Let's make them pay for using our personal data
amortizedcost.net
amortizedcost.net
The actual mechanism behind the behavior the author observed is that the user went to Google, searched for a product, and then visited the product's website. The product's website contains a tracking beacon that associates a unique cookie for the user with the visit. The website's owner can then choose to run ads on Facebook or Twitter that are shown only to people who previously visited the website. This program is well-known among Facebook advertisers (it's apparently quite profitable to them), but Facebook understandably doesn't publicize it much to the general public.
Agree that it'd be cool if the person involved could actually control who and where it went to and was compensated for the use of it, but that'd likely require a fundamental change in how the web works.
This is of a dramatically different scale from the information Google has for its own purposes.
that would be better, but google would still be subject to attacks by adversaries and (secret) subpeonas by governments.
much better would be if they did their analytics on user data in real-time and store only the results while discarding the source data right away.
https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...
IMHO this'll end up being one of the most influential research developments of the last few years, but it's only a couple years old at this point and needs a lot of supporting infrastructure (which'll have to be done by people outside of Google - the mothership has no economic incentive to support this) before it really works well.
There's some serious mental gymnastics going from "young dog owners in Seattle" to selling somebody a dossier with their location, search & browsing history (all of which you can turn off).
Google provides selective contextual data about individuals to advertisers who target those individuals in exchange for money. Those advertisers are 3rd parties. Google sells data to 3rd parties. End of.
They don't need to be handing over the full database for it to be a sale of data.
90% of the 'valuable contextual data' is that I searched for something related to an ad's keywords. The other ~% is targeted data. Targeting anonymised, generalised demographics/keywords which billions of people fit into does not class as selling private data.
I'm not arguing to trust Google, nor am I denying that there is massive data brokerage in the advertising industry - just that there is a big difference between targeted ads and selling data.
With all the subsidiaries and partner companies - and even just shell companies - out there, why should we be doing such gymnastics in order to support the advertising industry. If a company bought access to some data what's to say they couldn't eventually re-sell it to another company with another slice of that pie... or have that data inherited on acquisition.
That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to sustain an industry that really isn't providing a lot of value.
I'm not arguing that the data received by the advertiser through targeted ads is anywhere near as valuable as a selling a dossier full of an array of information about a person, but... they're both examples of selling data. Unless you're redefining English language verbs... data is being sold. About a person. To a 3rd party.
There's a difference in scale and value, but there's no difference beyond that.
Check out https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ and https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols
One way that could alleviate this but still allow targeting, although it might be too expensive to implement in practice, would be only allow ad targeting to be based on attributes of the viewer that are either very broad (e.g., gender, income quartile, age group, geographic region) or that correlate highly with use of the advertised product and do not correlate will with non-users of the product.
For example, targeting "young dog owners in Seattle" would be OK on the "young" part and the "in Seattle" part because age group and region are whitelisted broad categories, but would not be OK on the "dog owners" part unless the product was in a category that dog owners use but people who are not dog owners do not. Dog food, for example, or a dog walking service.
The idea is that if someone ran an ad for dog food targeting "young people in Seattle", rather than "young dog owners in Seattle", the respondents are going to largely be dog owners, and can reasonably expect that they are outing themselves as such to the seller. So allowing using "dog owners" in the targeting doesn't really give away any more information on the responders. The targeting just serves to not waste the time of people who don't own dogs seeing ads for dog food.
If, on the other hand, "dog owner" could be used on the targeting for unrelated products, someone could target "young dog owners in Seattle" with an ad for something that almost everyone wants, and the people who respond out themselves as dog owners without having any way to reasonably know that they are doing so.
Also, this is very common in some countries/industries. In the U.K. if you want to buy insurance or open a bank account etc, you’ll often use a comparison website, and they will likely give you an incentive (such as free cinema tickets) for choosing a service through them. This is paid for directly by the affiliate revenue. Cashback sites also exist that do this through affiliates. Credit cards do this with air miles, cashback and other rewards too.
A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up completely is an acceptable outcome of this policy. Make everyone go back to non-targeted advertising!
The problem is that targeted advertising mostly just sucks. Last year I bought wireless headphones from Amazon, and everyone I visited them again for the next two weeks I had recommendations to buy wireless headphones. So even Amazon can't do it properly. What if I'd browsed on Amazon and bought from another store?
