Would companies be willing to pay for your privacy?

Nowadays there are many companies that are collecting our personal information when we are using their products or services. Law makers, of course, have realized the issue of privacy, and made very complicated regulations and laws to limit the collection and usage of companies' clients' personal data. However, some of the products and services of these companies have almost become the necessities in our life that we cannot avoid using them; therefore, we have to sign the legal contract with the companies and give up some of our privacy in order to get the products and services that we want. In addition, when we enter the Internet, we would like to enjoy speedy information transferring experience (watching videos is a type of information transferring, reading news is a type of information), so we do not want to spend time on reading the long and tedious legal agreements provided by the companies regarding our privacy at all. Because we cannot see the losses from giving up our privacy right clearly, we care more about the experience we get from the products and services than about our own privacy, this makes protecting customers' privacy is not an effective salespoint for companies; therefore, companies have more incentives to collect their customers' personal data in order to improve their products and services, thus attracting more customers and generating greater profits.

In the future, such personal data collection will become more ordinary and more personalized. Even nowadays, many smartphones have built-in AI to train and improve themselves from collecting our use habits and the information surrounding us; if all the information is uploaded online, it is not surprising to see that smartphone companies us better than ourselves. When companies know their customers better than their customers themselves, the customers would become more addicted to the products and services and be willing to pay for the products and services. Then there is no way for companies to be willing to pay for collecting their users' personal data, unless the companies do not generate profits from the information collection targets. For example, Google's search engineer does not charge its users to pay for faster search speed, this is because its profits do not come from its users but come from the advertisers.

Therefore, companies would only be willing to pay for data collection when the market is very competitive and the companies do not generate profits from their data collection targets.