#nostr is free data about us. Our social graph is free to read. Anyone can tabulate and interpret it. There is no single, central beneficiary, but anyone, in our current free-to-read-note relay environment, can harvest the data for free. I wonder which tech giant will realize that Nostr can scale to be more valuable than their current centralized walled gardens.
Discussion
I suspect the public content isn’t worth too much. What’s worth money is all the metadata and how surveillance apps can bridge to observe behaviors on other apps etc. Eg the value is knowing exactly how you react, in high resolution (100s of metrics) to certain ads and content. Those metrics just aren’t present on nostr because they’re not taking that info to begin with
These guys have the hardware and traffic capacity to do this at minimal costs. For the low-ish cost of running high quality scaled-up relays, the tech giants can potentially gather location metadata to match to our public notes across a range of micro applications. I think we will see them leave their walled data harvesting gardens and adapt their current brands to #nostr if only to get more high quality data on us without having to pay their competitors & partners for it.
Beware the high capacity, low latency, free relay operators of tomorrow.
you’d have to opt in to the surveillance relay to begin with and opt in to their nostr app that is able to track the additional metrics. If you don’t, they will still have your public posts and if you happen to have other surveillance apps on your phone that they are partnered with, sure. Dangerous world out there!