Google Offers To Pay People To Have Their Web Use Tracked Minutely | TechCrunch.

This is fascinating. I have been saying for a long time – mainly on Twitter, where no-one has picked it up – that it amazes me that neither Google nor Facebook nor another of the tracker/analytics brands has troubled to offer us an option in which we pay for the service with cash rather than the myriad secrets of our lives. This has always seemed to me so obvious, and I assume is not technically problematic: I pay $10/month and said service remembers absolutely nothing of what I am up to (well, nothing more than the law requires, which info is not reviewed or used and is then humanely destroyed at the earliest opportunity).

Some of us think that this is where the future lies – that is, a range of options in which privacy/data are traded for search and social and other online services. Knowing Facebook, they would find dozens of complex options between “everything” and “nothing,” in an interface with their famous privacy policy statement.

So: here is have Google working on the other end of the privacy equation – and offering financial incentives to people who may choose to offer up even more of their data (per impossibile, I hear you saying). I wonder whether this shift is going to prove a tipping point into a more rational, economic view of privacy and consumers and service provision.

What do others think?