What Would You Pay to Keep Your Digital Footprint 100% Private?
hbr.org
hbr.org
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di...
'A tenet of the Estonian system is that an individual owns all information recorded about him or her. Every time a doctor (or a border guard, a police officer, a banker, or a minister) glances at any of Piperal’s secure data online, that look is recorded and reported. Peeping at another person’s secure data for no reason is a criminal offense. “In Estonia, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brother,” a local told me. “You can tell him what to do and maybe also beat him up.”'
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit-r...
>Access to your file is limited. A consumer reporting agency may provide information about you only to people with a valid need -- usually to consider an application with a creditor, insurer, employer, landlord, or other business. The FCRA specifies those with a valid need for access.
>You must give your consent for reports to be provided to employers. A consumer reporting agency may not give out information about you to your employer, or a potential employer, without your written consent given to the employer. Written consent generally is not required in the trucking industry.
The FCRA isn't comparable. It's allowing a private agency to collect data without your consent, and then give it to those with a "valid need" without your consent. Only employers have some limitations.
OP's premise also entirely ignores the fact that our "digital footprints" traverse spaces of others' (think email) regardless of our individual choice.
The only longterm potential downside is the realities of globalization roll up of these concepts into world government and monitoring..but that may well be imposed anyway...
> 1. No more free services.
> 2. No more personalization.
> 3. No more instant gratification.
The form of the question belies the real problem with our current laws around digital data and privacy: the assumption that digital privacy is not a right and thus requires extra payment to maintain.
The question should be: what would you charge a company to access X% of your digital footprint?
> 1. No more free services.
> 2. No more personalization.
> 3. No more instant gratification.
Well I do want my information private, it would have to be 100%. What's the point in paying Facebook or Google for privacy when every other website I encounter, even if for something as simple as shopping or reading a personal blog, is working to build and share a profile of me?
I also can't help but feel some amount of distrust seeing companies like Microsoft ask $200 for a product, then inject ads and force telemetry. Paid or not, if companies can sneak in some way to increase the bottom line, some will.
This isn't even to mention that they've clearly drank their own Kool-Aid about personalization being a "feature."
To me, this feels like an issue issue that business isn't suited to deal with and that requires regulation.
This is the opposite of a downside. Please, companies, let me pay you to remove personalization from, say, Google search results. The upsides are basically non-existent for a consumer.
They should in theory be able to provide far better de-personalized search results than DuckDuckGo.
It’s Facebook and Google’s fussiness about real names and identities (and desire to become something akin to ultra-invasive credit ratings agencies / the next Equifax) that’s the new part about commercial surveillance, and that creates these trade offs.
Your privacy will be compromised. It's inevitable.
No, you can still do a lot with compartmentalization. Throwing in the towel just because "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" is just looking at the glass as half empty.
Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?
The quote's real (Chuck Palahniuk did write it, after all); the character who said it was just fictitious. They were just using it to say that you're being overly pessimistic.
Stalking is unwanted or obsessive attention by an individual or group towards another person. Stalking behaviors are related to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person or monitoring them.
Put another way - "What would a world be like where a user could simply sell their data to the highest bidder for the right to buy their business?"
This could mean a lot of things to me it meant don't show me ads unless I ask for them and then I'll agree to take offers from all of these providers and I'll choose the best offer to give my business to.
It is the reason I honestly don't have Alexa or google home or something else in my home.
Because ultimately I believe the system that wins should be one that let's me choose and that gives me value by tying me into any number of providers I wish and not by letting one large conglomerate into my home with only the ecosystem of their choosing.
Ultimately I'm not sure if enough people think like me but if you do feel free to drop me a line I'd love to chat!
Email is in my profile and I'll be in SF alot more starting in January but also currently reside in Los Angeles
Often true, but this is a bad example:
> Sure, you could turn off your geo-location settings for a taxi app so that it stops tracking your every move, but the hassle of having to manually enter your current location every time you want to use it may feel like too much of an effort to be sustainable.
"Tracks your every move" and "needs you to manually enter your location" aren't the only two options. You could have "summon a taxi" button that transmits your current location to a given service one time.
The crucial thing is that the user should have control of what they share with whom. That's what privacy means.
