Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal
eff.org
eff.org
I'm not attached to this, I'd rather the programs like this get destroyed. But also by stacking the offers, I believe I'm getting more value here than they do.
So for now I'm cool with this exchange. Would others put the privacy/money break-even somewhere else? (This is assuming reasonable shopping - I make a full list before starting to order a pickup, I rarely actually go through a shop, so there's no upsell here)
Already i've read things about hotel websites and stuff altering prices based on which device you're using to browse their site.
In a world where your personal shopping information is bought and sold and things become increasingly online, it'll become a game of individualized shopping lists and prices, individual sales. Another perfectly crafted corporate bubble for people to live under where prices, suggestions and sales are individually tailored and at the whims of people siphoning all your personal information.
I don't need my own personal omnipotent digital god dictating everything in my life. Even if it saves me a few bucks.
The pricing difference that actually matters (moving old stock) is already mostly done without personalised data. Sales are a standard.
If someone has your spending history, sees you buy something frequently, they have no incentive to put it on sale. Likewise, if they see something you've maybe looked at but not bought, they can put it in sale and tempt you.
This is just one example. I'm sure marketers can come up with all sorts.
If anything, prices would rise for richer people, and decline for poorer people.
Is that bad?
It would be interesting to see the arms race that could arise, though. If individualized prices became enough of a thing, there would probably be personal shoppers who would buy things for you at a lower price with their "poor person" data profile and pocket a percentage of the difference. Or more likely, there will probably be a way to run a browser with the right cookies to give you the lowest price.
Instead of you being sold to the richest, hungriest gas station, it's more like all of the gas stations racing to the lowest price to serve you, and consumers having no brand relationships with gas stations anymore.
If Android auto was always serving up expensive gas, users would start using bing or apple maps - I certainly would if there was such a tangible cost difference
“Waze is better than google maps for directions” for a long time was true. Then google bought it.
If Waze can rise up, so can another. Especially where it’ll save drivers some % on their fuel bills. Even more so in European countries with high fuel duties.
And that will happen to every competitor on that market.
Years ago, the grocery stores here did the same thing. It's taken 15 years for them to finally begin to actually compete with each other...well just prior to covid anyway...
Uber is making you pay more when your phone is low on battery (because they know you don't have too much time to think about how you're getting back home).
Airline companies are showing you higher prices if they believe you can afford it, from the information they're getting about you (like your user agent).
Off-topic: this same idea has been cropping up a lot on HN recently with respect to salaries when moving to lower CoL areas. The argument on one side is that their work hasn't become less useful, and on the other side we hear that with a lower CoL you need the money less, and we have a bit of a holy war going on trying to describe why one side or the other has some moral claim to the entirety of that surplus.
Now let's do a little thought-experiment with the Uber ride and look at the information you and Uber have to make your price and choice on:
For Uber:
- What time is it? +
- Are you far away from home? +
- Have you been here before? -
- What have you paid before? +
- Where do you shop usually? +
- Are you rich? ++
- Are you ill? +
- Are you pregnant? +
- Are you drunk? ++
- Are you very drunk? +++ (bonus!)
- Are you sad? +
- Did you just break up? ++
- Do you have any friends? +/-
- Do you have any friends with cars? -
- Are you alone? +
- Are you going home? +
- Are you already home? -
- probably a lot more...
For you:
- Price?
- How screwed am I if I don't take the ride?
There are not many other options. Maybe a taxi's while they last and Lyft probably has the same algorithm.
Upside? Plausible deniability! An NN AI that happens to score based on age, gender, gender preference, religion, disability status, and ethnicity, but buried among other factors and not explicitly exposed? Perfectly fine! (At least until you can hire stats PhDs to prove statistically significant bias.)
Bad news? The engineers have no idea why (or when) the model gives bad results. It's answers without insight.
