[HN Gopher] Why We Should End the Data Economy
___________________________________________________________________
Why We Should End the Data Economy
Author : oppodeldoc
Score : 372 points
Date : 2021-06-04 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereboot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereboot.com)
| tibiahurried wrote:
| The Data Economy is what enables "free" product for the end-user.
| Think about email, drive, video. Users are now used to get most
| of this stuff for free. And that's possible thanks to the Data
| Economy.
|
| End such economy basically means the users will start paying for
| the internet. Never gonna happen.
| joadha wrote:
| The so-called "data economy" has improved our lives in
| immeasurable ways. I can more easily discover products that are
| relevant to me. Deserving innovations are granted a platform for
| quicker adoption. The world at large is more efficient, because
| relevant products and services are being delivered more quickly
| and efficiently than ever before.
|
| The author is extremely paranoid. She uses the word "should" a
| whole lot, but does not back up her dictatorial statements with
| any reasoning.
|
| This article has failed to scare me as intended.
| starchild_3001 wrote:
| There has to be limitations to the use and distribution of
| data. E.g. sensitive topics should be disallowed to be tracked.
| Otherwise, personalized ads are great. They make our lives
| immeasurably richer by enabling a free internet. They make
| small businesses grow and thrive. They allow users to find
| products they need w/o looking for them endlessly.
| throwawaywindev wrote:
| Efficiency is not always a good thing. We're not machines and
| we shouldn't aspire to some Wall-E existence where we do
| nothing but consume without any inconvenience.
| [deleted]
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I think a big part of the problem here is that our computers, and
| the associated data they collect, are part of our extended
| brains. They're not record players, hotel registers, or any other
| metaphor society or our legal system has used in the past. It's
| virtually as if you could take part of your brain out and hand it
| to somebody, perhaps to whistle a tune you remember from school
| or recount that chat you had with your previous SO.
|
| It's not okay to take a person and hold them against their will,
| even if they've signed some sort of agreement. Indentured
| servitude and slavery are considered non-viable business
| arrangements. No matter what I promise you or what our trade-off
| is, these contracts cannot exist.
|
| I think the only way this reasonably ends is when the rest of
| society catches up to that conclusion. It might be a while,
| though. I honestly don't think most people _want_ to know what's
| going on, since it's quite frightening and there's nothing they
| can do about it. This is going to have to get more and more
| stressful to the average citizen until most folks realize what
| kind of world we've crept into.
| Hasz wrote:
| Ending the data economy means ending inference. Most of the
| examples listed in the opening paragraph are not direct
| measurements, but mundane behavior that can associated with
| something interesting. I don't think stopping inference is
| possible (or a good idea!), but it is easy to subvert and reign
| in, at least online.
|
| Simply letting your browser emulate the browsing habits of a wide
| variety of people could knock down your uniqueness if done in
| bulk. I'm pretty sure there was a chrome extension a while ago
| that browsered major sites to obfuscate your actual traffic. I
| also like the EFF's panopticon if you'd like to see some real
| value uniqueness scores.
| RGamma wrote:
| Viewing the world through the data lens makes you blind to the
| things you didn't measure or that you cannot conceive a
| measurement for.
|
| It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of
| how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck").
|
| When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable
| shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's
| behavior at scale you're no longer an independent observer
| anyway, complicating things further (a measurement that becomes a
| target stops being a measurement).
|
| There isn't one truth you could uncover in data; life is an open-
| ended chaotic system. Let's keep it that way.
| dgb23 wrote:
| I've been thinking about data-driven AI systems that generate
| art, photography and the like. One thing about these systems is
| that they are always learning from past works. They don't
| create in the same chaotic - as you say - way as we do.
|
| Recognizing the limitation of these systems is key to be able
| to use them well and when not to use them.
| RGamma wrote:
| These systems lack any form of coherent world view, artistic
| vision, moral imperative, culture or ability to reflect on
| their own surroundings, limitations and assumptions (higher-
| order thinking).
|
| Even if one adds randomness to create new phenomena within
| their given framework, one can never compensate for that.
|
| Uncarefully applied data-driven narratives have not enriched
| our thinking, they're blunting it. And they blind us to what
| could be.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Human art is also based off of past works. Moreover, AI art
| tends to be more, not less, chaotic than human art.
| RGamma wrote:
| Past works are one component. Major happenings, fantasy,
| wishes, emotions, etc play a bigger role overall
| (historically).
| uberdru wrote:
| I remember a time when the virtue that separated the U.S. from,
| say, East Germany, was the assurance that your library borrowing
| history was sacrosanct.
| pascalxus wrote:
| The article implies a lot of risk for having so much personal
| data circulating around without our control. but the article, and
| many others like it fail to show how all that risk can adversely
| affect us.
|
| I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did?
| maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he
| got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a
| ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get
| an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact
| whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad
| uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my
| political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me
| after I investigate the matter objectively.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The article itself explains this: Privacy is
| important because it protects you from the influence of others.
