Amazon is offering users $2 a month for letting it track phone data
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
"I signed up to let Amazon track data coming through my phone in exchange for $2 a month, and get this — you won't believe it — I think they might be violating my privacy!"
If other companies start paying for your “data”. Load them up. Rinse and repeat.
edit: disable microphone if paranoid or wrap in a sound deadening material.
[1] Obviously using the solar generated power for something else to save on electricity might be more effective, but where is the fun in that?
> $12.30: 5W 5V Portable Solar Panel Power Bank Phone Charger
I could definitely picture myself as a teenager getting a bunch of shitty old Android devices to make $20 a month, though. My younger cousins will fill out surveys with fake info to make a few bucks here or there.
Think of what it demonstrates. It acknowledges a standard that your personal data belongs to you, that they value it, and they are willing to pay you for it. More importantly, they are willing to do it in a upfront manner instead of trying to sneak it into some new application. Hopefully more companies will take note.
The whole premise of data privacy is that your data belongs to you, to do with it what you want, including selling it.
I'm normally very privacy-minded but tempted to agree to it just on a matter of principle to help get such a market off the ground.
They think they can make money on the data and willing to pay a user for the data that they use.
I haven't seen that before in the general consumer space.
Nice try
Not sure what your low effort comment is trying to say. That people shouldn't be able to sell their data?
My main disagreement is that in the US at least, I feel that corporate surveillance is already normalized. Given that, I think this is an incremental step away from non-consensual surveillance, or at least surveillance where the transactional aspect isn't obvious.
Most people are already tracked by their phone apps, google, ect. It is normalized.
At $2/month, the exchange doesn't really do anything but pay to normalize the idea of a consumer market for selling your personal data. And as other comments on the post have pointed out, this is just the starting point. If people will consent to x for $2, consenting to y for $4 or $10 or $50 dollars is officially on the bargaining table. Deeper and deeper behavioral data will only become more desirable as the AI arms race heats up, so I'm confident we can expect surveillance demands to grow in the coming years. The outcomes for personal data markets are self-evident.
I'm not about to agitate for laws against programs like these, but I don't think they're a good thing for society and they seem quite contrary to anything privacy advocates stand in favor of.
As another commenter point out, this eerily reminds me of human organs trafficking. "People own their body, so shouldn't they be allowed to sell their organ?". We don't allow such things because this directly impacts people with low-income. Now admittedly one's organ is not comparable to one's information, but my stance on this is that privacy should be human rights, non negotiable.
If someone asked to pick out the cans from my recycling, I don't see that as a critique of my personal value.
For instance, I'd happily take $5/month to let them spy on my usage of Twitter. I don't use Twitter, so it would be a free $5/month!
If you use a coupon (with a few exceptions, where the seller must explicitly opt-in), that comes off of eBay's bottom line. Same with eBay plus - we'll get an additional credit (usually AU$4) to cover the difference between regular and express shipping.
Of course, they more than make up for this by taking a 10% cut off everything you sell through their site.
$2 a month is $24 a year. So basically on par with a company giving you a free steak dinner on your birthday. Not life changing, but still pretty cool.
Why are we creating these fresh new hells all the time?
Democratic government is no longer working for us but rather against us, for the "elite" class that have bought it out from under us.
This gets trotted out every time there's a "big tech violating our privacy" story, and it's correct most of the time but not this one. Amazon is offering you a purely voluntary choice to sell your data. What "protections" have been "thoroughly eroded and destroyed" in this case? You're free to not sell your data. If anything, you need to do more work (ie. install the app and opt in) to have your privacy invaded.
That said, if they offered me more than a lousy $2, and all they were tracking was phone calls (not anything on chat/talk apps, just the actual voice calling), I'd sign up, because it's free money. Who the hell uses the phone any more? They want to pay to see how many robocalls I get?
I use NextDNS an all my devices. The amount of data you can gather from them about a person is mind boggling, given the amount of telemetry most services use, and the trend of very low DNS TTL.
Heck I’d like it if ad-based business models had some type of GDPR-ish regulation around it the required companies to divulge something like:
>Your use of this product/service is paid for by monetization of the following pieces of information about you.
>We estimate that this informational contributes $X in annual revenue based on the market value of your demographic to advertisers and data brokers
It not much but the way I understand it, it is basically free money, you just check a box and you are tracked more, but other than that, no obligation on your part, and you don't get more ads.
Yeah, privacy, but you get tracked anyways, in fact, Amazon already has the most sensitive information about you: they know where you live, they have your credit card, and they know what kind of stuff you buy. If you trust them all that, you might as well send them the ads you see and get your $2.
And yeah, I guess they did their research. They probably don't want that many people to enroll in the program, and they are fine with the kind of profile $2 gets them. I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more.
Wouldn't they have a massive adverse selection problem unless the money is high enough to convince normies to sign up?
People complain all the time that companies are stealing their data, then amazon comes in and offers to buy and people complain again... Yeah 2$ is away too low for a lot of people, but it's better than 0 for a start, hoping it will just go up from here.
and for that paltry sum, not even worth it set up an old iPhone loaded with scripts and apps purely to muddy the data.
Thinking about it, do we have Apple to thank for this?
Recently I received several emails from Amazon offering me $15 if I would start using their Photos service. Never read the fine print, but that sounds skeezy - like they're trawling for more raw material to train ML systems on.