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Comment by skummetmaelk | Hacker News Reader

Disgusting

Why? In any transaction there's a non-negative spread between how much the buyer and seller value the item being exchanged. Why is it disgusting if the seller captures that spread but not if the buyer captures it, or is there some other distinction you're drawing?

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.

There's an inherent information and therefore power imbalance as well as general unethical nature of the interactions.

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 problem is with the information inbalance. Before, a salesman, for example would look at what kind of clothing you were wearing and what segment items you're looking for.

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.

With machine learning, the model isn't even a set of explicitly selected factor whose parameters are then derived from data, but hidden factors (and interactions) within the neural net. The engineers who construct the models don't even knnoe how they achieve their ressults, only that they do.

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.

Is the problem then that they have that information, and having that information is inherently bad for some reason regardless of the effects, or is it that with that information they're able to reliably capture more of the market surplus and cause more of your transactions to only be barely worth it for you?

The buyer is a person. Their needs should be satisfied as much as possible, that's the whole point of having an economy.

The seller is a company. Its only purpose is to satisfy its customers' needs.

Except this same thing has been happening in all of history. Salesmen asking different prices from different people through negotiations. I don't see it being necessarily a bad thing.

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