“The End of the Free Internet Era: How Our Data and Attention Became Currency”

The completely free era on the internet is coming to an end. And it’s time to review concepts. For a long time, those who know used to say, and they said well, that on the web and in social networks you don’t pay with money, but with our data, with our attention time.

The commercialization of our life has been essential to launch many digital businesses and to refine the strategies of other physicists. If I want to set up a hairdresser, it will be very useful to know how many people pass by on that street, what is the average age, if they are men or women, if they come from Albacete… And these data are revealed by our cell phones.

In many cases, the management of this information has been done respectfully, with transparency and anonymized data. In others, not so much. Meta has never had much of a reputation for handling the personal information of its millions of users. Scandals involving the sale of information to third parties, such as the Cambridge Analytica case, led to the filing of a class action lawsuit on the other side of the Atlantic. It looked bad for the Facebook matrix. And he reached an out-of-court agreement. Pay 725 million to users who meet two conditions: have lived in the United States and have used the network between 2007 and 2022. Open the door to new claims in other countries? It’s curious. Now that Meta and other platforms are considering charging money for their services, it may be that, once the invoice is made, they are owed to us.