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Comment by Arizhel | Hacker News Reader

What I think would be interesting is: what if a company like this made an app like this, but then clearly stated to users that it'd be collecting data on them and sending it to marketers? They could even pitch it as helping to keep prices "low". How much would this hurt sales? Would it even hurt sales at all? Given the proliferation of "smart TVs" and various IoT devices, I'm extremely skeptical that a company would experience any decrease in sales by simply being honest about their collection of data. The only reason these companies are getting in trouble is because they're sneaky and dishonest and try to hide their data-collection activities. Google has a gigantic business involving collecting user data, without hiding this fact, and they're extremely successful.

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The problem is that they could do some damage to the user even in perfect good faith. Just think about someone who listens music at unusually high levels or with channels heavily unbalanced compared to someone with normal hearing abilities. That innocuous information if leaked could hurt the user insurance or job opportunities.

I have no idea if their app collects this information too, but it's just a matter of time before someone becomes interested to it as it happens with any kind of data that can be used to profile people.

> Just think about someone who listens music at unusually high levels or with channels heavily unbalanced compared to someone with normal hearing abilities. That innocuous information if leaked could hurt the user insurance or job opportunities.

A person who listens to music at unusually loud levels SHOULD be charged more for insurance. Just as a 24 year old Asian single male software engineer in Mountain View gets charged more for car insurance. And if you have poor hearing skills, I sure as hell don't want you on my Marvel Studios audio engineering team (example)

It seems that your really want everyone to be treated equally when in reality it will never happen, and in fact comments like yours increase the disparity.

Honestly I don't think so.

No one who I know personally, outside one or two folks who also work in tech and would fit perfectly with HN's demographic, cares about tech spying on them.

Friends of mine have gotten home assistants, video game console, smart TVs, etc for years without one thought of their data being sold to a third party.

I think, sadly, that this is the essence of the "problem". That is, few people outside of those who know about consumer data collection actually care about it.

And it is one reason why we are hurtling inexorably to Idiocracy...

> They could even pitch it as helping to keep prices "low".

Considering that code has creation and maintenance costs, I doubt this would ever actually reduce the price. They would just inflate the final price to cover the cost. And if it collects enough data to actually make money, the price reduction would probably not significant enough to match perpetual data theft. Not to say that some people wouldn't go for it. It's amazing the lengths people will go to for free or cheap products.

But there's still the many liabilities of collecting, transferring and securing sensitive data. People who know the risks and hassles involved with identity theft would be very selective about these services.

Today's discount is tomorrow's fee waiver.

> Would it even hurt sales at all?

Of course it would. What is the consumer benefit derived from the collection of this data?

In the given example the benefit is stated as lower prices.

This example would only work if you had the same product in two different price ranges, e.g 350$ without tracking and 300$ with tracking or something similar.

Many consumers don't see their meta data as having any value to them so see giving it up as zero cost... Hence they don't care at all about tracking.

Amazon does this with Kindles.

If someone familiar with Amazon's hardware business and Kindle sales numbers could chime in, we could get a sense of whether the transparency approach works.

Depends on the price reduction. Those earbud noise cancellation speakers go for like $200. If you could cut the price in half, I'd get them. They'd pretty much know which movies I watch and what flight I'm on, but so do a lot of other people that give me no benefit.

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