No Cash Needed at This Cafe: Students Pay the Tab with Their Personal Data
npr.org
npr.org
I’d probably do it. They’re open about what data they collect and what they use it for, which is better than many of the websites I use
"We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee."
What's not to enjoy about a fresh cup of coffee, payed for by a stranger who has special training in reading ads at you? Specifically at you.
I wonder if the customers<?> are allowed to not pay attention? or give incorrect information?
The fact that you had attention to spare while in uni can also be seen as a loss (not a personal attack to you). But if you are in uni and don't have anything better to do but to listen to someone reading you ads, then, in my opinion, it's sad (again no attack against you).
Coffee is just coffee...
You need to sign up with your details on a website and need to activate a QR code each time you visit. Show the code at the counter to collect coffee. As you collect your cup of coffee, the barista speaks out an advertisement (yes, really) which is a short description about one of the sponsor companies. There is a limit on number of cups you can take per hour and day. I've never used it but it's immensely popular among students and even professors.
There is no option to pay for the coffee and bypass the advertisements/sign up process. Can't wait until all food and drinks everywhere are "free" this way.
"Adbuddy" is a service in that where you can get stuff bought for you, but a 'buddy' turns up to advertise at you.
--edit-- notice this has already been brought up down-thread
Mr. Plow that name again is Mr. Plow
Okay, suction
Funny, the definition of "free" seems to have changed.
It may be that no money changes hands, but the coffee is certainly not free.
Honestly I would expect more services like this to come out, given how successful Facebook and Google managed to become.
So, it is not free, just as Facebook and Google services aren't - which is exactly what GP said. So ... what is your point?
who seriously thinks this? the only services i can think of off the top of my head that don't have viable paid alternatives are facebook and google search. and there's at least one decent alternative to google search that is a bit more privacy focused.
for most people, privacy isn't even worth a $5 monthly subscription.
indeed. Yet these private information have to be collected in quantities before becoming relevant, both economically and analytically.
Unfortunately this kinda of apathy doesn’t leave much room for those who don’t want to give up their information. There is no alternate model for companies like Facebook or LinkedIn that allows for possibly paying users to maintain some level of privacy.
I think the answer here is to remember that individual privacy as a social norm is healthy for your community, regardless of whether you personally expect to need it.
(surely you can pay for a service to replicate whatever part of these platforms you need)
I definitely remember a lot of events like "bring your resume, hear from a panel about exciting careers in X, and eat free pizza!!"
1.) Totally opt-in. Unless this cafe holds a monopoly on the coffee market on this college campus, students can choose to participate.
2.) It seems like the students have some control over what data to share. Hopefully it's not a binary all-or-nothing situation, but if there's a chance students can share whatever they want (and receive tiered cafe services in proportion to whatever they share), that seems kinda interesting.
I'm more than happy to grant companies access to me. But I want something in return. In this case, maybe a chai latte?
I think you're undervaluing yourself at 4 bucks
It's certainly not a one off as apparently they have limits for per hour and per day.
It seems to me that this idea is a race to the bottom. If people continue to give up first level information (name, address, etc) it devalues it because that info becomes commonplace and widely distributed. So what happens then -- dig deeper into your life? Does the 2019 version of this cafe want complete access to your phone / laptop? What about the 2020 version?
The only wining move is not to play.
Your daily habits, used for who knows what purpose over the many decades remaining in your life, are worth a hell of a lot more than a latte.
The Chinese social credit system looks at your social media and phone usage and says, "Sorry, we're denying you a loan because you were critical of the government."
It is fair to criticize the prospective Equifax system and the concerns around pervasive data collection are valid. But the Chinese system is in a whole different, far more evil league.
> While English-language media describe China’s social credit system as a Black Mirror-like authoritarian implementation, Chinese social media users seem to focus more on the advantages than the burdens.
This is a remarkably tone-deaf observation given that talking about the burdens will get them imposed on you.
Fed with enough data, a ML system should be able to derive “We’re denying you a loan because you’re likely to default on it because you’re likely to lose your job because you’re critical of the government”.
It likely wouldn’t be able to express that to humans that way, though, so humans would say “We’re denying you a loan because the computer says we should”
We must be very careful.
... and exercise and driving telemetry data and family medical and criminal history and...
At a certain threshold the distinction with the Chinese system becomes irrelevant given the impact on an individual.
That's a common misconception of how Chinese social credit works. China doesn't really care if you're criticizing the government as long as if they don't think of you as a threat. If they do, they'll simply imprison you. If the government is only a little suspicious, they wouldn't want to send you on guard by lowering your credit score.
This one says "Nope, the Chinese system wouldn't use the credit system for non benign reason. They don't care"
Different standard?
I think calling it outright 'evil' is unfair.
The Chinese model at least comes from a well-intentioned place. It's a ham-fisted version of the "nudge" programs you see in places like insurance plans, with a bolder underlying goal to create a better society. Their definition of "better" may not be yours, but the goal is not inherently malicious.
The American take of this will have the exact same flaws-- the data will eventually be mishandled, the models will have holes you can drive a bus through-- but it's justified in the sake of "we'll get slightly more accurate pricing for credit and insurance".
That being said, since these systems are abstraction on debt, the failure mode at the margins means that companies that become reliant on funds from these loans will be increasingly sensitive to people at the margins who will be denied such loans.
I also find it interesting that the public will also have increasingly more access to the data to be able to retroactively understand the factors that determine the go/no go (especially as these systems become increasingly automated). Combined with the above, it will be increasingly possible to create ways to dirty the waters in the signals for a variety of desired outcomes for 3rd party actors.
