I put all my personal data on eBay | Hacker News Reader

I put all my personal data on eBay

olifro.st

587 pointsolifrost146 comments

Context: this fellow (Oli Frost) is something of a social media satirist, having previously built LifeFaker (http://lifefaker.com/, a place to buy your way to Instagram fame), and Flopstarter (http://flopstarter.com/, a Kickstarter clone for terrible ideas).

I found the latest idea pretty funny - actually trying to monetize your data instead of letting companies do it for you is kind of a cute turnabout. In any case, please do view this project as an artistic endeavour - a work of satire.

There are a couple companies that are working in that space:

https://datacoup.com/

https://datawallet.com/#protect

A more detailed reddit thread about them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/8btjah/16_passiv...

I am quite interested in the BAT (Basic Attention Token) project. Using the Brave browser you can either block ads normally or choose to view Brave ads, and the difference with Brave ads is that the viewer gets paid--- in tokens, that is. They can then use the accumulated BAT tokens to send micropayments to platforms and content that they like or peruse frequently. Pretty cool incentive system. And Brave is a really nice browser, at least for mobile.

Yeah, but it begs the question, why would anyone want BAT tokens?

AFAIK, you can't even withdraw the tokens currently. The idea being, you use the BAT tokens to send micropayments to your favorite sites, and then they can do plenty of things--- re-use that BAT to advertise, cash it out via fiat gateway, etc.

I use the brave browser in mobile but have everything blocked. Where can I learn more depth about this?

So maybe in the future we accept payment upfront for our privacy or through incideously free services.

I believe you meant insidiously? Not sure why you make it sound so sinister.

Right word. A world where you may have no privacy and must choose how it is sold (directly, indirectly) is insidious.

Your phrasing is rather off then. Your original statement was that we might perhaps, in the future, accept payment upfront for our privacy (whatever that might mean--are we getting paid for our data or for our privacy?) or that we'd be paid through insidiously free services. So ... how are these insidiously free services paying us? In features? More specifically, because of your phrasing, how are they paying us in this potential future for our privacy?

Your clarification here makes your intention far clearer than your original comment did. It doesn't look like you're concerned with how we might be paid; instead, you're attempting to shine a light on the problem of being paid for our personal data / intruding on our privacy at all. Am I parsing you correctly now?

The new meta is no one has privacy. The default state of the internet invades your privacy. Period. So maybe down the road we’ll still have no privacy. But we can opt to sell it wholesale, all at once, instead of being lured into divulging it.

You’d be selling personally authentic data as opposed to noisy metrics. I don’t know what good the marketers would provide you. Possibly free services (email) sans trackers.

lifefaker - That one was like staring point blank down the throat of a beast that eats human futility and status-jockeying, and in the darkened distance you can faintly hear the tortured howling of a million lost souls... in other words, mission accomplished!

This is not a satire. I can easily see a service where people can simple upload their FB data and the service bundles it up in to groups of 10,000 for sell, takes 30% cut and distributes rest of the proceeds. There are tons of folks who have most of their posts public on FB would be willing to do this. There are companies who wants to model users, train/test algorithms would be willing to pay for it.

It's...still satire.

Poe's law applies.

How will it be verified if profile is real or fake?

This is a major problem. There's no guarantee the data is real, and most of the people who have to sell their old data clearly don't have much buying power regardless.

But, imagine if they were selling a real-time feed of what they're actually browsing. Imagine if authenticity verification was possible by closed software and hardware (totally not pointing android here). Then the data would definitely be worth something. And the more "clients" you have, the more they're worth.

I think you could easily train machine learning algorithm to do that.

lol this is great http://flopstarter.com/1dprinter/

If you could print very light lines and the costs were very low, I'd be interested. As someone who works a lot with handwritten formulas and pencil & paper sketches, I'm constantly annoyed by how strongly lines and squares are printed on paper. It's distracting and there is no need for it.

As someone who shares the same frustration with normal graph paper, check out a Rhodia Dot Pad.

Print in lighter shades of grey.

I think it's real data about is actual life though. Kinda blurrs the line

I wish he had an RSS feed.

http://olifro.st/feed.xml

Cheers!

This concept is being talked about a lot in crypto area. Bringing data back into the control of the user and providing ways for them to monetize it.

LifeFaker cracked me up - thanks for sharing.

"Being able to pretend I rode an elephant in Thailand really helped my confidence"

Jana is doing this by building a browser (mCent) that shows people ads in exchange for tokens that they can use to buy mobile data. It's becoming really popular in India. http://www.mcentbrowser.com/

> instead of letting companies do it for you

Yay, it's 1999, and disintermediation is the word.