I understand this article. I still want to see a penny every time my data is used/accessed/sold/etc, if anything to drive up the cost of contracts around or servicing of my data. If my data is made functionally anonymous then make it a dime payment and then a penny every time that block of data is used sold. Send it as a check to my mailing address with a letter including the legal entities involved, initial source of the data, what type or category of data they have relating to me (like PII category ex address, name, purchase history, etc), their intended use for the data (research vs marketing), and how I can contact to have my data removed from the set. Also if my data is made anonymous, provide a 1 penny check and above information for any use or sale of the data set.
Yes this regulation would kill the industry in overhead costs aimed at making the information somewhat close to the 'informed consent' required for medical approvals and breaking down how the industry works. Maybe make it so on initial sale and usage you get a check then at the start of each following year that entity pays out for annual usage.
Our data is valuable collectively to identify trends, markets, and opportunity and I'd like to know how I'm manipulated into being a part of that as well as what entities I cannot trust with any personal data. And I think this should apply to Experian/etc too. Chase wants to find out my credit score to market CC reward offers to me? Make it known and pay me the same way farms are paid for the useful manure their animals produce.
The seller is a company. Its only purpose is to satisfy its customers' needs.
Is there a way to game this? i.e., given a specific user agent, can I convince airlines I'm poor and get a deal on tickets?
Do you have a source? 9news[0] claims otherwise.
> Airline companies are showing you higher prices
I do not find evidence of this, either[1].
[0]: https://www.9news.com/article/news/verify/verify-does-uber-c...
See...there's always someone that can come up with an even more awful scenario.
I'd never even thought of such a thing...but that really doesn't sound too far fetched.
I guess it would create a new little economy, but i dunno, these things always remind me of something from black mirror.
And most of the depictions of the future in that show kinda horrified me.
You can opt-out/not opt-in all you want, but as long as enough people opt-in (or don't opt-out), they can just apply an existing model against you, get good-enough results and you're almost as screwed.
Well, these huge chains have bean counters that do exactly these kind of calculations, and in general, no. They are making more money in aggregate by doing this data collection than they are losing to discounts. Otherwise they would not do it.
The real mystery is the shadow economy behind the scenes of how this data gets packaged, sold, analyzed, and monetized. You should be more curious. In fact, we all should.
That's why I mentioned selling the same information to 5 companies. I get each of them separately maybe paying a few bucks. I'm assuming that a few of them resell the information to the same market making that information less useful and giving me more value.
But at $70+ a month for the very repetitive shopping lists from a single location? My guess is they don't plan for people actually using the offers efficiently. If they did, the rewards would plummet.
Hmmm.
In aggregate, that might be true, but that doesn't mean it is true for you. It is like coupons. In aggregate they make more money for the company, but individually the super couponers are making more money. There are a lot of systems that understand that a small percent of users will care enough to learn how to actually maximize return, but the other 95% or users make up for it. Credit card points is another good example. All the people that carry a balance and pay interest subsidize the few people that pay theirs off every single month and use the points for "free".
For other elements of my data I am relatively hard line - it's too hard to value the privacy/ money breakeven and my approach is always to withhold wherever possible. In the long run this tends to net me on right side of any scandal even if I am a laggard on some social trend or convenience
Your data is valuable not just for the immediate value that its used for (e.g. grocery stores predicting how much they need to restock of product X aggregating over consumer choices of all users). Its also useful as a data point in larger statistical analysis of an "audience" (i.e. a group of people with certain attributes) to marketing organizations. Every datum that they get makes their models somewhat more accurate.
Most of these analysis are still pretty primitive today (AFAIK, maybe someone from the NSA or G00G can say otherwise). But these tools are getting better every year, and so is the value of your data.
Which is extremely valuable. Without them, a company can see they sell 1,000 units of product X and 500 units of product A. With these data models of individual buying behavior, they can see that 400 of the 500 buyers of product A also bought product X. So they can start marketing product A to product X buyers to boost product A, instead of just trying to market it to everyone and hoping for the best.
