This was my first thought as well. Most people do not fully understand the implications of giving up their privacy and personal data. I don't have a lot of faith in the general public's ability to...
Some people fear that data ownership is the wrong approach to protecting user privacy online and only incentivizes users to sell away their privacy instead of protecting it.
This was my first thought as well. Most people do not fully understand the implications of giving up their privacy and personal data. I don't have a lot of faith in the general public's ability to assess the value of their own data, and whether it's worth it to sell it. I predict that most people would happily sell their data for a few bucks. After all, most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and might think "what's the harm in sharing the info that's already on my facebook profile for a few dollars", not realizing that "personal data" entails much more than just what high school someone went to.
The implications for an individual aren't that great. But on a collective level, the ramifications could be great: I expect that the overwhelming majority of people would choose to "sell" their...
The implications for an individual aren't that great. But on a collective level, the ramifications could be great: I expect that the overwhelming majority of people would choose to "sell" their data, which means that nothing changes except that now millions of people receive a trivial amount of money. This will make it even harder to argue in favor of restrictions on the gathering of data.
On an individual level, there is a danger that sensitive data is in the hands of a private company, that can do with it whatever they want. Targeted advertising preys on people's personal insecurities, there is a risk that people continue self-censoring their online communications because they're even more acutely aware that corporations "are listening in" on the things they do online, and most importantly people shouldn't be made to choose between money and their rights.
This seems plausible but I'm not sure how it connects to today's most urgent problems. For example, apparently there are lots of foolish people losing money gambling on stocks using Robinhood. I...
This seems plausible but I'm not sure how it connects to today's most urgent problems.
For example, apparently there are lots of foolish people losing money gambling on stocks using Robinhood. I don't know how they are advertising, but it seems like there also a lot of Reddit groups and Instagram influencers and YouTube channels, where the true believers suck other people in? It would be surprising if targeted advertising made that much of a difference. It doesn't seem like they need to know a lot about gamblers to get gamblers to come to them?
Or take cryptocurrency. This is clearly an area where you couldn't get the true believers to shut up about it if you tried, and there was plenty of mainstream press covering the trend and getting more and more people interested.
No targeting seems needed to get people to watch Fox News.
Does QAnon use advertising?
How did Juul get so popular with kids? It seems like they were putting up barriers to kids getting them but the kids went around them.
The number of people getting sucked into shady stuff seems pretty high these days, but through channels other than paid advertising, which seems kind of tame in comparison.
I also find it hard to believe there is much of a chilling effect. There are lots of ways (such as Tildes) to talk about stuff without doing it under your own name. But there also doesn't seem to be much reluctance to post crazy stuff on Facebook where friends and family can read it. I often wish people had more self-restraint.
This video series by Jaron Larnier and the NYT is related and very interesting. Yang cites Larnier as an influence/inspiration, but I find it interesting that he stops short of Larnier's most...
This video series by Jaron Larnier and the NYT is related and very interesting. Yang cites Larnier as an influence/inspiration, but I find it interesting that he stops short of Larnier's most interesting ideas such as data-as-labor as opposed to data-as-capital. I'm currently reading Who Owns the Future? and recommend it to anyone interested in this stuff.
I do find it ironic (though understandable) that this project asks for multiple email addresses and your PayPal information, but doesn't pay for them! I'll be curiously watching where this goes - I think real data reform is the only thing that can pull the internet out of the advertiser driven, bubble chamber inducing panopticon it has become.
I actually like Ben Thompson's formulation of data as a sort of "raw material" and data-centric companies, such as Facebook, being "factories" (though I think "refinery" is probably a better term...
data-as-labor as opposed to data-as-capital.
I actually like Ben Thompson's formulation of data as a sort of "raw material" and data-centric companies, such as Facebook, being "factories" (though I think "refinery" is probably a better term for the analogy he's making). The data is produced as a byproduct of human activity in the same way wine is just a byproduct of yeast eating grape-sugar. We're the yeast in the barrel, Facebook is the vintner regulating the sugar and barrel conditions to make sure we're creating the product they need. The yeast doesn't care about the alcohol they shit out, and we don't really care about the data we create qua data. We care about it qua the risk of it being used to violate our boundaries or trust.
The truth is I don't think paying people for their data is going to be all that useful at reforming the things we care about. Each individual's data isn't all that valuable to Facebook or Google, it's the aggregated data set that's worthwhile. As far as market power goes, end-users have none so this Coasian framework just doesn't work. The services are functionally paying you for your data by providing free services to you. (This gets more complicated when you're already paying someone for the service and they're still snooping on you).