| The more companies know about you, the more power they have
| over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will
| take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive
| payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads
| for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never
| know that you were discriminated against. If they know what
| tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even
| if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time
| away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they
| know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you
| about politics and manipulate you into voting for their
| preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our
| personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public
| trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on.
|
| There are quite a few stories that have cropped up over the
| last decade or two that show this is actually happening.... the
| most precient one I can recall was where Target outted a
| pregnant teenager to her parents before she even knew she was
| pregnant:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I wonder how true that story is
|
| https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-
| pregna...
| codyb wrote:
| The big issue to me was always the data falling into malicious
| hands.
|
| Sure it's not a big deal if you buy a red shirt and I buy a
| blue shirt but it is a big deal if you can piece together the
| security questions (thankfully falling out of fashion as a
| recovery method) for my bank account.
|
| It's not a big deal when you don't get an advertisement for
| your local university but if an authoritarian government roots
| out gay people because they have access to credit card data for
| Grindr subscription charges that's probably not great.
|
| I guess my impression is that it's not what's happened so far
| (although certainly innumerable lives have been sullied for
| weeks, months or years at a time due to identity theft, credit
| card fraud, and the rest), it's the potential of what could be.
| anm89 wrote:
| Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that
| there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest,
| lowest value category of journalism. It's a plague.
| Impassionata wrote:
| There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government
| come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the
| big players that are supposedly legit.
|
| Burn it all down.
| ianai wrote:
| I sense this would have been in the Bill of Rights had the
| notion been around back then. They knew the government needed
| to protect property rights as a fundamental principle and
| that is written throughout the legal code and constitution.
| So endowing citizens with ownership of the date of where they
| are, what they're doing, and how they use sites seem like
| extensions of the personal property right. In a sane
| universe, there might only need to be a Supreme Court
| judgement somehow establishing this from the current
| legalization, for that matter.
| asiachick wrote:
| I doubt it. If you ask me "who lives next door" I'll tell
| you "Oh, the Smith's live next door, John, Jane, Jill, and
| Jacob. John's a blacksmith, Jane makes the best apple pie,
| Jill is studying to be a doctor and Jacob just turned 14"
|
| I doubt the forefathers would have thought there needed to
| be a law against me passing on info.
| ianai wrote:
| That actually makes it sound like unlawful search and
| seizure.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The US Constitution is around a century too old to care
| about lists of people, but I think even they would react
| badly to some powerful organization going around
| classifying everybody by some random feature.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The US Constitution is around a century too old to care
| about lists of people, but I think even they would react
| badly to some powerful organization going around
| classifying everybody by some random feature.
|
| Probably not, since it _created_ a new powerful
| orgabization (the federal government) and _mandated_ it
| to go around classifying everybody by a particular set of
| feature (whether they were a "free person", an "indian
| not taxed", or an "other person".)
|
| Given that when the framers were scared of a powerful
| organization doing something, their first concern tended
| to be about government doing it, and their response
| tended to be to prohibit at least the federal government
| from doing it, I think the fact that they mandated the
| federal government to do it indicates that it was neither
| something they feared _nor_ something they failed to fear
| out of lack of consideration.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Domesday Book commissioned in 1085, Constitution of USA
| 1787; I think you mean at least 700 years.
|
| I mean the Bible tells us about censuses by the Romans
| ~5BC, so depending what's in your list ...
| anm89 wrote:
| I'm sure we're going to "burn it all down" any day now.
| bobthechef wrote:
| That's how we got here. Revolution.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| "Burn it all down" as a solution -- inevitably applied to
| cultures, systems or industries viewed from the outside -- is
| also a plague of laziness.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| I've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over
| from scratch!" be called laziness before.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| "It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing
| an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly,
| civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data
| industry warts and all.
|
| There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough
| thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this
| eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to
| consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not
| working" means.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I'm also surprised you haven't heard of this before.
| Every New Year millions make resolutions that are not
| kept because 'it is easier to start from scratch' or a
| clean slate, but it is very difficult to actually follow
| through.
|
| People who diet non stop because they might get to day 20
| and it isn't working and the solution is to start over in
| a week or so.
|
| It is much easier to make yourself think that behavior
| will change if only one got a clean start. But inevitably
| you find yourself at a similar point, and a similar
| result.
|
| In order to start from scratch and make it effective, you
| should have a reason why things will be different in the
| future.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I don't think the plan is to get rid of data collection
| and then allow it, we ban it moving forward
| awillen wrote:
| It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace
| the stuff that you want to burn down.
|
| It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated
| and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well
| (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to
| escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's
| just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.
|
| The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason.
| We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy
| electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the
| tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan
| on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want,
| you're going to end up with some undesirable results that
| you then have to fix.
|
| It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but
| if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
| khawkins wrote:
| >We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy
| electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the
| tax code to do that.
|
| [If we want] to incentivize...
|
| While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax
| code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of
| incentivization in the first place.