In essence you should be paying less because these programs also cost money. Just think of all the expensive smart people that make these programs work.
I don't think this is the exchange you are making, though.
The money you save here is no different from couponing: it's a way for retailers to price differentiate and charge the other customers more.
You are being charged a fairer price (still profitable for the retailer), for actively paying attention to what's cheaper; that'll be unrelated to the price or value of your data.
Last year I was part of a working group on a data dividend proposal for the state of California, which you can read about at https://www.datadividends.org/ .
Our conclusions led us much closer to the spirit of this EFF article than the term "data dividends" might suggest. We recommended against any kind of personalized payments. We considered a small universal basic income funded by a "data tax", but because of the small amount (as mentioned by the EFF), we focused on use of a data tax to fund public projects and initiatives aimed at redistributing the benefits of data more equitably.
We mostly stayed away from recommending privacy or data ownership regulation because (a) California had recently passed the CCPA and (b) this question seemed outside of our mandate, but I agree that the two should be considered together.
> By analogy, I don't think putting taxes on cigarettes means the state will try to get more people to smoke.
To be clear: I don't mean that the state would try to encourage companies to collect and monetize more of their users' information. What I'm suggesting is that they would have a weaker incentive to protect the privacy of their citizens if part of their revenue depended on it being infringed.
I whole heartedly support repeated radical cashectomies targeting the windfall profits of the data pirates.
However...
The structure of Canada's carbon dividend serves to disincentivize an undesired behavior. It's a no brainer win/win policy.
I cannot see how California's data dividend does the same for our privacy. That (negative) feedback loop is missing.
It's an interesting strategy. But I think it needs more work.
We did discuss this and felt that a very deep dive would be needed. (A) It's not an objective no-brainer exactly what behavior you want to disincentivize. (B) The economic impacts/consequences could be huge, so the tradeoff needs to be carefully considered.
One example is Google Maps. Right now it has privacy drawbacks, but it also generates a lot of utility for a lot of people and is relatively freely accessible for individuals. You'd want to be careful about screwing that up. For example, incentivizing Google to switch to a paid access model.
I guess part of what this EFF article is saying is: these decisions are better treated as part of privacy law / human rights, rather than economics...I'd be interested to hear your thoughts!
Google will some how manage.
Government's job is to define the rules of the game, make things predictable. There's no need to second guess yourself by anticipating how the belligerents, err, players will react, and preemptively conceding the initiative.
You act. They react. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I understand the realpolitik, constraints, bargaining.
I'm just encouraging you to become clear about what you want, ultimately. Then find a path to get there.
Some day you'll have an opportunity to do great things. Are you ready? What will you do?
That's how the other side works. They spend $100m annually war gaming and coming up with plans. Then when the next inevitable crisis hits, they rush the field.
> You wouldn’t place a price tag on your freedom to speak. We shouldn’t place one on our privacy, either.
You do place a price tag on a lot of your freedoms, that's what your employers pay you for. And it's not like people are going to be forced to give their data, or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary.
We either put a price tag on all user-generated content (including private data) or we abolish all intellectual property laws and copyrights. Suggesting otherwise is dishonest double standards.
> should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them.
The system is already sucking all their data. There's nothing else. If anything this will force companies to compete and pay them more than $0.
> Facebook is a massive, global company with billions of users, but each user only offers Facebook a modest amount in revenue.
Plenty of websites would be kept alive if they could earn $28 / year from each one of their users (hell, i 'd be rich), and in fact it shows why such a scheme would be beneficial for the web and the world as a whole.
Privacy and attention are currently being grabbed , stolen and sold in marketplaces nowadays . It's just so wrong to try to convince people to keep doing so.
This isn't 2003, and the price of "free services" is no longer high enough to justify giving our data for free (by law). I don't even understand what's the motive behind this post, and why Hailey felt the need to support such abuses
Sure you can avoid using Google and other spying companies products, but you kind of then getting yourself excluded from the society that see no problem with that. If you don't want to give your data you essentially need to stop using internet or put a lot of effort to learn how to avoid your data to be taken away from you.
