Occasionally I am tasked with explaining why personal information is valuable – and inspired by a toilet article on BoingBoing I ran into this quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilets_in_Japan

However, historically, pit toilets were more common, as they were easier to build and allowed the reuse of the feces as fertilizer[14]—very important in a country where Buddhism and its associated mostly vegetarian, pescetarian lifestyle acted to reduce dependence on livestock for food. The waste products of rich people were sold at higher prices because their diet was better.[11]

Okay, I’ll grant you, it’s not a perfect similie – but if a relatively free market will differentiate human poo then it has to have value; so the question in my mind is whether the producers of said poo did-or-did-not get cutbacks from poo-sales, bearing as they do both the means of production and the cost of raw materials?

If not, that strikes me as unfair; and likewise it strikes me as unfair that the streams of sales-intent-poo and browser-history-poo that we generate all get aggregated together and resold in bulk by [Google/Facebook/Whoever] and we should be satisfied only with some sort of pride that some peoples’ digital-poo fetches higher prices, never seeing any personal quid-pro-poo from it.