Text me! +1 (917) 540-3402Big Tech has made billions of dollars using personal data. Your personal data. When was the last time you got paid for playing your part in the tech ecosystem?Probably never. Andrew Yang, ex-2020 presidential candidate and today’s Business Casual guest, wants to change that. And that’s why he’s pioneering the Data Dividend Project. In his words: “The Data Dividend Project is an organization that is trying to get us paid for our data. And our data now is worth tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars a year in value that we are not seeing a dime of.”The merits of the DDP, as Yang and his fervent followers call it, appear to be many. The project would realign incentives for tech entrepreneurs, advertisers, and platform users such that everyone could walk away satisfied. And sustained, direct payments to American people sound great...but there’s always a but. 

Yang’s concept would mean that, for Facebook, Google, and its ilk, “some of the money that they're making will be made more responsibly,” per Yang. That’s politician for “top line revenue could shrink.”

And the likelihood of all the right parties buying into something like the DDP is slim.

But Yang remains steadfast in his efforts to keep American tech users from “getting cheated.”Listen to this episode for an inside look at how a data dividend would work, how it wouldn’t, and what happens when you put $1,000 in Jeff Bezos’s bank account every month.