I agree that it should be straight up illegal to collect data that there is no essential business need for. Company should be allowed to take personal data to process an order, but it should be illegal to run any kind of analytics that involves personal data and even "anonymised" data should not be allowed to be sold or used for advertising or to manipulate customers into sales.
edit: The fact that Instagram can ignore GDPR requests essentially means the law is dead.
This is never going to be fully possible. Companies will just move to analyzing people's posts and communications to extract their preferences (and, predictably, they 'll stop offering encrypted messaging for this reason). Let's just admit that as long as advertising and manipulation are necessary evils, business is going to keep making money from that data
TLDR: Bookkeeping is hard, so only reasonable option is the honor system.
Good grief.
EFF, ACLU, others frustrate me to no end. I just cannot grok their viewpoints. Establishment centrists trying to defend an imaginary world that never existed?
I was an election integrity activist. I had also implemented electronic medical record exchanges. So I know a few things about patient and voter privacy. My discussions with policy people have never been fruitful.
We have no privacy. That's not the interesting part.
The interesting part:
What is privacy?
What are the technically feasible options?
What are the laws and practices to uphold those feasible privacy solutions?
In my experience, the privacy advocates are completely out of touch with the technical reality. (I'll skim read the datadividends.org link below shorty, to see if they're more savvy.)
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Putting a price on our data has two consequences.
It establishes our personal property rights over our own data. It's my data.
It creates a liability for the holders of data. Paving the way for tort. Language that accountants and lawyers and investors and even congress critters understand.
Putting a price on my data is not about the money. Well, maybe a little. Any one making a buck off my data owes me my cut. Pay me.
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Property rights for personal data still don't answer those three interesting questions. That's a separate discussion.
Well...what did you think would happen?
privacy as a legal right is complex and ill-defined -- if you look just at CCPA or GDPR, these are big laws with large compliance costs with the risk of benefiting incumbents like FB/G
if your goal is to develop a robust case law for privacy in the united states, pay for privacy accomplishes that because if I pay a dollar for 'private mode', and the vendor breaks our contract, I can absolutely sue.
we also don't know which privacy features users want. hard to write laws without market research, and you can't do market research if there's no market for a good.
another issue is that if privacy laws 'demonetize free tiers', you're effectively paying for privacy anyway. 'pay for privacy' vs 'privacy as right' may be a false choice.
I'm not saying market privacy is fair on the face of it, but it may be more effective than the alternatives.
Whether it's a right has nothing to do with whether you have to pay for it.
I wonder if people would accept to have to give up a gun they already had and then get paid to not have one anymore, while they have a right to have a gun.
A milkman knew where you lived, a plumber knows what your interiors looked like. You sacrifice your privacy for service.
Google is no different. You used their services in exchange for your information. It costs you nothing to not use these services.
The deal with google is their spying goes beyond any business relationship.
When you use their service, they know about you. When they filter our spam for you in Gmail, their software reads your emails. When you look up in Maps where you are, their service tracks where you are. By the way, you can delete your data and stop tracking anytime while continuing to use the service (something you could not do with your milkman or your plumber). They could always continue doing it behind your backs, but the milkman could also poison you. You have to trust them and take legal action if you catch them doing something that they are they aren't.
When advertisers want to use Google, they tell Google where they want their ads. For example, a dental clinic can tell Google something along the lines of "Show my ads in search engines to people in my area who are searching for 'affordable dentist'" and pay Google when people click the ads. The dental clinic never gets any user data from Google.
Privacy should be a right but it isn’t. At this moment privacy is very much a commodity or else we wouldn’t need articles like these.
I always wonder: didn't this use to be the case? In the 80s, could we even imagine a telco listening in on our conversations? When did things go sideways?