| awillen wrote:
| Sure - that's absolutely fair. But with that said, I do
| think that a lot of people would agree that a lot of the
| incentives are good (I for one am glad that the
| government is trying to get people to move to electric
| cars) and would want to maintain something to keep
| promoting the same things even if the tax code were
| restarted from scratch.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to
| replace the stuff that you want to burn down.
|
| And what do we want to replace targeted ads,
| surreptitious tracking, and a system that exploits its
| users for money while not being held accountable to its
| users with?
|
| I'd say we're better off with nothing. So yes, in this
| instance, burn it all down actually is a solution.
|
| I'm aware I'm ignoring the externalities, I'm aware it's
| complicated, and I'm aware what I'm proposing actually is
| lazy. I'm aware a bunch of people will lose their jobs
| (mostly in tech though so I really don't feel bad, having
| spent most of life in that industry). I'm saying in this
| instance it doesn't matter. We're still better off
| burning it all down.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Presumably we want companies to be able to use user data
| to improve their product, so that's one thing we'd have
| to legislate around.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Someone else proposed what I consider a very reasonable
| solution. Just make whatever data they have 100%
| transparent, and you as the user can choose to offer less
| (or more) at any point in time. This should be regulated
| similar to HIPAA with serious penalties for any
| violations, because it absolutely is about avoiding
| privacy violations.
|
| And if you as the user want to share no data at all, you
| should have that option. This is the company's problem,
| not the customer's problem - or at least that's the world
| I want to live in.
|
| And obviously don't hide anything behind dark patterns,
| and all the other common sense gotchas. Violations should
| be treated as criminal fraud with prison time (assuming
| they are found guilty in a court of law, and proving
| criminal fraud is notoriously difficult but the threat
| needs to be real).
| jfengel wrote:
| I'm surprised you haven't heard it before. "As a matter
| of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy
| than to create," as one wise man put it.
|
| "Burn it all down" is easy to say. You can apply it to
| anything, with no further thought. It's precisely what
| I'd call "lazy".
|
| To avoid being lazy, you'd have to couple it with exactly
| what you intend to build from scratch, and ideally how
| you'd go about it. That's a ton of work, not just because
| you have to have a concrete idea, but because you have
| something that people can point out the flaws of. Many of
| whom will say, "It's terrible, burn it down."
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Good luck. All those so-called hearings with social media
| companies? Excuses to get those CEO's into the back rooms,
| where the REAL discussions -- and graft -- sorry, campaign
| donations -- happened. Our government is completely captured
| by the organizations that are most-hostile to our long-term
| well-being.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > Burn it all down
|
| Easier said than done. What we're seeing is advertising as a
| business carried to its logical conclusion. If you "burn it
| all down", you have to end, in effect, all advertising.
| Advertisers try to target their budget as effectively as
| possible; the more they know about their target demographic,
| the better able they are to do that.
| jtdev wrote:
| Uhhh, you can stop using said services and software that abuse
| privacy, e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, TicToc, etc.
| lsb wrote:
| You can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the
| rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out
| of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the
| rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all
| the time.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| facebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a
| facebook account
| Nicksil wrote:
| But that doesn't stop their abuse.
|
| Think about all the _other_ websites out there using Google
| Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.
|
| You're ever getting away.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be
| informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well
| you don't have to use facebook"
|
| Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook
| will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know
| who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating
| to you to someone
| anm89 wrote:
| That doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of
| your personal interaction with the data economy.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.
| SahAssar wrote:
| If enough people end their own interaction with it it
| ceases to exist, right?
|
| If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or
| use it for profit then there is no data economy.
| fsagx wrote:
| A person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to
| not interact with services that aggregate and sell data.
| No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.
| SahAssar wrote:
| The point is that for each person that ends their
| interaction with these companies the less data they have
| on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook
| they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do.
|
| Convincing even one person to choose more privacy
| friendly choices helps a little.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Here's another industry that relies on aggregating your data:
| Credit reports.
|
| Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion,
| or Equifax collecting everything they can about you,
| including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity
| theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar
| name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database.
|
| No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every
| now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are
| silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's
| consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity
| information is included in a data breach, I am both small
| enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
| gspq wrote:
| And they have an API to these data. Selling your data to
| data vendors. And now this:
| https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare
|
| Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your
| health data are in the vendor database . What possibly
| could go wrong?
| tejtm wrote:
| True, but there is no practical way to get through our work
| days without them using us anyway.
| royaltjames wrote:
| In any form of communication, it's the worst.
| _vertigo wrote:
| You can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of
| the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't
| really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that
| makes people care more is a step in the right direction.
| dominotw wrote:
| we should end this category of journalism.
| anm89 wrote:
| Ha, well played.
| ginko wrote:
| I certainly think there's ways to achieve this: Implement and
| enforce GDPR-like laws and fine spy corporations into oblivion.
| DennisP wrote:
| Which is what the article implies with statements like "we
| should not allow X." There are several specific rules it
| suggests, which clearly would have to be laws.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Just because something is impractical or a solution is unknown
| doesn't make it valueless.
