Put a Cost on Malice

I am running a small experiment. It can be stated in one sentence:

Put a cost on malice, and keep the service cheap for everyone else.

What does that even mean? Let me start with the worry behind it.

I have never been comfortable handing information over to services without limit. A worry I carried for a long time has simply become reality: once personal data leaks, it cannot be stopped and it cannot be taken back. Everyone knows this. It has happened again and again — this month alone, breaches affecting more than ten million accounts were announced, one after another. And still, the collecting continues. I do not think this will change.

Honestly, even when a service is free, personal information is too high a price to pay for it. Why does nobody seem to think so?

Everyone is still staring at the holes, trying to plug them. Why does no one say plainly that plugging every hole is impossible?

So I started from the other end — not from plugging holes, and not from collecting more carefully. From a price tag. What if behaving badly inside a service simply cost more than it could ever earn?

How that cost works, and what the service actually is — I will explain another time. Explaining it now would make it sound smaller than the question.

The experiment is called inclinq (inclinq.com). It is small, and it is just beginning.

One thing I am genuinely curious about: if you could put a cost on one kind of malice in something you build, what would it be?

— Yosshi