Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over their data
reuters.com
reuters.com
Support them by not visiting any Amazon property for the next two days. No Amazon purchases, no Audible, no Goodreads, no Twitch. AWS is kinda unavoidable, but the rest is not. We can do without them for two days, and show our support for the workers that are protesting inhumane conditions.
Even AWS is avoidable. The cloud hosting market is competitive if you'd only look around.
Even that wouldn't work if anyone is using custom domain names (which the vast majority of published endpoints will be). The best you can do is black list Amazon owned IPs. But you should expect half the web (figure made up) to break and potentially in unexpected ways). Not to mention plenty of other internet based infra like IoT devices, smart TVs, etc
Prime-day wise I saw other sites suggesting that you shouldn't avoid shopping there - a warehouse strike can't make its point of orders piling up and not shipping on time if there aren't orders to pile up.
But I agree, if you work for a company that relies on AWS, now is the perfect time to re-examine that decision. They were the first ones to fulfill a niche, but there's a bunch of competition now.
Theres only any point in withdrawing labour, if that labour was required. Surely it would be better to concentrate your purchases so that the labour loss will be keenly felt, then not buy the week before or after.
Consumer activism is a difficult set of choices. If you stop supporting by purchasing from a company, you run the risk of that company failing/struggling and things getting worse. If you do support them, you run the risk of allowing their behavior to get worse.
There's no objectively moral choice in a vacuum and points to be made for both actions. Be as informed a consumer as you can be and purchase mindfully. Speak with others about the issues you feel are important and try to improve things. That's really the best you can do.
> Still, the GMB isn’t calling on customers to boycott the online retailer during Prime Day. “We’re not calling for economic damage for Amazon,” Mick Rix, a union officer told the BBC. “What we’re asking for is for people to be aware. Leave feedback on Amazon.”
https://qz.com/1666429/amazon-prime-day-2019-sees-workers-st...
> We are not anti-union, but we are not neutral either.
Of course they're gonna say that. All of the other countries listed in that article didn't, so quite a cherry pick you got there.
The US strike looks like a flop, with less than 100 protesting and (according to Amazon), only 15 people striking [1].
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-says-15-workers-strik...
And that shows the strength of one's resolve.
1. What is the correct price? Amazon is doing this to better discriminate customers on offerings, price and quality. It's essentially the sophisticated version of what econ 101 calls "siphoning off the consumer surplus by price discrimination". At this stage, it is highly doubtful that the fixed 10 bucks actually represents the true value that the consumer's data.
2. Externalities. Especially considering that amazon can classify you by other means, people that are like you getting these 10 bucks means that amazon increases its discriminatory power toward you - whether you have gotten the money or not. This is a negative externality - one that the market simply can not solve because we fundamentally lack information and this behavior essentially induces a prisoners dilemma among consumers. Amazon is going to know everything anyway, so I might as well take the 10 bucks.
There's all sorts of other premiums on the exercise of your rights in a private context. It's very hard to get a job in information sectors that lets you retain copyright of your creative work, or in general a job that lets you exercise your freedom of speech without potentially risking your job. If you have physical handicaps, it's more expensive to get a house and a car that are accessible (because there are fewer opinions on the market), you can't necessarily use public transit, and your choice of jobs is also quite limited. Medication and treatment for chronic conditions, whether physical or mental, often exceeds what your insurance will pay. Having a child is quite expensive. If someone has wronged you, depending on the issue, getting a lawyer may be very pricy.
If we think that the market should not set a price for certain desirable basic things, it seems like the fault is on society for allowing and encouraging the market to do so in general, not on the market participants for taking rational advantage of it in particular cases. Personally, I'm of the opinion that everyone should get privacy for free, but I'm also of the opinion that everyone should get health care for free.
Leaving it to the market leads to horror scenarios like the one we have to live through right now: the USA's banana republic privacy laws are hurting all of us.
It can be both.
I agree, but there's no underlying constant that humans act rationally or in their own best interest. I don't think the market can protect rights, period. And putting a price on them marginalizes the poor even more.
You could substitute workday length or child labor or any other undesirable attribute of a society into that sentence. There are some things better not left up to "the market".
That only loosely correlates with driver safety, especially since a bad claims history has an independent impact on price.
There is a huge difference between the scenario you describe, where a company is using your data in an attempt to help you improve your life (save money). vs. A company who takes your data and uses it for profit-generating endeavors that you did not willfully consent to.
What people probably think: If I install the plugin, Amazon can always beat the target and walmart price for me.
The reality: this lets Amazon increase their prices on cheaper goods to within a tiny fraction of what walmart and target offer, and also build a psychological model of the consumer to charge a bit more depending on their state of mind (Tired? Rushed? Pissed off at Trump today, and therefore red-state-headquartered Walmart?), etc, etc.
Most people that install this will only see the first order effect though — $10 and more convenient comparison shopping.
Of course there is another category: People that understand the game, and think they can beat the house. They should install it too (and then go try to make money playing slots at a casino).