P.S. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disintermediat...

I just finished reading Radical Markets (http://a.co/7cNafHl) and it's funny to see this HN story because the last chapter was about "data labor" where the authors claim that we're all working for FB/GOOG/etc to generate data to train the AIs that makes profit for these companies. And that it's time for "data workers of the world to unite" into a "data labor movement" so we can get paid for our work (I found it kind of silly but worth thinking about). This assumes that a single unit of data (say a person's personal data as in the OP) is worth something on it's own.

The counter-argument to that, which is also presented in the book, can be summarized as the resolution to Adam Smith's "diamond-water" paradox (roughly, why is it that while water is more useful, in terms of survival, than diamonds, diamonds command a higher price in the market). The answer is that the price is determined by the marginal value of the last unit of good available rather than the average value gained by its consumption. So while the average value of personal data is high (you can build a service like Google or Facebook) the single unit value (as in the OP) is low. I'm more convinced by this side of the argument.

> I found it kind of silly but worth thinking about

This was my reaction to 95% of the book. Until Radical Markets, I'd never read a nonfiction book that I found so absurd and detached from reality and yet provoked so much useful thought. I worry that others may not realize how detached it is, and that the net effect may not be positive, but we'll see.

> A nonfiction book that I found so absurd and detached from reality and yet provoked so much useful thought.

This is a really interesting category. Makes me think about other books I've read that are a bit like that. I'd probably put Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance in there. Maybe Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan as well.

Gregory Clark candidly prefaces his "Farewell to Alms" with the admission that the arguments he presents in the book will most likely be proven "oversimplified, or merely false" but excuses his fallibility quoting Darwin:

"false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”

We do not need a "Radical Market" to realize the fact that individual personal data doesn't make so much of a value. Advertisers don't go hunting after individuals. That's advertising-101. Or rather internet-101. The whole point of OP is not to make money off of his personal data. Its to create awareness. You base all of your argument on single unit value being low. What if there are a billion such listings on eBay?

> This assumes that a single unit of data (say a person's personal data as in the OP) is worth something on it's own.

This is your assumption about other's assumption. Not true.

I'm struggling a bit with your second paragraph. I think there's something interesting here, but I'm not quite clear on your argument.

Data is the opposite of the paradox of value, in that one person's data is completely useless, but each additional person worth of data adds a greater and greater marginal utility (probably not linearly so, maybe an s-curve or something). Is this what you are saying?

I haven't read the book you link so perhaps that is why I misunderstand.

You have it mostly right. Thanks for clarifying my sloppy writing here. I just wouldn't say "completely useless," especially at the start of the s-curve but then at the shoulder of the s-curve you have diminishing returns.

I’m pretty sure diamonds are expensive due to artificial scarcity introduced by debeers holding on to huge quantities. No need for some fancy ideas there, they should really rename that paradox to some material that wasn’t market manipulated so heavily.

There's a curious anti-intellectual trend in HN where people think they can explain things simply without "fancy ideas".

Scarcity on it's own doesn't explain it. Your grandma's locket is scarce (only 1) yet no one will pay anything for it.

Selling your personal data as an individual is not going to work (yes, I understand this is a joke posting).

If your data has to be re-imported into the various systems that normally exchange consumer profiles (advertising platforms for instance) it will be a net loss, besides that the chances of you hitting one of the properties is nil. So without the association between your profile and your online presence that data has little value on its own and as a single profile.

But in bulk, with a correct association between your profile, your recent online queries, expenditures, location and so on it becomes valuable.

I had a similar idea to sell peoples personal data in bulk with their permission and then give people back a portion of a monetary award. Then people would bid for certain properties about the personal data. I was inspired to do something like this from the below article from the ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223045-a-theory-of-pr... .

One of the issues I found was while I could easily charge people for the sale of large amounts of personal data the way to pay out would probably be in some kind of ACH with a minimum amount of money to accumulate for that.

With a current bid of £113.00, it's working fine.

The first time is always a special case. This reminds me of "the million dollar homepage". It worked once. It will never work again.

Also the potato salad kickstarter[0]. Raised $55,000 to make a potato salad. Lots of clones appeared and made about $10.

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zackdangerbrown/potato-...

