Facebook should pay its users!

Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | People should be paid whenever their personal data is used by tech giants to make money; that is the proposal of Sir Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party in the UK.

He said data was the ‘new oil’ and the ‘growth industry of this century’, but it is ‘astounding” that people were giving away something so valuable free of charge, the former business secretary said.

Speaking at the CodeNode tech events centre in London, Sir Vince said there was a ‘fundamental economic issue of whether any company which uses data from individuals to make money should pay the owner of that data for its use’.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook got rich by gathering data on his social network’s users.