Data brokers - companies that earn their revenue from trafficking data about user behavior, typically in the form of selling ad spots to other smaller businesses - are strongly incentivized to not operate ethically. This list of companies include some of the largest brands of our generation - Google, Facebook and their respective subsidiaries such as YouTube, Gmail, Instagram and WhatsApp.

While there is nothing morally wrong with organizing and leveraging such a valuable source of data, it's important to understand where the incentives to push ethical boundaries exist as well as how this ad driven model of revenue causes otherwise good companies to falter. In a very literal sense, a data broker makes money when they sell data they've collected from users. As viewed from this perspective, it's clear that the real customers of companies such as Google or Facebook are the businesses that purchase ads to be displayed on their respective platforms. The typical Instagram or Gmail user is merely a resource to be mined for data.

Because the needs of the ad buyer are more important to the data broker's bottom line than the needs of the users of the front-facing social media product, there is strong incentive for the broker to collect more and more valuable data to be sold to their ad buyers. What this means in a practical sense is that the broker will collect more sensitive and private data, and expose it in a tantalizing way to the ad buyers - all while obscuring the amount and depth of sensitive data that has been collected so as to not cause users - the data resource - to leave their platform.

The immense amount of trust given to a large data broker can't be taken lightly. Companies are not inherently "evil" as Google famously tries not to be. The incentive to treat their main users as second class citizens is built into the system itself. There are few solutions, none of which are easy.

One option is to create regulation that puts ethical boundaries around scummy practices. This is the most common solution, as it focuses on solving a tangible, already existing problem. Another is to step away from this business model entirely, a much more difficult task as it requires creating currently unknown business models that will generate just as much revenue as the current ad model.

Out of those two, I personally believe the second option is the more permanent solution as it removes the underlying incentive. While the shift to a non-freemium business model requires sacrificing the benefits of creating a free world-class tool such as YouTube, at least the average user won't be caught in the crossfire of privacy politics, becoming a casualty of unethical incentives.

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