I think it would still work in the case of celebrities. For most of us, I guess only a few scammers / enemies / relatives would be interested in the data.

now at 300

Fully agree and in addition selling your data would only be useful if it contained enough identifiers to unambiguously tie it to a single identity. But this data would most probably enable the buyer to impersonate the seller. Not a good idea as OP obviously realized himself and hopefully redacted the data in addition to his disclaimer:

> What’s Not Included

> Permission to steal my identity and open a sweat shop.

On the other hand, the bar for identity theft is so low, that it probably wouldn't matter.

There are some people[0][1][2] want to sell your data and use your data to train ML.

[0] https://synapse.ai/ [1] httsp://datum.org/ [2] http://doct.ai/

Second link says sp instead of ps if you care

Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?

These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"

    Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!

I don't know about others, but that naive reaction is definitely not the reaction I have. Selling me ads is acceptable. But using my data without telling me how are you going to use it is considered hostile to me. And, I believe, using aggregate data to research on crowd is dangerous and harmful to the society, even it's anonymous. My personal data is probably only worth a few dimes to them, but aggregate data is not that cheap. Those companies use PII and non-PII to do researches without telling people that they are being researched or how they are being researched or why they are doing it. It's like poeple are lab rats.

No one should have such power without testee's consent. But opt-out empowered them. And the ability to gain insights (with such procedure) on different crowds witch leads to the ability to manipulate the general public makes me nervous.

I don't expect stuff on the internet to be free of charge, but people don't want to pay with money doesn't justify the current business model. You know what is worse? People paid, yet their data is still being collected and used, only less ads.

If what I said is unreasonable or non-sense, please feel free to downvote me, but also please share your thoughts to me. I'd love to change my mind since it's getting really hard to surf the internet these days with my current mindset. It's not the internet I love any more.

Just one example: Imagine a group of people where you are one of the few people without a Facebook account. Then there is some group pressure to push you into becoming a Facebook user and since they don't offer a paid service, you either have to convince a lot of people to use some other medium, sell your personal information or accept missing a lot of communication.

> Just one example: Imagine a group of people where you are one of the few people without a Facebook account. Then there is some group pressure to push you into becoming a Facebook user and since they don't offer a paid service, you either have to convince a lot of people to use some other medium, sell your personal information or accept missing a lot of communication.

This is peer pressure and has nothing to do with the way Facebook monetize its product.

I think it does. Otherwise it would be simple to just skip Facebook. But if skipping is no option (and no alternative payment method is available), the whole 'analyze my behavior, values and believes' until you learnt how to influence me effectively becomes a problem (at least for those who don't want that Facebook or one of their partners can effectively influence their mind).

> This is peer pressure and has nothing to do with the way Facebook monetize its product.

Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product. They know that human connections aren't fungible, so they can gain adoption through local monopolies.

> Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product.

Every single social network relies on this concept; the way it’s monetized is independant of that.

Sorry I kind of missed the independence part - in the main, no social network has value unless it has most of the target audience on the network.

So monetization results are entirely dependent on having those people subscribed.

Thus all the emphasis on techniques to get people hooked/attracted/addicted etc.

That’s sort of an operating cost/basic imperative to the social network.

So when you say it’s independent , what do you mean?

> So when you say it’s independent , what do you mean?

We agree that "monetization results are entirely dependent on having those people subscribed". What I’m saying is the _way_ Facebook does that monetization (with ads) is independent of that. If Facebook were a subscription-based service, it’d still rely on those "techniques to get people hooked/attracted/addicted etc". So you can’t complain about Facebook’s ad-based model by saying it encourages peer pressure because the latter would still exist even if there weren’t ads.

I think you either misread the above question, or responded to the wrong parent.

You are assuming that I am using Facebook. I am not. They have a shadow profile on me anyway, together with my cellphone number and lots of private information, because my friends uploaded it to get access to Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp.

Not just your friends. I recently found out that two companies I've bought something from shared my data with facebook.

It's an issue of transparency. I don't mind if I know what it will be used for but "sell me some ads" isn't the only thing it's being used for as we have discovered recently. If Facebook et Al. were more transparent about exactly how it is used then users could decide if the cost is worth it.

> what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?

Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

Others might have their own reasons

> These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want.

Want, but might not want at all cost. If enough users do not want to pay the asking price, some of these companies might revisit their race to the bottom approach. Some of them existed and were profitable before tracking become big and pervasive.

> Providing those services is not free

No, but being profitable is not a concern that overrides everything else. Maybe for the company it is, but a society has every right to say, "You can be as profitable as you want within these confines."

>Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

But what does this mean functionally?

I don't mean to disparage your argument, but I've never been able to get a clear answer on actual pain points from Facebook data mongering, answers are always some variation of above, which I take to mean "it's icky, I dunno, it's just icky."