The way I think about it, by itself data doesn't have any value. You need to process it. The more you process it, the more value you can have. When you anonymise user data, you remove some...
The way I think about it, by itself data doesn't have any value. You need to process it. The more you process it, the more value you can have. When you anonymise user data, you remove some information. If you didn't need to remove that information, you could process it even more to get more value.
This was my first thought as well. Most people do not fully understand the implications of giving up their privacy and personal data. I don't have a lot of faith in the general public's ability to assess the value of their own data, and whether it's worth it to sell it. I predict that most people would happily sell their data for a few bucks. After all, most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and might think "what's the harm in sharing the info that's already on my facebook profile for a few dollars", not realizing that "personal data" entails much more than just what high school someone went to.
What do you think are the implications?
The implications for an individual aren't that great. But on a collective level, the ramifications could be great: I expect that the overwhelming majority of people would choose to "sell" their data, which means that nothing changes except that now millions of people receive a trivial amount of money. This will make it even harder to argue in favor of restrictions on the gathering of data.
On an individual level, there is a danger that sensitive data is in the hands of a private company, that can do with it whatever they want. Targeted advertising preys on people's personal insecurities, there is a risk that people continue self-censoring their online communications because they're even more acutely aware that corporations "are listening in" on the things they do online, and most importantly people shouldn't be made to choose between money and their rights.
This seems plausible but I'm not sure how it connects to today's most urgent problems.
For example, apparently there are lots of foolish people losing money gambling on stocks using Robinhood. I don't know how they are advertising, but it seems like there also a lot of Reddit groups and Instagram influencers and YouTube channels, where the true believers suck other people in? It would be surprising if targeted advertising made that much of a difference. It doesn't seem like they need to know a lot about gamblers to get gamblers to come to them?
Or take cryptocurrency. This is clearly an area where you couldn't get the true believers to shut up about it if you tried, and there was plenty of mainstream press covering the trend and getting more and more people interested.
No targeting seems needed to get people to watch Fox News.
Does QAnon use advertising?
How did Juul get so popular with kids? It seems like they were putting up barriers to kids getting them but the kids went around them.
The number of people getting sucked into shady stuff seems pretty high these days, but through channels other than paid advertising, which seems kind of tame in comparison.
I also find it hard to believe there is much of a chilling effect. There are lots of ways (such as Tildes) to talk about stuff without doing it under your own name. But there also doesn't seem to be much reluctance to post crazy stuff on Facebook where friends and family can read it. I often wish people had more self-restraint.
This video series by Jaron Larnier and the NYT is related and very interesting. Yang cites Larnier as an influence/inspiration, but I find it interesting that he stops short of Larnier's most interesting ideas such as data-as-labor as opposed to data-as-capital. I'm currently reading Who Owns the Future? and recommend it to anyone interested in this stuff.
I do find it ironic (though understandable) that this project asks for multiple email addresses and your PayPal information, but doesn't pay for them! I'll be curiously watching where this goes - I think real data reform is the only thing that can pull the internet out of the advertiser driven, bubble chamber inducing panopticon it has become.
I actually like Ben Thompson's formulation of data as a sort of "raw material" and data-centric companies, such as Facebook, being "factories" (though I think "refinery" is probably a better term for the analogy he's making). The data is produced as a byproduct of human activity in the same way wine is just a byproduct of yeast eating grape-sugar. We're the yeast in the barrel, Facebook is the vintner regulating the sugar and barrel conditions to make sure we're creating the product they need. The yeast doesn't care about the alcohol they shit out, and we don't really care about the data we create qua data. We care about it qua the risk of it being used to violate our boundaries or trust.
The truth is I don't think paying people for their data is going to be all that useful at reforming the things we care about. Each individual's data isn't all that valuable to Facebook or Google, it's the aggregated data set that's worthwhile. As far as market power goes, end-users have none so this Coasian framework just doesn't work. The services are functionally paying you for your data by providing free services to you. (This gets more complicated when you're already paying someone for the service and they're still snooping on you).
Actually, if the data isn't anonymized, companies can get a lot more value out of it.
I'm wondering how we know this. Are there some examples somewhere of what the numbers look like?
The way I think about it, by itself data doesn't have any value. You need to process it. The more you process it, the more value you can have. When you anonymise user data, you remove some information. If you didn't need to remove that information, you could process it even more to get more value.
There's an article here where they put some numbers on that data: https://www.supermarketnews.com/retail-financial/kroger-banks-burgeoning-sources-revenue.