The other day I saw an ad on twitter for an wine company, in the "why am I seeing this as?" section it said that it is targeted to males (yup), aged 35 and above (no) who live in the United Kingdom (no). And to top it off, I don't even drink.
The problem is targeted ads mostly don't work, their targeting is so simplistic (see something you like, then blast you with ads for that over and over) or just assign you to such a general bucket (age range and location) that it isn't useful. Even "likes" aren't that useful for targeting - just because I "like" a brand doesn't mean I want to be blasted with ads from them or am going to buy every product they sell. I like Thinkpads, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy every new ThinkPad that is released.
What of the third parties with whom they share my personal data? When those parties profit off my data, what compensation do I receive?
That's like me paying an author for a book, and then the author demanding I pay if I give (or sell) the book to my friend.
I know what you are thinking: "but in this case copies of your data are being resold" in which case I would agree that each party has to buy their own copy from me, or, if they resell to each other, they have to delete the copy they previously bought from me.
It's a bit like a songwriter receiving a royalty whenever their song is played on the radio or in public (see https://www.prsformusic.com/).
Obviously this would be a challenging thing to implement.
1. a musician joins one or more "guilds" and pays dues. there are three major musicians guilds in the US.
2. a public venue pays subscription fees to one or more guilds.
3. the venue is licensed to broadcast music by any of the guilds' members.
4. the guild divides monies from venues proportionally amongst its members, with proportions based largely on the musician's popularity.
that model wouldn't work very well for what you're imagining.
firstly, it wouldn't give you the access to information that you want about who has your data.
secondly, unlike music, user data for advertising purposes doesn't really have differences in value; to an advertiser, data about one person is just as valuable as data about another person. any differences in value have to do with the type of data rather than the source of the data.
That's not really true - there are certain coveted demographics that are worth more than others. In general your value to an advertiser is proportional to how much money you're likely to spend on their product. People with a lot of money are worth more than people without lots of money; people who are likely to spend a lot of money are worth more than people who will save it all; young people are worth more than old people (they have more years of purchases ahead of them); socially connected people are worth more than loners (they influence the buying decisions of others); and people who are easy to influence are worth more than cynics. Also certain industries have very high revenue potential, while others don't; this is why a click on [mesothelioma] or [auto insurance] can fetch over $50, while a click on [f2p games] might be a dollar or two at most.
In old-line (print & TV advertising) they could only determine this in various broad strokes (which is why you'd hear about the coveted 18-34 demographic, or pay more for primetime TV than daytime TV). On the Internet you can divide this up in much greater detail.
6. Smaller musicians often arrange their own events and thus have to pay licensing fees to for the privilege of playing their own music, which as the guild doesn't sample the event, is not returned to the musician
Yeah, works well.
In fact, I refuse to negotiate with FB over my data, I don't participate in that service (or most other social media outlets). If they offered a reasonably priced way to keep up with family on FB without harvesting and tracking everything I do then I would be interested and potentially subscribe to such a service.
This is just a matter of law, unless there's a hidden moral assumption behind what you're saying. Your comparison to the IRS makes the point quite easy to draw: laws -- say, laws about handling of PII -- can be changed.
The usual question arises: What would a civilized solution to the problem look like?
Edit: Having a unhinged competition where the winner is he who manipulates the masses most effectively without getting cought doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better future to me.
Advertising is a negative value add on pretty much all modern interactions, it needs to go away and stop imposing such a steep cost on consumers for the atrociously marginal value it delivers to producers.
Just the sort of conflicting loyalties that leads to insurance, pension and mortgage misselling scandals.
More generally the exchange seems to have become one of being scammed out of £10 of data, tracking and inferences for every £1 of value received. It's years since it's felt like a fair and equitable exchange - like search in exchange for simple keyword ads without tracking.
Maybe this transaction needs to be somehow more explicit?
The only remaining "control" is in ad and tracker blockers, and a vocal minority of the tech industry considers these tantamount to theft.
People aren't normally sensitive to these things: for example Govt on average takes 1/3 of people's incomes (thousand, tens of thousands of dollars) without the slightest hint of complaint. But when a company records where you've been online (with 0$ cost to you) it's all the sudden a disaster?
i genuinely struggle to understand this. if someone could explain it, that would be interesting.
What's the hold up? Is it not the same as the barista at Starbucks knowing your name and what coffee you like?