The idea of the market itself is based on things like that: there’s no reason to value a shiny yellow metal, but we do.

Practically, this is centralization of information and it’s sale which is enabling people to target and herd ideas and behaviors in ways we do not have responses to.

Not that this is very new as a phenomenon! But the tools available today allow this to be mechanized.

So where artisanal bakers would have to make campaigns and do all of the data gathering and follow up work on their own, we’ve now made factories to do this.

Since essentially we are talking about collective concepts, consent and beliefs being influenced in an automated manner, this is “different” than what has come before.

For me, the major pain point is in what this means for our cultural values around privacy. The less privacy we have the less important privacy becomes, and our collective values around privacy become eroded. This makes it much harder to raise a fuss about privacy violations and have people take you seriously e.g. they might interpret your objections as "it's icky, I don't like it."

If somebody can put better words to this, please do. I'm not well-versed in Sociological Things.

I'm a young adult. I've been on the internet for most of my life and all of my adult life. When the GDPR started to be a hot topic, I decided to check what Facebook knows about me.

There are lots of things in there I didn't want known and remembered. Many embarrassing, cringy, inaccurate, unfortunately accurate, depressing, stupid things. Past interests, teenage angst, bullying, fedora edgelord material, unflattering photos, mean things I've said and had said to me, controversial political opinions, things I've come to disagree with, relationships and so on.

There exist vast public, semi-public, and buyable records of my life full of things I'd rather not even remember myself, let alone have corporations remember for me and highest bidders.

I don't understand this either. The big ad companies have a huge incentive to keep your data secret, so only they can serve you ads. The big privacy danger will always be the government through the ISPs.

Why should the government go through the ISPs if they can get the unencrypted data from facebook.

Because it's a court order either way?

They are "hoarding" the data, IE keeping it away from their competition. If the data was free, it could be used for things like large scale medical studies, instead of blasting my eyeballs with auto-play videos about the product I just finished buying on amazon. How many work hours combined daily on planet earth are lost waiting 5 seconds for the video to play, before continuing to read information required for your job / hobby / entertainment?

GDPR is pushing in the opposite direction though.

It's not. I personally think it's great that companies can make money out of it, while in turn i get the service for free.

I don't want to use facebook and google's services. I'm perfectly happy to use alternatives that won't track me and that I pay for. However, when facebook and google trackers are in completely unrelated websites, when my friends' emails are owned by google, when my school forces me to use google services for my school work, then it's not my choice. I'm forced to give them my data.

TL;DR: knowledge is power, surrendering your privacy is giving knowledge about you away, this quite literally translates into giving away power over you.

My core concern with eliminating the gap separating what corporations/governments know and the reality of people's lives is the smaller that gap becomes the less robust our democracy is on a very fundamental level.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is the first major glimpse of what this enables and how it threatens our democracy.

I encourage you to watch the series The Century of the Self. It's a bit dated by now, but it illustrates a pretty clear lineage easily extrapolated to where we've arrived today.

It's important to protect the privacy of the public. There must be some uncertainty and substantial error when it comes to campaigns to influence the people.

When people say "I have nothing to hide", what they don't realize is that the fact they have nothing to hide is something to hide. The other side certainly has things to hide, and they benefit from having total visibility into what you're aware of.

It's not, it's a loud minority that's especially vocal on HN. Mostly people who have read 1984 too many times or have lived in a totalitarian state and worry about the slippery slope.

yeah, i don't get it either. I really don't mind if they use all my info to target me with ads. In fact, I prefer it. I'd much rather get relevant ads that show me products I really want or need because I ONLY buy stuff I really want or really need. I've never purchased anything merely because an ad popped up and told me to buy it.

Please post the list of all sites you visited in the past year and you'll get an absolutely serious answer.

Facebook and google sell your attention and your clicks. They will sometimes make 100 dollars a click depending on the content of the ad and how targeted it was to your profile. For example, type car insurance into google, click the top advertisement. Ka’ching, that was 100 dollars transferred from one adwords account into Google’s. Your simple click, and the data associated with it, is someone else’s money.

And why is that a problem perse?

Your search query may have just saved you more than that on car insurance alone. I've gotten arguably many many thousands of dollars of value from Google in my life.

I think you're simply not considering the immense value good internet search adds to life.

It’s not being excluded - the issues is the various secondary effects. Not to mention the honeymoon period is over and antagonists have figured out how to use this information to direct political power in ways institutions are unable to adapt to.