|
| There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math
| formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no
| proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything
| doesn't mean we should throw it out!
|
| I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who
| may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth
| $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society
|
| All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies
| may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly
| educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos
| and not.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
| atomicbeanie wrote:
| Hogwash. Sharing data and having it stolen are two different
| things. Luddites did not account for what their idea of the
| future would miss out on. The data future offers new
| opportunities in reality based communication.
|
| Working on serious problems like climate change would be hobbled
| without the rise of the data economy. But to be an economy it
| must have rules that protect private, personal and ethically
| important entities.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I'm curious, can insurance companies get access to this
| information to potentially affect policy rates?
|
| That would be insane. If they know how sedentary you are, or if
| you aren't sleeping well, or if you are driving too fast, driving
| at dangerous hours, or if you hang out at the bar too much ...
| can you imagine the implications?
|
| It gets even wilder with things like Fitbit Charge 4 where this
| data, in the hands of data brokers, can include data like your
| resting heart rate, your SpO2 levels, exactly where/when you
| walk.
| tootie wrote:
| The data collectors only provide anonymized data. But it's
| possibly for a company that collects PII to stitch together
| their own user profile data with the anonymous data. So, yeah,
| maybe. Like if you login to your car insurance website and that
| website is using third-party tracking to piece together a
| profile, they can correlate to your identity. I don't think
| I've actually seen this done and I'm not sure if it's entirely
| legal.
|
| https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guid...
| dontparticipate wrote:
| There's not a single person that doesn't understand the "why" of
| this, especially on HN. There's just no "how" there. It's pretty
| clear so far that GDPR/CCPA have been complete failures.
| Companies just design around them and consumers are in no
| position to jump through the hoops those companies have set up to
| defend themselves. The game is already over and we've lost and
| articles like these are just hope porn wishing for a better world
| that we will never see.
| djoldman wrote:
| Anyone know of a confirmed instance of:
|
| > They generate profits by ... selling [your personal
| information] to ... _prospective employers_ ...
|
| ?
|
| This one seems unlikely but who knows.
| arcticfox wrote:
| It's one of the top use cases listed for
| https://www.peopledatalabs.com/ (candidate sourcing).
|
| And incidentally, PDL was the source of a 1.2-billion person
| data breach a few years ago:
| https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/
| jeffbee wrote:
| There certainly are firms that will sell a dossier on you
| employers or anyone else who wants it, it's just not any of the
| players mentioned in the article. That's why I hate these
| articles filled with _non sequitur_ fuzzy thinking. If you want
| to end the data economy you need to start with the real
| players: telcos, payment processing networks, ISPs, insurance
| companies, credit bureaus.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| It's indirect. Employers use one of many firms that do
| background checks, and those firms pay for access to the data.
| djoldman wrote:
| If you're a background check company, it seems like a
| dangerous game to attempt to systematically match data from
| such unofficial sources to potential employees.
|
| Aren't they opening themselves up to lawsuits if they match
| the wrong person to the wrong potential employee?
|
| Additionally, isn't it illegal to decide to hire/not-hire
| based on a bunch of protected traits? (age, sex, orientation,
| religion, etc.)
|
| It seems like a lot of the quoted information would be off-
| limits.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| have you ever dealt with background checks? they don't care
| cs702 wrote:
| No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work
| colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the
| OP):
|
| _> who you sleep with because both you and the person you share
| your bed with keep your phones nearby
|
| > whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are
| keeping you up
|
| > whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and
| search for things like "loan repayment"
|
| > your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the
| friends you have
|
| > your restaurant visits and shopping habits
|
| > how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because
| your phone contains an accelerometer
|
| > your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by
| your phone
|
| > whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger
| across your phone's screen
|
| > if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been
| searching online for a divorce lawyer_
|
| No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third
| parties being able to obtain and save this information either --
| _especially_ if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to
| agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read
| or expertise to understand in its full implications.
|
| We need a _New Declaration of Human Rights_ for the 21st century
| that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for
| collecting and acting on data at mass scale.
| toss1 wrote:
| >> _Many of these companies call themselves "data brokers." I
| call them data vultures._
|
| Perfect. Except it is insulting to vultures, who at least put
| carrion back in the food chain.
|
| This is straight-up theft of our data and privacy, for profit,
| and it needs to be both outlawed and shamed.
|
| Seriously, but these slime should be more despised than common
| burglars (tho maybe a notch above mobsters). Seriously, these
| people are not respectable, and should not be respected or
| tolerated in polite society. So, don't.
| treis wrote:
| >No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work
| colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the
| OP):
|
| The things you mentioned are kind of how it was before the
| advent modern civilization. Before Facebook tracking it was old
| biddy tracking. Through gossip everyone knew pretty much
| everyone's business.
|
| That said, there's not an immediately obvious connection
| between surveillance and our neighbors knowing things. I have 0
| information about who my neighborhors are sleeping with based
| on their cell phone tracking.