Next year, "I did a total body scan at the Amazon Outlet and Care Center and got a free year of Amazon Prime."
Next next year, "The Amazon chip implant was totally painless and I got an account credit of 100 Bezos Bucks."
Next decade, "Alabama is the only state I'm not allowed to marry Alexa."
In some ways this seems like an error on Amazons part. They are telling people this data is worth $10, when most people think its worthless. How long before enough people cotton on and these companies start having to pay rates that reflect the actual value of the data.
Why? That seems a pretty extreme position.
Presumably kpU8efre7r is thinking of something similar - which would obviously make life hard for companies like Equifax.
If anything, this is a great move in the right direction for both privacy and fair compensation: It’s opt-in (you’re opted out by default), AND you get monetary compensation!
What more could you want? More money? Yeah, but that could actually start to happen if a competitive market of such things grew (though I doubt that will happen so long as it’s legal to collect data without compensation or permission; for that we probably need regulation).
Regardless, $10 is far better than the $0 from others who take (and sell) your data without even asking first.
IMO the creepy and dangerous privacy violations come from the always-on tracking systems pervasive throughout the web from Google, Facebook, and others. With those, not only are they on by default without your permission, but you can’t opt out, and you receive no compensation!
I do have problems with their defaults in many of these areas (in my main Google account I have disabled much of the tracking) and also with how certain features (e.g. Google Assistant) tie more of the functionality than necessary to extra permissions with dark pattern nags to grant them all. But the opt-outs are generally there.
(Disclosure: I used to work for Google, but I haven't in over 4 years, and I'm not speaking for them here.)
... Despite having painstakingly turned off every available tracking switch from every service I’ve ever signed up to.
... Despite no longer using any services from Google, Facebook, and many others (except when I must via a link from someone else).
... Despite using privacy oriented browsers with all privacy features turned on.
There are so many problems with the current “opt out” model:
1. They do not make it easy to find all these switches. (And it seems intentional, though I can’t prove it.) In addition to there being no global “off” switch, they nest countless switches behind deep hierarchical navigation graphs, where it is extremely difficult for a human to reach every node without missing some.
2. Even when you find the switch, it’s not always clear which choice is the “most off” position, and some switches do not have a “fully off” position.
3. Many switches use extortion to convince you to keep them on: For example, sometimes you’ll be shut entirely out of a service for turning off a tracking switch with dubious explanations as to why they can’t operate the service without it.
4. Many switches will automatically and silently turn back on if you so much as visit the wrong link to their service. Sometimes this happens silently, and sometimes it happens via confusing “dark pattern” prompts.
5. Google isn’t the only one. You have to repeat this whole process for every other service you use (if they even have the switches available).
6. Despite all this, you’ll still be tracked by trackers that don’t need or want you to have an account with them.
The last item can perhaps be summed up by the fact that I still get very targeted ads for things I’ve been searching for on DuckDuckGo even despite all these efforts. Clearly trackers are still embedded into various endpoint web pages and are figuring out what I’m doing despite it all.
It’s an interesting experiment to try yourself: try to actually not be tracked via a regular or even fairly privacy oriented browser.
As far as I can tell, aside from getting into something like Tor, it really can’t be done: If companies can track you, they will. And they can. So they do.
It's almost like a perfect storm. I feel like many of these issues are worsened by economic conditions in America or poor education. You have people hurting for money who don't realize what they're giving away. Due to this they are vulnerable to being exploited by powerful entities like Amazon.
I think this also contributes to a lot of what we see on the web or on mobile. You have multitudes of free apps that suck and sell your data and blast you with ads but they're free. You have multitudes of free online "news" sources that are basically billionaire backed propaganda but they're free. Good sources usually cost money- better to get your news from Facebook.
Free wins almost every time. I don't care if people are opting into this, Amazon knows exactly what they're doing. They're benefiting hugely from the uneducated and poor. The thing is I'm not sure there is anything that can be done. It's a symptom of poor education and economic factors.
Let the market decide the price
Shoptimate extension has been doing that for 9 years without selling your data.
> fetches Amazon’s price for products that users see on Walmart.com, Target.com and elsewhere.
To me that reads: "we will turn your computer to a node in our scraping botnet". I would guess the internal documents they have will refer to this as market research, but the fact remains that this sounds like a botnet under construction.
- Would you be willing to receive a basic living wage for sharing your information?
- Do you think some people's information is valued at more or less than your own and why?
- Would you be willing to receive payment for sharing your information that is valued at what the market dictates? Why?
- Based on the previous question, does your opinion change if the payment was enough to be a living wage (though still varying based on market demands)?
would love to see Amazon push toward those goals
the day everyone woke up and realize the lies of multi-cloud. Everyone's architecture is naked, and tied to one particular provider.
if you can't flip a button and serve from other provider for the strike, you will also not be able to change when aws crashes, get slow or too expensive. Or what is more likely, slow unless you pay the aws-prime subscription ;)