These two aspects are the marginal change that people are focused on now. (From my perspective).

That’s why, imo, there’s no mention of how valuable search is, same way there’s no mention of how useful browsers are.

For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you.

Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience.

Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds.

Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns.

So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people.

Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.

> It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching

This is very subjective. You cannot speak for everyone, and meanwhile Youtube generates petabytes of analytics every day showing what people really like, down to each individual.

My specific, stated metric was pigeonholing.

You receive less information online when these systems are employed, ie more repetition in the same space. Youtube optimizes for maximizing the viewing time across the most common types of viewing associations, namely people watching for entertainment, not looking for information. If you ever look for information in a new topic, you tend to be signposted back towards your old time-sink staples from your history instead.

Certainly, one can also point to algorithmic enforcement of echo chambers, which would be a subjective value judgment as well. It feels good in immediate practice (and can increase viewing time), but many don't view it as a net positive at scale for social issues. Yet for things like small-scale hobbies, it can be beneficial.

This is basically the obesity/fast food scenario, but just for ideas. YouTube Facebook etc being the new McDonalds.

Out of interest, do you have a source for that "petabytes of analytics every day"? It sounds like the kind of thing that would come out of an interesting "How we cope at scale" kind of article.

> it pigeonholes your internet experience.

it seems like your issue is more with the inefficiency of the various algorithms rather than the use of data per se. And you re right, e.g. right now my supposedly AI youtube is full of the same type of videos.

> seems unfair they don't get a cut

This may ring true on the surface, but people always make money out of other people, by definition. Compensation would not work, it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund. One issue however is that users in this case do not have a mechanism to affect the price personalized ads so in total it seems unfair.

> and Nazi Germany,

I think you mean cold war germany. in any case it is interesting how the latest EU law completely ignores that aspect of privacy.

> a federal agent followed you a

Good point, being tracked does feel like you re being followed by an annoying salesperson. This IMHO is more annoying than the gathering of private data takes place on the internet. Privacy is not the default mode of life, in fact there are few places where one goes to when he wants to be private. Most of life involves interaction with other people and nonprivacy. One could even claim that this kind of privacy is not violated with things like ad tracking, as it happens behind screens, in safety and with relative control from the user. Of course there need to be limits to when and where this information can be gathered.

> it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund

I'd think of it more like treating any consumer of a product as an investor at the same time

There are quite a few new blockchain projects[1] aiming to directly remunerate users for data. They're essentially trying to shift the middleman share of the data market into the pockets of the actual data owners – the people.

Advertisers typically aren't interested in single person (personal) data. The minimum size aggregate audience is 1M people to have any advertising value.

[1] https://datum.org/ https://wibson.org/ https://datawallet.com/

> Loads more, like who I vote for, my boss’s name, and where all my family live.

So their selling other people's data too?

Asked mum and dad and they're all cool with telling people where they live. I live with them anyway.

Every time someone on FB shares a picture with other people in it they are doing just that.

TIL when I tag a friend on Facebook I'm also tagging their political beliefs, work history, favorite food, and venereal disease status.

> So their selling other people's data too?

I was answering that particular question. Either you didn't get it or you pretended to not get it, hard to tell the difference from here.

Well, yes. Say you tag a friend in a photo at a political fundraiser, protest, etc. Or you tag them posing by their company's logo, or at a booth their company is running at a trade show. The context of a photo matters, and FB can extract an awful lot of information out of seemingly-innocuous things these days.

So crazy it just might work

Somewhat related: https://marketplace.streamr.com/

Streamr is a marketplace to sell your data streams (vs static data in this case).

Jaron Lainer - Who Owns the Future is a great read on the topic of owning and monetising ones data.

> Condition: Used

Very nice touch.

> "Permission to steal my identity and open a sweat shop."

What if I just do one of those things? This guy needs a lawyer.

No, then you will need a lawyer.

sometimes lawyers will use "and" to mean "or" or vice versa https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/conjunctive

If you tried to sell your on ATM number and PIN or SSN# and Credit Card Credentials, your Ebay account would be shut down in less than 24hrs. You would be guilty of "identity theft" for not adequately protecting your own identity. (i.e. credit worthiness)

Didn't know Ebay suddenly allowed digital goods again

He could probably be putting it on a CD, DVD or USB drive and mailing it out. But looks like only shipping to the UK... Says "May not post to United States" for me.

He's supplying it on a one time USB drive and only offering collection in person from London, UK.

