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Comment by RoadieRoller | Hacker News Reader

Barely a month back in the facebook data breach thread in HN, I was downvoted and my comment removed when I said that it has become a fashion for the top 500 web/e-com companies to come one day and announce data breach and walk away. I said there that it all looks to me as part of a conspiracy theory where they hide behind a breach to sell data/ buy data en masse for marketing purposes.

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I don't think large companies have much interest in selling data. It's a long-term asset. The real money is in renting. E.g., Google and Facebook make a lot of money renting access to you based on the data they have. That's far more lucrative than selling the raw data once.

Also, it's implausible to me that selling the data wouldn't come out eventually. As we saw with Cambridge Analytica, even pretty obscure uses of data can eventually turn into giant media exposure for privacy breaches. The brand damage is is very expensive. Facebook's market cap is down something like $100 billion; there's no way they could have made that kind of money from trying to quietly sell copies of their data.

Selling the data outright is not worth anything. Public identities can be scrapped and bought very easily already. Most companies with personal and contextual data like this sell access to it, usually in the form of ads.

The long term cost / benefit for this sort of deal doesn't work in favour of the company selling their user's data

Well yeah because that is stupid.

The conspiracy is mostly in your head. No sane company would do this.

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