My concern is that the truly evil have stealth and pretence on their side, while people who are developing the behaviours and norms that will be necessary for us to cope with the societal challenges we face - for example people who espouse radical anti-consumerism - may be driven out of debate by the norms and norm maintenance mechanisms that are accidentally and with good intention being developed in the west.
They will feed your behavior into a machine learning algorithm, which will probably develop biases.
If it turned out that Ethnic Group A is on average 5% more reliable about paying their debt, this is valuable information, but the banks are legally bound to ignore it.
So they've probably spent a lot of time trying to produce similar metrics through proxy measurements. Seek out a profession or purchasing pattern that suggests a given ethnicity without outright saying it.
I suspect AI is, from a legal CYA perspective, the greatest proxy of them all. "It's a black box, we don't/can't know how it produces its results... yet mysteriously it biases exactly how we would if we could overtly discriminate."
> At time of writing, Sesame Credit has 240.000 fans on its official Weibo account (@芝麻信用), where they promote the most recent benefits to users with higher credit scores, such as the possibility to get Hello Bicycle (哈罗单车) rental bikes without deposits.
> Apart from Hello Bike or Ford, there is a myriad of other brands that seem happy to participate in the Sesame Credit system and the idea of Shared Economy. “Thumbs up for sharing [economy]!”, some netizens comment.
https://www.whatsonweibo.com/open-sesame-social-credit-in-ch...
> Team of scholars at Freie Universität Berlin surveyed 2,200 citizens. Particularly high level of approval among older and better educated
https://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/informationen/fup/2018/fu...
The comedown from empire isn't pretty and even if the trade war somehow delays China from superseding the US GDP it is somewhat inevitable. Although the social credit system probably comes to the US it is naive at best to assume that the vast majority of other forms of control that China has developed don't make their way over the Pacific.
Here's an article where a credit score based on phone habits is viewed positively: https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2017/02/22/woman-l...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/audreymurrell/2018/07/31/pushin...
It's not. It's because of scale. If a similar system was being implemented in the US the shitstorm would be even bigger.
Tala is a whole other story, it is small scale and not mandatory. As it grows to the point where using it is expected or required it will face the same exact criticism.
I get what you're saying, but I still sense some cognitive dissonance. If the US lets some hip start up build a social credit score and then just heavily buys into it, I think it will face less pushback than if they use a scary federal contractor to build the same score. I get the feeling that people think governments are intentionally evil.
You can certainly feel whatever you want, but I see many many comments with specific privacy concerns that don't even mention China.
In fact, when I glanced at the comments before clicking through to the article, none of the top comments mentioned China.
The value of something does have a temporal component. You're talking about a cup of coffee now, when I desperately need caffeine, vs. the value of something (my personal data) far into the future.
You are surely not serious?
Of course, that's based on this article. In reality it might be much worse.
Other examples might be at gas stations, get reduced fare if you listen to targeted ad etc. Or ads when inside an uber. I dont mind targeted advertising actually (if its actually interesting to me), sometimes I wish I could see more of it but I have adblock running everywhere
Another example I see is sponsored pizza at tech meetups and sponsors etc
I don't see how aggregated data would be valuable enough to fund the cafe. You could probably find that aggregated data via the university's own statistics. The article also says they collect phone numbers and email addresses, but this quote says they don't give them out, which seems a bit strange to me. And JP Morgan hired 40% of its hires from the cafe, but it wasn't given their phone numbers or emails? I guess it's possible but it also seems strange.
If you think of the cafe like a job recruitment site, such as Linkedin, Indeed, or Triplebyte, then it would be expected that the site would provide some way for employers to contact candidates. Handing out email and phone number might be considered acceptable, or alternatively providing an intermediary messaging service might be better.
Well, what if the student comes again for another coffee? What new/different data does/can he give?
I hear this a lot. As a privacy advocate myself, what is the best response to this?
Also important to emphasise that once you know someone's user/email you can cross reference against leaked database dumps to reveal passwords. They might have changed them since on X website but may not on other sites.
Instead of having people and services steal my personal information to show me BS ads, let me sell my own personal data and maybe then you can show some ads for stuff I might actually be interested in.
You might argue that advertisers have too much access to our personal data, but I'd argue they don't have enough.
Ideally (hoping), in the future, these information should be made public for everyone, to level the playing field.
> It’s not just buying interests, though, is it? It’s where you go, who you talk to, what you talk about, your sexual preferences, bank balance, religious views, whether you have weapons in your home, whether you’re having an illicit affair, what medications you’re taking, etc.
I don't think this level of detail exists for most public leaders. Do you know the bank balance of the leader of your country?
Being paranoid about privacy is not perfect too, it has trade off aswell.
Whether that's a good thing depends on which laws are being enforced. Better hope what you're doing now isn't made retroactively illegal, especially if it's now publicly documented forever.
I mean, I just wouldn't go to this cafe because of my personal view, so that data point may not show what they want it to show.
This can be useful in proving how certain companies (maybe Facebook, Google) can be monopolies in overcharging users in data space due to the lack of competition.
Tyler Durden, lover of crafts and urban exploration, would like one espresso.
First reason is that the transaction is more transparent. Contrast that to what is happening on the internet - in the cafe informed consent is given explicitly instead of implicitly and from often less informed internet users.
Second reason is that it will perhaps unintentionally push into consciousness of people the notion that private information has real, tangible value which would hopefully translate into change of awareness and attitude on the internet to treats to privacy that exist there that I think we both find more nauseating.
Shiru Cafe into every city!
Is it? If this concept takes off, these places will be set up for maximum data collection. I don't give consent to use my PII, but the camera in the corner has facial recognition, tracks what I eat, how I eat it, who I am with, etc.
I'll definitely avoid these places.
That's not a valid form of informed consent. That's coercion.