Always did, you just have to state you own copyrights:

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

When you sell digitally delivered goods on eBay, you must include a statement in your listing that says you legally own the content or are authorized to sell it.

This is going to get interesting only when someone offers a good sample of blood with no strings attached (that is, you're free to clone me or even use my DNA to plant evidence for a crime). I admit an extremely generous offer would make it tempting to me.

That reminds me of a (satirical) personal data exchange website [1] which criticized a lot of personal data exposure incidents in Korea. Most amusingly, the website, which had absolutely no actual personal data or functions (and clearly indicated it's a joke in the first click), was blocked by the South Korean government.

[1] http://trademyinfo.libsora.so/ (in Korean)

[2] https://libsora.so/posts/trade-my-info-warning-or-kr/ (in Korean)

Whoever wants it already has it.

Hey @olifrost, presumably this contains personally identifiable information of several individuals connected to you - are you seeking their individual consent too?

Why should he? I don't have a Facebook account and yet people post pictures of me without my consent.

damn..it's starting to hockeystick. and these are pounds so it's like $400 now. Reminds me of the the million dollar homepage and other gimmicks that get a lot of money and attention initially and then fail when replicated.

A comic that I assume was inspired by this stunt: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/free-love

This type of data typically had low individual and high collective value.

The idea of selling information you choose directly to advertisers, intentionally, is much healthier than Facebook / Google etc spending tons of time inferring shit about you.

Yes: http://jenniferlynmorone.com/

I actually think this is going to be the next big thing. Some sort of data broker app that helps users market their own data for a commission. Like an app that can look at the data and basically say, "okay, so judging by your data, we think you are a big fan of Nike products? Is this something you would like us to market on your behalf and if so would you like to make this data more valuable to advertisers (and yourself) by filling out a survey that provides a better understanding of how important this product is to you?

OK but why wouldn't you cut out the user as a middleman, and just market to the user directly? If I knew you were a fan of Nike, I could just sell that to Nike directly instead of asking you to in a roundabout fashion.

As many people have observed, the current digital economy really already facilitates you monetizing your data, by allowing you to have access to innumerable resources for free. Those resources don't cost zero to operate, but you pay for them with your data.

Have you seen https://datacoup.com/ ? They've been around for awhile, and I used them for awhile, until I decided the $1 or w/e I was getting per month wasn't really worth it to me, given that I had no idea where my data was going.

Like Google surveys that doesn't suck because it only pays in Google Play credit.

A good reference in this context would be www.datacoup.com, which allows one to monetize their data in a safe manner.

Spin off the classic joke: Identity theft? I've had my identity on eBay for a year and no one wants it!

This is an interesting thought experience. What is all this data actually worth ? How can you monetize it ?

*Facebook data

It's considered an infringement of GDPR. eBay should take it down

How do you believe this is infringing the GDPR?

IANAL, but...

Ebay are processing the data as instructed by the data subject (Art 6. 1a) for the fulfillment of a contract to sell the data (Art 6. 2b).

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/

I want oreo update s7 adge for free please help me

I am planning on doing this with my medical record.

Why stop there? Let's see someone auction their whole genome sequence.

There are already hundreds of people sharing their whole genome sequence publicly.

http://www.personalgenomes.org/

I imagine the first person to do that would get a very low amount of money in return. Then in the future we will look back at that person like we do at the guy that bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. Like, someone had to do it, and it wasn't worth much at the time, and if he didn't do it that way he probably would have done it some other way, but still the feeling remains that he could have gotten rich instead.

Or credit card details ;)

we're being comoditized. Either as becoming end layer in a tech stack, or a supplier to an aggregator.. all the same.

@olifro do you ship internationally?

Over $100 so far with five days left

Raw data? No value in that.

behind this is the question of morality,I think.

It's scary how much information we actually have out there without knowing.

Seems to be self aggrandizement/someone who wants to market themselves...I'll just move on.

Aside from the fact that it's a joke... Isn't that what social media is for in the first place?

Let’s normalize our exploitation with humor.

I wouldn't say it's normalizing the exploitation. It's putting it in perspective. My first thought when I read this post was "Why would you do that? That seems really stupid!", but then remebered, this is what we are already doing essentially. Only on a larger scale, and hidden from view.

And to think - if you didn’t have such a good memory, metaphors like this would be lost on you!

How do I know you are not keeping the money to yourself? Also data without government official id is not convincing enough.

Staying with the 'I'm just making a point' aspect, what portion of the proceeds are you sharing with your family for disclosing their addresses? Or have they all signed waivers?

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