I'd say 5-10 bucks a month to keep my digital tracks in my own cloud or on devices i physically control and no one else.
That's most traditionally the Amazon/Ebay model, guiding you into buying something you don't need, or a SKU with a higher ticket price, but as we're seeing recently, there are also parties spending money to insidiously influence the sociopolitical news and opinion you get to see.
Both Facebook, Google and Twitter all boast about their ability to target adverts and "promoted" posts.
And it's not enough to pay for a search engine, or shunt over to a social network nobody uses. If you want free of this, you have to make painful choices, like getting you and yours off Facebook and Google and onto services either you control or you know aren't being mined and adjusted. Getting the hell away from Windows as it tiptoes around privacy-hell.
Unfortunately, because people have neither the appetite or technical know-how to run or audit their own social networks, what seems more likely is we're just going to chase people off these "liberal" platforms onto ones with even stronger tints.
Trying to decide if that fits in the irony category or not...
In Colorado they simply cannot convince the public to pass a law allowing liquor/beer stores in grocery sales. The public doesn't want to knowingly condemn every mom and pop liquor store because safeway would easily put them out of business. Do you really think the public would knowingly condemn facebook, twitter, google, youtube, etc.?
(Fb/google/etc are not mom and pop, but the comparison still holds some merit)
Texas is a state which allows beer (no liquor with an ABV above wine, I believe). Liquor stores there seem to do just fine with the caveat that they have to be "real liquor stores". Meaning, they can't just sell Coors and Budweiser, they have to specialize and carry the newest/hottest craft beers and employ a staff that can give recommendations. If I wanted a Miller High Life or a well known craft beer like Dogfishhead I would just go to HEB (large grocery store chain) otherwise if I wanted more of a selection I'd hit up a "real" liquor store.
So yeah, sure those mom-pop places will go out of business if they don't adapt. But, hey, if you run a shitty business, you should expect it to fail, right?
Analogously, if there are products that offer the same utility of FB/Google/etc with the added benefit of not farming out everyone's personal information, they should totally be bankrupted. They're making a worse product.
That being said, me arguing against your analogy falls apart here. Laws being passed in Colorado means, mom-pop's will be shuttered because other businesses will canabalize them with better services. In the case of passing laws for digital privacy, Google, et. al, would be condemned because their products would become illegal, not because there's a better competitor putting them out of business. That being said, I'm sure they'd have some sort of timeline to change their products to fit the laws. My albeit hazy understanding of the EU privacy shield laws leads me to believe that was the case there.
tl;dr: I'd personally be fine seeing Google/et. al being forced to adapt their products due to "privacy as a right" regulation changes. Within reason of course. I think they should have a period of time where they can make their products fit such regulations.
In the practical sense, I think that the hard part would be coming up with a workable transition plan. I think you're being melodramatic, though. There'd be massive disruption, but I don't suspect that Alphabet or Facebook would just slide under the waves.
> Do you really think the public would knowingly condemn facebook, twitter, google, youtube, etc.?
Hell no. People love all those things. I like them myself, despite their obvious problems.
> The public doesn't want to knowingly condemn every mom and pop liquor store because safeway would easily put them out of business.
All of the chain grocery stores near me carry beer, wine, and all varieties of spirits. We've still got mom+pop liquor stores all over the place. 2 are within a 10 minute walk of my condo. In Colorado, I think the big problem wouldn't have been the chains carrying liquor, but the sudden change in the status quo if they were allowed to now.
But I would for example pay small fee for an article using anonymised payment method (I do not find subscription model viable).
1. Accept your payment (arguably bitcoin solves this, but it has to be purchased, and also accepted by the vendor).
2. Work out what your digital footprint is
If we were certain that hackers will get hold of all our online data and use it to completely compromise our identity and company we SHOULD pay hundreds of thousands of Dollars!
If we are worried that our wife will find some compromising information on Facebook then we should pay nothing and instead explain to her.
If insurance companies will use our data to raise their fees our protecting should be worth at least the difference.
If trump or some evil genius inside the NSA somehow turns the US into a dictatorship and use our data to to send our children to concentration camps (quite unlikely but not impossible) we should run to the bank and ask for as much credit as possible to save our privacy.
So to average the above risks we should probably pay >2% of our income for privacy. That would be 10% of military expenses.