| ramphastidae wrote:
| I downvoted this because I can't read this as anything but a
| disingenuous comparison. Surely you can understand the
| difference in scale and motive behind village gossip and
| global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations.
| treis wrote:
| The point is that everyone knowing everyone's business is
| the "natural" state of human society. For most of human
| history all my neighbors would know who I'm banging. It
| doesn't take some sort of insanity to live like that.
|
| And you've only addressed half my argument. I don't know
| who my neighbor is banging because of cell phone tracking.
| You don't know who your neighbor is banging. Nobody in this
| thread knows who their neighbor is banging. It's an
| entirely theoretical danger that has not yet come to pass.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| "global surveillance by profit-seeking corporations" is a
| string of scary words, but gossip is much more likely to
| cause the average person clear, tangible harm. Just
| pointing out that digital tracking is _creepy_ doesn 't do
| much to convince most people to inconvenience themselves at
| all.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Before Facebook tracking it was old biddy tracking. Through
| gossip everyone knew pretty much everyone's business.
|
| As already noted the difference in scale, but obviously if
| you didn't like what the old biddies tracked about you in
| your small town you could move to a new one and start over -
| you can't with the global surveillance system.
|
| finally it should be obvious that not everyone lived in a
| small enough town that the old biddy network was actually
| useful for tracking you.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Yeah, it's in grandma's forgetful brain, and to be fair she
| probably (a) has usually learned the value of discretion, (b)
| will pass away in a few years and (c) can sometimes be
| dismissed as a fibber.
|
| The computer on the other hand, is an eternal record and can
| be dumped into the open by any hacker or wannabe-hacker for
| ill intent or just for fun.
|
| I guess, there's no appropriate reputation scale for what we
| see on the internet (it's either perfectly trustworthy or a
| total sham), there's no forgetfulness in terms of minor
| misdeeds, and there's no way to argue with the public
| consensus once they've made up their hivemind...
|
| "No really, I've changed in the 10 years since I wrote that
| post!"
| slver wrote:
| From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most of
| them, because over half of them contains details that are total
| BS.
|
| Also I happen to think we'd be a better society if we all knew
| everything about each other. Instead of discouraging companies
| from analyzing us, encourage them to publish everything all the
| time. Let governments join in on the fun. Everyone should be
| tracking an analyzing everyone else.
|
| Solves the issue with companies manipulating us to sell our
| data, because if they publish it they can't sell it. Solves the
| ransomware problem as well. Publish everything, no privacy for
| anyone. You can't blackmail someone for data everyone has.
|
| I wanna know what you think right now. I'm not asking you to
| tell me, I'll scan your brain instead. And I'll know what your
| dream last night was. And you'll know the same for me as well.
|
| That's the future, prove me wrong.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > From reading this list, I can deduce OP just made up most
| of them, because over half of them contains details that are
| total BS.
|
| Care to specify which list entries you have trouble
| believing?
| Cederfjard wrote:
| What a complete and utter nightmare.
|
| You say that you think this would lead to a better society.
| That aside, how would you personally feel if this vision was
| to become reality?
|
| For me, I'm certain my mind being totally exposed like that
| would lead to debilitating mental illness and possibly even
| the loss of the will to live. I can't imagine human beings,
| either as individuals or a collective, being fundamentally
| equipped to deal with such a thing.
| lanstin wrote:
| Did you ever read David Brin's The Transparent Society
| (used to be a web article, I think it might be a book now).
| He argues that as networking and miniaturization progress,
| and given the curiosity of 9 year olds, we have 2 choices:
| everyone has all data about everyone else, or, the powerful
| (gov't corps rich) have all data about everyone else, and
| the powerful have privacy. I'm not sure if I think that's
| true, but I can't really think of a counter-argument.
|
| If someone can slip cameras into what looks to me like
| gnats and film my bathing, well, my bathing isn't so
| exciting, but how can we prevent it? Some weird EM
| shielding arms race on nano-bots or something? And still
| all the sound I utter will be recorded. I wouldn't want to
| live on a planet with no insects. If I were 9 and I had a
| "build your own flying gnat" kit, pretty sure I might try
| to find out about what naked people look like. Now I grew
| up in a relatively repressed family and society, so maybe
| the cool Europeans have a different take on it. Maybe if
| there's 10M "watch people all the time" public channels
| with video feeds from all over the planet, peoples mental
| health would adjust somehow. I suspect we'll find out. Most
| people (that I talk to in real life) are stolidly
| uninterested in the "omg, do you know what the data people
| are gathering thru your phone" facts.
|
| I for sure don't want to live in a society where the
| powerful have privacy and none of the regular people do.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| All I can say is that this line of thinking makes me feel
| that we might be in for a bleak future indeed.
| volkk wrote:
| i'd be happy to be hung from the gallows than live in such a
| world
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Upvoted, not because I agree with you but because it makes
| important points.
