When Zuckerberg came out in favor of Basic Income, the first thing that came to my mind (and probably to a lot of you as well) was: “That’s very nice, why doesn’t Facebook start sharing its profits then? You know what they say, ‘charity begins at home’.” If you are Mark Zuckerberg, if you have a significant role in managing a money making machine like Facebook, and if you think the idea of distributing a Basic Income is a good one, it follows you should take the lead on this — since you can.

For those of you who have not heard about it, Zuckerberg defended Basic Income in his Commencement Address at Harvard. He said: “We should explore ideas like Universal Basic Income to give everyone a cushion to try new things.” And regarding who should pay for it, he said: “Yes, giving everyone the freedom to pursue purpose isn’t free. People like me should pay for it. Many of you will do well and you should too.” So, I am sure that he has thought or is currently thinking how Facebook can get involved in the Basic Income bandwagon.

Here is the full speech in case you are interested:

I am not the only one who thought that after this speech, Facebook should be in the business of paying a Basic Income. John Thornhill, a veteran writer and Innovation Editor at the Financial Times, wrote an article entitled “Why Facebook should pay us a Basic Income.” In his article, Thornhill says that “data is the new oil” and that “data could do for the world what oil has done for Alaska.”

Alaska has a Permanent Fund that was praised by Zuckerberg on Facebook. Alaska re-distributes the income from its oil and so, Thornhill says, should companies such as Facebook and Google, they should also redistribute the income accumulated by the use of data. This data is provided by its users, “often unwittingly” to be sold later to advertisers. Thornhill concludes: “It seems only fair that Facebook makes a bigger social contribution for profiting from this massively valuable, collectively generated resource.”

Thornhill does make a good argument that data that is collectively produced and the income it generates could be re-distributed. In fact, most great ideas for financing Basic Income spring from the argument that collective resources should be redistributed in an equalitarian way. Other collective resources that could create revenue used to finance basic income are land, natural resources, carbon tax, airwaves tax, and even redistribution based on shared collective knowledge is defendable. All of these can be used to support Basic Income with using the morally sound argument that the income generated by something that was collective owned or created can be redistributed.

This all sounds great and plausible, but let’s peel one more layer and see what is behind this idea that data is used to generate income. Data is used in this way obviously via advertisement. An advertisement, in its simplest and most basic form, is simply a public notice, a way of letting people know about a particular product or event. So far so good. These public notices started appearing in newspapers, street corners, subway stops, television and now the internet. We were told that they helped support these media that we cared about, they made our newspaper possible, they make our favorite TV shows possible, and now they make a “free” Facebook possible. Of course, everyone knows that advertisement generates way more profit than what is necessary to keep these platforms going. Facebook made 8 billion in 2016.

And why are companies willing to spend so much on advertisement? Because it works, and data-driven advertisement works even better. Is this ok to do? Is data just targeting you according to your personal preferences or is it using your personal preferences to target you? No one want’s to think they can be manipulated, but the truth is, yes they can. That’s exactly what targeted driven advertisement is doing. I don’t know about you, but 90% of the ads I see on my phone on Facebook I think, “Gosh, I gotta have this, how do they know?” And I have to make a conscious effort not to click on the 80 markers made to draw landscapes, or the cat nip corner scratcher for my cat and so on (it all looks like cheap crap made in China, Facebook must know my income is not much to speak of).

Anyway, let’s get to the point here. The question we should ask is not if Facebook should pay us a Basic Income (the current profits $19.81 per U.S. and Canada user, which is far from a Basic Income), but whether it should be using our data freely and what are the limits to this? In a Facebook future, will we be forced to share all of our data and force-fed advertisements in order to help finance a Basic Income? Is a Basic Income worth it at any cost? Consider carbon taxing, Republicans wouldn’t mind a dividend based on a carbon tax, but the condition is deregulation. Now, unless that tax is progressive and disincentives carbon emissions over time, I wouldn’t want my Basic Income dependent on that, the same with data sharing. We should not simply deregulate data sharing and give up our privacy for the sake of a Basic Income.

We have to be extremely careful with how we decide to finance a Basic Income. At the core of the idea of Basic Income is a certain kind of liberation. People would be more “free” to say no to a job, or to leave situations of submission that they are trapped in with no way out. If you have a job, your boss can subjugate you by threatening to take it away, putting in cause your way of life and often your family’s as well. But if we have a Basic Income that is financed with things such as data sharing and carbon emissions, we immediately have an entire country of people who get that income who will be more willing to accept abuse of their basic rights to privacy or even abuse of their planet, that they would otherwise not have accepted.

The question about how to finance Basic Income is often more focused on “how can we make it work” and not so much of “what sort of compromises do these sources of financing imply.” These questions need to be asked. In my opinion, there should be strict rules in order to prevent dependence of Basic Income on abusive practices, and financial resources for Basic Income should be uber diversified so that it never depends on a handful of industries. We don’t want to liberate people from job submission just to put them in the hands of data collecting giants that would then have the power over everyone. Basic Income can be understood as a re-distribution of power and we have to make sure that financing is not creating another imbalance to replace the one we have.

If you are still on the wall regarding the importance of not making our Basic Income dependent on data giants, see the Black Mirror episode, 15 Million Merits, and then let me know what you think.