the people paying to hijack our attention. It’s a terrible model that survives only because we haven’t found another way to reliably support most internet content and services—including getting individuals to pay for the things they claim to value.

We become aware of how uncomfortable this model is when Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica develop personality profiles of us so they can tailor persuasive messages to our specific personal quirks, but that’s exactly what any competent advertiser is doing, every day, on nearly every site online. If that makes you feel uncomfortable: Good, it should. But the problem is way bigger than Facebook. This is a known bug not just with social networks, but with the contemporary, ad-supported web as a whole.

It’s relatively easy for social networks to address bad-actor problems. For the most part, social networks would be better off without bots artificially promoting posts or fabricated news capturing clicks. Platform interests are aligned with society’s interests as a whole in fighting bad actors.

It’s different with known bugs.

When platforms address them, they run the risk of breaking their business models. It’s hard for YouTube to fix a recommendation engine that leads us toward conspiracy-theory videos without breaking a system that encourages us to surf from one popular video to the next, racking up ad views in the process. It’s hard—though not impossible—to fix harassment and bullying on Twitter when many of Twitter’s most engaged users are opinionated and sharp-tongued and their arguments are some of the most compelling content on the service. And it’s impossible for Facebook to protect us from manipulative advertising targeted to our psychographic profile when their business model is built on selling this particular form of persuasion.

Platforms won’t fix known bugs on their own, not without external pressure. In his interview with Segall, Zuckerberg acknowledged that it might be time for regulation of Facebook, suggesting standards that force transparency around who’s paying for ads. We should push Facebook, and the web as a whole, to do much more to address this known bug, and others.

Users of the internet have been forced into a bargain they had no hand in negotiating: You get the services you want, and platforms get the data they need. We need the right to opt out of this bargain, paying for services like Facebook or YouTube in exchange for verifiable assurances that our usage isn’t being tracked and that our behavioral data is not being sold. We need an ecosystem that encourages competitors to existing social-media platforms, which means ensuring a right to export data from existing social networks and new software that lets us experiment with new services while maintaining contacts on existing ones. We need to treat personally identifiable information less like a resource to be exploited and more like toxic waste, which must be carefully managed, as Maciej Ceglowski has proposed. This may require a digital EPA, as Franklin Foer, Paul Ford, and others have argued—a prospect that would be more appealing if the actual EPA wasn’t currently being gutted.