|
| Anyone who thinks such transparency is a good idea should
| read Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's Light of Other
| Days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
| shkkmo wrote:
| The worst thing about the information economy of today is
| absolutely the inequality of access. We would be better off
| if everything that is collected was public.
|
| I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It absolutely
| has value.
|
| The problem is when privacy is only available to the rich and
| powerful, while the details about the rest of us are hoarded
| and used by the very same powerful people who pay such a
| premium for their privacy.
|
| If we allow the collection of information, that information
| should absolutely be public, but that doesn't mean we should
| allow everything to be collected.
| matz1 wrote:
| >I don't think that means we don't need privacy. It
| absolutely has value.
|
| I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy has
| value.
|
| >but that doesn't mean we should allow everything to be
| collected.
|
| Why ?
| wyre wrote:
| People spend money on privacy. This gives it value.
|
| I don't know anyone that would want to spend money on a
| hotel if there was a security camera in the room. I would
| get the more expensive room without the camera, probably
| go to a different hotel.
|
| Doctor and patient confidentiality is implicitly
| understood. Do you think doctors should be able to tell
| advertisers what their patients are going through.
|
| Maybe your own individual privacy doesn't have value to
| you, and that's okay, but other people value their
| privacy, and these corps profiting off data definitely
| find value in lack of privacy.
| deep-root wrote:
| Perhaps you'd like some privacy to surprise a significant
| other with your purchase, rather than it show up on their
| Venmo feed in real-time.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| > I never heard any convincing argument about why privacy
| has value.
|
| You have either _never_ had to keep a secret (which I
| highly doubt, unless you happen to be a literal child) or
| you simply aren't arguing in good faith.
|
| Assuming that you are arguing in good faith, let's
| consider a potential reason why someone might value their
| privacy:
|
| Some people are born attracted to the same-sex (gay,
| lesbian, bi, pan, etc.).
|
| There are some countries where being gay is a criminal
| offense; there are even some countries where you can face
| the death penalty for this. [1]
|
| If a gay person lives in one of those countries, don't
| they have a right to keep this fact about themselves
| private simply in order to protect themselves? Or does
| their life have less value than the profit that can be
| generated by the "Data Economy"?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_
| homosex...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Obviously the problem is laws that outlaw homosexuality
| and not a lack of privacy.
| path2power wrote:
| To the people whose lives are at stake, what difference
| does it make?
| matz1 wrote:
| This is the way to go in the future. It will be more and more
| impractical, very costly, and inconvenient to hide
| information as technology get better.
|
| The problem that need to be solves is not how to hide
| information but how to fix the issue that arise when the
| information are public.
|
| Lets talk about one example :
|
| Right now it is a problem if my credit card number become
| public because it can be used for unauthorized purchase.
|
| Simply having my credit card number become public is not an
| issue perse but for it to be used for unauthorized purchase
| is the problem.
|
| But what if I can have my credit card number public while
| nobody can use it for unauthorized purchase ? then I won't
| have issue for it being public.
| janto wrote:
| You'd still need to keep something private like a PIN or
| private key.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I happen to think we 'd be a better society if we all knew
| everything about each other._
|
| You should set the example. Go ahead and post your e-mail
| address and password for us.
| yboris wrote:
| The author of this article, Carissa Veliz, also wrote _Privacy
| Is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your
| Data_
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
| freddyym wrote:
| I'd advise reading pretty much everything that they write on
| privacy, its all very worthwhile.
| codeisawesome wrote:
| If one were to buy that book (or even visit the link) - some
| new interesting 'data points' have now been collected ;)
|
| Actually no, not a wink, it's terrifying :D D:
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Privacy for me, but not for thee.
|
| Imagine trying to be a new author, marketing a book before
| Amazon, before Twitter and Facebook.
| mancerayder wrote:
| Add to this... everything you said is a forever kept thing. So
| over decades this stuff can be mined and a tiny needle can be
| found if it's meaningful to the searcher. It's terrifying.
| choeger wrote:
| Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is even
| correct. A glitch in the location tracking and, bam, you have
| an affair. Some wrongly assigned search queries or speech
| requests and suddenly you are a pedophile. A terrorist
| selecting you as a cover identity and you wake up in
| Guantanamo.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Add to this that no one cares about whether the data is
| even correct._
|
| It's interesting how our culture has adopted the mantra
| that "computers are never wrong." Yet, every day in the
| media there are dozens or hundreds of articles about
| computers and systems making mistakes. I wish we could
| break that cycle of believing anything that comes off a
| screen.
|
| I fight my own minor battles against this weekly. As part
| of my job, I maintain an online directory of about 70,000
| businesses related to the one I work for. I regularly get
| e-mails from people saying things like, "The phone number
| for X is wrong. Google says it's this...!"