(Also, I don't get the comparison to taxes. You do realize that taxes pay for your infrastructure, safety, health--at least indirectly through regulation even if your country does not have public health care, justice system? But that's not really relevant to the topic here.)
Now let's pretend that they know how to use this information to change your opinion. And not just your opinion, but the opinion of however many people fit their targeted persuasion campaign. Then understand that the moment the data is sold to another group, they have the same power. The new group might want to do things more sinister than sell you designer jeans.
Finally, realize that the information will last longer than you will. It'll probably be your legacy.
When you go to Starbucks you make an active choice to give the baristas your name (or any name) without them checking it’s actually yours.
What companies like Facebook and Google do is record your every move online with no effort or repeated decisions on your part on what to share with them. They, and whoever they sell your data to, can then build a profile around whatever aspect of your interests they choose, which will consist of associated risks and gains. That’s quite scary to me because they probably know more about some things about me than my closest friends and family do.
If someone without good intentions, someone who wants something from me, someone I’ve wronged, someone who could just gain something from me has that data they can use it to manipulate me.
But you live a charmed life without imagination. Without dangerous ideas. Who wouldn't hurt a soul. To you, your life couldn't possibly matter. To you, you're one of the herd. You like it. Blending right in.
Enjoy your charmed life that complete and utter indifference to the digital dystopia being erected around you, beyond your control. You probably won't do anything edgy or interesting, because you're caught in that loop that they love you to be in. Inured and desensitized, caught in a self-reinforcing loop made by the background of your mind, constructed by your subconscious that knows that you're being watched--all the time.
For your sakes I hope you never stumble on a crime, disagree with prevailing political opinions, or speak up against the powers that be. Or that you look like someone who might. Or are close to someone who might. Better steer clear of sex toys, risky behavior and embarrassing maladies, live your bland existence under the watchful eye of the overlords who seem harmless, if only a little greedy.
Don't live your life any way that makes you unique and don't make yourself a target! Don't bother to use your imagination! Keep your lips off that whistle! And make sure to vote, or not, because who the fuck cares how society treats its citizens, amirite?
And don't bother looking back to the expectation of privacy that just a generation ago, was some kind of normal. To see the governments and power structures that wielded tyranny over people and engaged in genocide, to the documents and bills of rights that were put in place to restrict that tyranny, and how thoroughly founders understood that people just have a right to be free. But lattes!
And basically, that FB monitoring reduces our willingness to share who we really are (at least the edgy non-conformist stuff)
For sex toys and other non-conformist stuff, signout of facebook and use Google in-cognito mode. You don't want that stuff on Facebook anyways.
You've got a value scale telegraphed through your essay: edgy and dangerous is much more what a human should be rather than safe, complacent, comfortable.
I think it's something you desire to be/have, and that's fine, but you wouldn't say that unless you felt that this is something far, far away from what you are now. You must feel that you are unimaginative and more of a consumer than a producer. I wouldn't blame you for feeling that way...one of the neat tricks of our system is that we are supposed to individuate deeply (dangerously, rowr!), however every single way to do it is co-opted by some marketing identity. Try going to do some yoga in just ordinary pants not branded as a "lifestyle."
If you feel like a non-entity in this way, it's good to have an enemy. A "man" to keep you down. This is the "they" in your essay. And indeed, he runs rampant through all of our thoughts.
But in reality, they is you. You participate in this internet economy. You take the "free" things that are offered. What I mean is that this system serves you more than you want to admit: it gives you a reason to fail to find out who you really are.
Because, be honest, do you really want to be this edgy and dangerous person you are putting forth as an ideal? Are those people the best dads to their kids, the best wives to their husbands? Isn't there also goodness in the individual who shows up at the median of all these increasingly insidious schemes to harvest data.
Maybe, just maybe, this character shows up as so bland and useless because her attention is focused elsewhere. She doesn't care that she's tracked. Her opinions are bland because she doesn't strive to "cut a profile" in a place which would be visible to observers in the system.
It could just as well be that true freedom is in that.
And further, who is more free: the one caught and victimized by one of these totalitarian webs you describe (and they are scary), or the one who is so savvy about avoiding the webs, the mistakes, the many trip wires that eventually lead to disgrace, prison, whatever.
So I have been caught. So what? Was that the purpose of my life? To adroitly avoid the traps of my enemies? I suggest it's possible to not care about them. About what they do every moment.
I think life may lie in a completely different direction.
