Washington Post Link

By Kevin Kelleher – Washington Post
Sunday, December 20, 2009

Wake up, Web users. It’s time you demanded your fair share for the vast wealth you are helping to build for the Internet’s most popular sites. Yahoo, despite its recent troubles, has $4 billion in cash. Google has $22 billion that it won’t even share with investors, let alone you. Facebook may one day amass even more cash than either of them. They could never have made a profit without the data they collect about you. So where’s your share?

Face it: To these companies, you are not even a human being. You are a “user” — one of the ugliest, most dehumanizing scraps of jargon to gain currency in the Internet era. It connotes the consumption or manipulation of something valuable, perhaps even in an addictive way. But our “using” the Web is only half of the story — maybe less than half. You, dear user, may use the Web, but at the end of the day, it is you who is really being used. You have become someone’s instrument for profit. And the worst part is, you’re not even getting paid…

…So: What if we all e-mailed these companies collecting our data with our own version a “terms of service” that read like this? “By collecting, storing, selling, trading, reselling or exploiting for any commercial purposes any information about me, your site agrees to pay me a licensing fee of $100 per month.”

The first few times it happens, the companies will laugh. If it happens often enough, they will be annoyed. And then, maybe we will be heard as more than data…

Read more at the link above.