|
| Then when I look into it, Google is wrong. But because it's
| Google, people assume it's right, and my web sites are
| wrong. We need to teach people that not only do computers
| make mistakes, but Google is the king of all mistake-
| generating engines.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| And as we already see happening, when cultural values shift
| over time, you will definitely be judged by things you did or
| said decades ago. Even if by contemporary standards they were
| typical.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| This is a great list. SO many times people have said to me,
| "Let them track me, I've got nothing to hide." And you hit them
| with a few things off this list and they immediately change
| their mind. There should be a tinurl for website I can send
| people to that shows a simple list of all the ways personal
| information can be used.
| notamy wrote:
| > There should be a tinurl for website I can send people to
| that shows a simple list of all the ways personal information
| can be used.
|
| I just now set up a small site for it at
| https://whynottrack.com/! It's open source -- GitHub link in
| the footer -- so anyone can PR changes / reasons / etc.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > SO many times people have said to me
|
| I'm sure that's happened.
|
| > to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read
| or expertise to understand in its full implications... New
| Declaration of Human Rights
|
| In the same breath: complain about long documents that no one
| reads, propose authoring an unenforceable, even longer
| document that no one will read.
| dioBaco wrote:
| Jordan Peterson has to read this article and these comments.
| How do we get him here?
| slg wrote:
| I think these concerns still need to be translated into real
| world repercussions before the average person is convinced.
| Right now it is certainly creepy, but does it really have a
| negative impact on my life for a company to know these
| things?
| momirlan wrote:
| I remember an interview with Edward Snowden where it was
| shown how little people cared about privacy. The
| interviewer then translated the concern into "the gov can
| see your dick pics". That was a no-no for most people
| dnumjar wrote:
| It was John Oliver, great episode by the way.
| https://youtu.be/XEVlyP4_11M?t=1382
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, great list. But salary and bank balance should probably
| be added.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _But salary and bank balance should probably be added._
|
| ADP is one of the largest paycheck processors in the United
| States. But almost no one realizes that if their paycheck
| comes through ADP, their salary information is being sold.
| Remember, this is also a company that knows when you've
| been hired, fired, has your Social Security Number, and a
| lot of other very personal financial information. According
| to a New York Times article from a few years ago, ADP is
| selling you out worse than even the cell phone companies.
| Yet, there was zero uproar about it that I noticed.
|
| As for bank balances, I was very surprised to learn
| recently that bank balances are not part of credit scoring.
| I have a substantial amount of emergency savings. The last
| time I pulled my credit reports, it wasn't on any of them.
| nINYqGQadl wrote:
| I think this list makes a case for better sharing/access
| controls but I can see applications for most of the things
| listed here. I might just want the insights for myself but
| not want to share it with anyone or my data being sold
| without my consent e.g. monitor and improve my sleeping
| habits, monitor my expenditure by tracking my restaurant and
| shopping habits, my health data and/or insights into it.
| Maybe not your spouse but some parents might want to keep
| track of what their kids do online. I know people who want to
| have the ability to find/track the location of family members
| etc.
|
| I suppose calls for better regulation, purpose oriented data
| collection and stricter enforcement and penalties but by no
| means does simply don't track/collect data is an answer where
| there are actual practical applications.
| nitrogen wrote:
| _don 't track/collect data_
|
| Only two of your examples (parental controls and location
| sharing) require any kind of network, and those could be
| done with a private VPN running at home.
|
| The design of cloud-based services is purely for
| convenience and collection. Sometimes if the collection can
| be controlled, the convenience is worth it, but every
| beneficial algorithm could be run locally.
| crooked-v wrote:
| An example here for "run locally" would be Apple Health,
| which uses end-to-end encryption to sync data between
| your devices, does all the analytics stuff locally, and
| has a extensive permissions scheme for voluntary sharing
| of info with doctors or research programs.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| The funny thing is that the rise of cloud computing
| coincides with the rise of really powerful cheap personal
| computation, you'd think it would be the opposite.
| uberdru wrote:
| Or even just a constitutional amendment that specifically
| defines rights of privacy.
| prestigious wrote:
| I would be curious to know my inferred IQ.
| Swizec wrote:
| > your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured
| by your phone
|
| Shit I would love to know this for myself! Is there a service
| or app that can crunch the numbers and tell me?
| bo1024 wrote:
| Just to respond seriously for a second: it's good to remind
| ourselves that ML isn't magic. If it knew your weight and age
| it would use those for predicting life expectancy instead.
| Same for smoking history, sleep habits, etc. But all it has
| access to is the accelerometer, and a weak correlation is
| better than nothing, so that's what it uses.
| weasel_words wrote:
| Someone previously illustrated sceneries where the
| algorithm hiccupped on your data and erroneously labeled
| you as a pedophile and/or terrorist (at the same time!).
|
| If you think about it, bad ML (or your words: "...ML isn't
| magic.") is just as bad, if not worse, than infallible ML.
| rahoulb wrote:
| Apple Health and many fitness tracker apps can estimate your
| Vo2Max score based on your height, weight and how your heart
| rate varies during brisk walks and runs.
|
| It's not incredibly accurate but Vo2Max is regarded as an
| important indicator of your cardiovascular health.
| geenew wrote:
| I thought that was interesting too. Looks like the research
| on it came out 10 years ago. A couple of links from some
| quick searching. The second link has some charts and graphs,
| though it limits its estimates to 65+ age groups.
