What if people were paid for their data?
I've had this idea in the bucket of "crazy things I'll never do" which is similar to this, half art-piece, half serious:<p>- Users sign up to an ad network and they insert all information about themselves, the more, the better.<p>- They are periodically prompted to add or update their data (like facebook asking you if you're still living in the same city).<p>- An adblock-like browser extension, replaces all ads they see with the own network's ads, which are highly targeted, and hence get much more money than regular ads for the ad network.<p>- The ad network is setup as a non-profit foundation which pipes all the revenue into donations to institutions doing work related to privacy initiatives (EFF and similar).<p>- Users are shown how much money their willingful lack of privacy has generated for privacy initiatives.<p>It's a play on using the argument of "I have nothing to hide" in order to advance actual privacy legislation and protections. If someone builds this, I'd sign up and use it.