Assume that the companies today are ethical with your data today - they only use algorithmic techniques to figure out what advertisements to sell to you.
What guarantee do you have that these companies will be around for the next 20 years? What guarantee do you have that somebody won't acquire these companies when their stocks are languishing - and that the new masters over this data will not abuse it?
Who owns Yahoo mail now? Who owns MySpace now? What are they doing with all that data? What incentives do they have to not abuse it?
The usefulness of your personal data has an extremely long half-life period. I'd guess it is much much larger than what the average life-span of an internet company.
I don't mind the big bad gobmint taking my money, I wish they'd take more to be honest. Public infrastructure needs improving and safety nets need strengthening. On the other hand, advertisers don't need my purchase history, or any information about me, and I'd rather not let them stockpile that as even if they were pure and morally righteous, they can't be trusted to make secure databases (no one can).
Taxes are unrelated, and people at your coffee shop recognizing you is nothing compared to the lengths Facebook and Google go to for vacuuming up any and all personal data.
This would allow ethical companies like Firefox and Signal to operate at much lower margins than Chrome and Messenger.
Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). We should make companies value our privacy in the first place, not commoditize it.
Heh, yes, clever spin on his part: it's expensive primarily because the default is actors (like Google) working so hard against it.
I also think that services that have become essential to receive public services like email should be regulated as such, with availability and cost guarantees. That's a whole digression on eInfrastructure though....
The first I heard of something like this was in the Berkman Identity Group, which grew into the Identity Commons. At the time the movement was called Vendor-Relationship-Management (VRM), an inversion of the CRM practice where customers controlled the information and could be incentivized in various ways (discounts, paid, etc.) to share that information for agreed upon durations.
https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship...
This movement was one of the drivers for the link contract work done as part of the Extensible Data Interchange (XDI) OASIS technical committee.
I don't know if this is the first instance of this kind of movement, but it was the first I heard of it.
Doc Searls reports another recent development: VRM is alive and well, under a new acronym that plays on B2B, Me2B. Source: http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
Arguably, this is already happening with Apple, positioning themselves as privacy-aware, but charging a huge markup for it.
[0]: Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for access to all of their personal data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-re...
[1]: Discussion on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055
If you click on 0 ads per year, you generate $0 for Facebook and therefore your data is worth $0.
For a personally targeted (using your data) ad click on FB, you're looking at ~$3.25. For a web targeted ad click on a niche website, you're probably looking $0.50-$2.50.
In other words, your "data" is worth $0.75-$2.75 per click of revenue
FB spends 17% of revenue on direct costs and another 18% on marketing. Let's ignore R&D improvements and assume 35% of costs to serve that revenue.
Profit per click for FB = $0.49-$1.79 per click.
Please consider that these clicks must have real intent behind them. In other words, there should be at least 10% chance you'd actually buy that product.
In other words, your data is not worth that much money.
...
On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?
IIRC they don't make anywhere near $10/user/month. If you gave me the option to pay, say, $25/year for ad-free, tracking-free, and it was implemented in some way that I could trust, then I might be willing to participate with FB again. I'm hoping, actually, that someone will come along with exactly this business model so that we can have social networking for friends and family without the dark patterns. Needs to get everyone on board, of course, which is the hard part.
Advertising effectively allows a company to charge richer users more, which you lose when you switch to a flat fee.
It seems like a chicken & egg problem, in some ways. A business that was built more traditionally than a unicorn could still make good money at $10/user/month, certainly it's possible to build Facebook-level social networking without employing nearly as many developers as they do. But without the network effect, the value is not there. I don't want to pay to be by myself.
Maybe it could work as a SaaS, selling distinct social FB-style closed social networks to families, with a future option to interconnect those.
Probably someone has already tried this and failed. I'm not an idea guy, just a coder ;-)
I view it kind of like Craigslist. If I put something there for free tons of people are interested. If I charge even a dollar the interest drops by a magnitude.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/fabric-offers-an-alternati...
https://medium.com/@fabric.me/sunsetting-the-fabric-app-deb2...
https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...
Why don't we realize that privacy is a resource and the current consumption of that resource to drive advertising is incredibly inefficient.
(I used to work in a company that was basically harvesting some users' GPS data (via a SDK / without their explicit consent) and using it to make consumer studies for retail companies so it made me think)
- Disqus
Maybe the author should practice what they preach.
I don't think this happens?
> Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company.
This definitely does not happen. Google doesn't sell search history to anyone else. It may be the case that Google itself remarkets things to you. But I don't think so, since how would they get paid in that transaction? Through affiliate links? Doubtful.
Instead, I think what actually happens is that people make a search, they click a link, and target of that link (be it Amazon or some other store) associates their profile with interest in a particular product, then remarkets to that profile on Facebook.
I suggest that we're tremendously outclassed in understanding how this all works, and how to find angles or "evil" in it.
Also, it could be somewhat similar to what we get with class-action settlements that are just a minor cost of doing business to let the wrongdoer off the hook, while paying some middleperson to facilitate that.
Facebook makes about $100/year from American users. [1] Something like $4 once can't be right.
(Facebook also doesn't sell your data. They allow people to target ads against your data.)
[1] 2018 Q3 data, but the right range: https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...
Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That really has to stop.
That's a non-sequitur... Whatsapp is Facebook. The Google Play Store is Google. You are using Facebook and Google 's services. Whether you're using Google search or "Facebook" (the product not the company) is irrelevant.
Tim Berners Lee is already working on something similar
If the average Grandma and High School kid had to pay per query to Google in return for ad free search ( Google did have this product with CSE) what miniscule percentage of users would pay?
The Brave Attention Token tackles this problem in a logical manner
It might work well if significantly large groups of people got together and collectively sold their data - say 100,000 or more. That would be kind of cool - "hey we are 100,000 people with X demographics and are willing to share Y data for Z dollars.
Doing it on an individual basis may be a symbolic victory, but that would likely be it. "Personal" data has a huge asymmetry in value. There is some Danny Kahneman in here somewhere - I bet people would value their own data 10x what they value a random person's at.
In my opinion people would on average refuse to sell their data individually because what it is actually worth would almost certainly be lower (probably much lower) than they'd imagine, and that sounds like it would make people sad not happy.
(Also author doesnt seem to know how google,fb work)
For Google users example, free-tier will allow each user account 5 searches per month that will not be tracked and recorded, so essentially users will have an option to specify right before the moment of each search to indicate whether this specific search is going to be “cognito” or “invisible” (perhaps by just ticking a checkbox).
Higher tiers offering greater amounts of private searches per month will simply cost more to purchase shall those consumers desire. Ran out of private searches? Top it up just like prepaid phone credit! This way those users who are extremely privacy conscious will have a solution to protect their own privacy while Google has invented a new revenue stream and can even increase profits from their valuable services.
The next generation Capitalism 2.0 will now enjoy privacy becoming a new cash cow industry overnight. The question then will be how much are people willing to pay for an unlimited account?
You can already open an incognito / private browsing window if you want to search without it contributing to your profile. On the other hand, modern search works better because it can build that sort of profile.
(Disclosure: I work for Google, on ads. Commenting only as myself.)
Google has become too incompetent to even take the query (all of it, without ignoring half of it) into account. I don't know what Google search has become better for because it sure isn't finding things.
Why should we allow our privacy to be commoditized, instead of enshrining it as a basic human right?
Obviously we cannot expect Google to provide their services for free as it's very costly to maintain such global infrastructure and their team of engineers, therefore in turn Google would need user data in order to provide advertising products and generate the required revenue. We must pay for using Google services in one way or another, and right now we are paying it by giving up our personal data.
In the end this will simply serve as another payment option for those who value their privacy more than cash. I suspect the majority of population would still remain at free tier. However with more options available, at least the public will no longer complain about potential privacy issues, and Google can also remove much of the unnecessary heat and focus off their back. There are just so many different ways Google can tweak and optimize these offers to satisfy public demand for privacy.
The current advertising in exchange for privacy model obviously does not work for all consumers so it's time to evolve.
> In the end this will simply serve as another payment option for those who value their privacy more than cash.
The problem with this is it makes privacy a luxury. Should those living paycheck to paycheck have to choose between their privacy and finding things on the Internet?
If privacy is a commodity, then this is fine. But then, so is the status quo: privacy is currency to be exchanged for services, and companies should stretch that currency as far as possible. There is no sound moral argument against what Google/Facebook/etc are doing. The current advertising model may not work for everyone, but who cares? The market has spoken.
If privacy is a human right, then this is obviously insufficient. We can't allow companies to exploit people who can't afford it by making it opt-in; we need to strictly enforce it for everyone.