In particular, I think this idea of trading your data is easy to understand and communicate. Also, could it be the case that as soon as companies are forced to offer a price for your data a lot of the predatory data collection schemes may not be profitable enough as a result? I imagine you can't just make a crappy app and start collecting user info en masse because it now incurs a real cost. Also I think data should be traded precisely where every data point generated should be worth something. Not just as a one time thing.
They can hire as many lawyers as they want but they will be punished if they're not careful with user's data.
Unless you're a political consultant of some kind no court is going to enforce an NDA that purports to prevent you from expressing your political opinions.
I don't understand where this massive misconception about freedom of speech is coming from; probably the phrase itself.
But I know the average person is NOT impervious to advertising. Quite the opposite, since ww2 billion dollar companies have risen based entirely on the fact most people are very susceptible to advertising. And every year, advertising gets smarter, more specific, more common, more aggressive, more tailored etc.
So you'll have to ask yourself: are you smarter than the average bear?
Or rather, are you smarter than Googles billion dollar bear hunting machine designed to catch bears that are too smart to be caught by any other bear catching machine? And are you smarter than it is, even though you gave it all your data for a dollar? And instead of a dollar, you settled for free email and tailored autoprediction to save you typing...
Sometimes the smartest thing to do is admit you're not THAT smart. I know I'm not.
It's just stochastic brainwashing.
I know I'm a cynical uni bomber type, I don't expect anyone to 100% agree or for adverts to disappear. But dwhen was the last time an advert actually informed you of a product you didn't know about and would have been interested in buying if it weren't advertised to make it so?
Most modern advertising is a less than zero sum game for the consumer.
I.e. you could have achieved the same by explaining your needs to some shop or service. Just tell them that you are a runner and want relevant ads in your mailbox. No need to tell them about the rest of your life.
This always comes up. But perhaps we should also ask the opposite question: what if we banned all ads, how would that affect overconsumption? It could theoretically be the best thing that ever happened to the planet.
You could argue that it just happens to also be to your benefit by chance, but that's certainly not where the incentives lie.
By comparison, companies like consumer reports, which instead directly sell you information to influence your behavior to your benefit are tiny. The advertising industry is nearly a trillion dollar industry -- if a large amount of that value is going to the consumer why hasn't there been massive innovation in selling to it directly to the consumer?
GP's comment about selling us shit we don't want/need is a hard pill to swallow. It's highly counterintuitive and demeaning to our sense of agency -- just like so many results in modern psychology.
But I think that view also misses the bigger picture twice. First, because while the consumer-producer relationship is positive sum and that's the whole reason it exists, pricing is not. If advertising makes it easier to connect with a product you want, then the price can be raised. We should think about how advertising makes the things we want more expensive.
But second, I think we should also think about how the relationship of advertiser to producer may not be positive sum. Producers compete with each other in a fashion that isn't positive sum, and advertisers sell to all producers. That's an arms race. I can't effectively start a business without using advertising because all my competitors use advertising. Advertising doesn't account for a trillion dollars in demand per year -- it just siphons it from producers by selling them the same arms they sell to their competitors.
But a hefty part of that value does come from selling it to the consumer, as long as he or she is interested. Advertising, and especially online advertising have both "democratized" greatly as the ad industry has grown over recent decades, and smaller business, so many of them belonging to consumers in other contexts, use this same consumer data to try benefitting their own bottom line.
I guess I have at times bought something I did not want or need, but that was because my wife or kids wanted or needed it.
Actually it probably isn't, given the data hoarding likes of internet companies, but it's the line they will push.
Anyway, there's one supermarket here with a loyalty card program (instead of an 'anonymous' discount / deal-of-the-week scheme), you get the card for free and it Just Works, and they ask you to register but it's not mandatory.
Doesn't matter that much to them; while they do not have your details to e-mail you offers and the like, they still have a user profile, a unique number where they log all the purchases to.