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/walking-speed-
| sur...
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554
|
| Edit: I'd add that you likely don't need any tracker to get a
| rough estimate.
|
| If you walk faster than people around you who are roughly the
| same age, then you'll likely outlive them.
|
| That may be a reason to take it slow and smell the roses,
| since you have more time :)
| amelius wrote:
| They only know in a statistical sense. Useful for insurance
| companies, but not on a personal level.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I had a wedding to make sure everyone closest to me knew who I
| was sleeping with (Emily as is already public record). It took
| a fair bit of time and money to coordinate and hold that event.
|
| When people ask how I'm doing, I tell them and that includes
| whether my problems are impacting my daily routines and needs.
| (Not lately)
|
| I've shared the results of my IQ tests and had plenty of
| discussions about the validity and lack thereof of those
| results (145-160+ depending on test). Facebook likes are the
| least good mechanism to work that out by.
|
| I think one of the helpful things I do is share really good
| places to eat and find things I want. (Nirmal's is my favorite
| in Seattle)
|
| I hope driving monitoring helps us shift from a penalize
| infrequent rule breaking instances to helping manage attention
| and grow skill. I speed when conditions let that be safe.
|
| I suffer depression and have my whole life as everyone I know
| is aware and now is more public on the internet.
|
| You'll have to ask her but I'm not looking to leave. I'm very
| honest and want that in my closest relationships so if we were
| going that direction she'd be among the first people I spoke
| with. If she feels she needs to leave I'll try and help us both
| find happier lives but I hope it never comes to that.
|
| I respect that you have a different level of openness. I think
| a good criticism of my post is that I have a ton of privilege
| to feel safe sharing these things. I've chosen to live a life I
| feel entirely comfortable sharing. Clearly I'm not handing out
| credentials but... I prefer a world that is more honest and
| intimate and that simply requires I be open, honest, and self-
| reflective.
| donatj wrote:
| > No one sane would ever want all their relatives, friends,
| work colleagues, and neighbors
|
| I'd happily share basically all of that information with _that
| specific group of people_ - except maybe my neighbor that keeps
| reporting me to the city, they don 't need to know my life, but
| if in turn I could know who was googling city ordinances in the
| middle of the night it might make up for it.
|
| At worst I get a funny look for something I googled in the
| middle of the night?
|
| To your point, it's 100% the government I'm worried about.
| They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than a
| weird look.
| virtue3 wrote:
| But how would you trust any company to properly respect who
| you share stuff with? There's a multitude of anti-patterns
| that make some things public already with social media.
|
| I think we should all be looking at this as either they're
| getting -all- of your data and sharing it with -everyone-
| (because that means more $$$) or they're NOT getting your
| data and they CANT share it cuz they don't have it.
|
| We cannot trust companies to respect our privacy because it
| goes against their core value of turning a profit.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| turning a profit depends to _some_ extent on our trust, so
| we can expect companies to do _some_ good for us too
| virtue3 wrote:
| Either they sell the data, or they keep it protected as a
| fuck you to google (aka apple) or they potentially get a
| data leak because they aren't following best practices in
| the slightest (aka Experian).
|
| I remember being out of college and finally being able to
| buy adobe products to do photography and then Adobe got
| hacked and my un/pw was out in the wild. It was safer to
| pirate their stuff and trust some crazy keygen software
| that's definitely doing something nefarious cuz at least
| I could run that in a VM.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| > They've got legal and lethal authority to do far worse than
| a weird look.
|
| Society scares me more. The government has the authority, but
| society has the power and the inclination to weaponise it.
| The government would never bother reacting to anything that
| RMS said but people did.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| You realize the government is made of people, right?
| xmprt wrote:
| Not really. The government is more of a system that's run
| by people. The government doesn't change much even if all
| the people running it change.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Society scares me more_
|
| Agreed. For example, it's unlikely a government agency is
| going to care about your personal web page talking about
| how you're open to theories about UFOs. But a potential
| employer may decide not to hire you because your mind is
| open to the possibility. Or worse, an employment screening
| company's "algorithm" will score you lower because of it.
| airstrike wrote:
| It appears you and I have very different relationships with
| work colleagues...
| jayd16 wrote:
| If you Facebook friend your work colleagues and introduce
| your wife then they already have easy access to what you
| like and who you're sleeping with, no?
|
| Search history and medical info would be more concerning
| than that information, on average, I would guess.
| Black101 wrote:
| > how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car,
| because your phone contains an accelerometer
|
| Any car 2010 and later "smart/stupid":
| https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1, so even
| if you leave your phone at home, don't assume that you aren't
| tracked.
| Black101 wrote:
| you don't like to hear the truth, but that's ok
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >No one sane would ever want their relatives //
|
| People close to you probably know all these things already.
| Even if you don't.
|
| >No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other
| third parties being able to obtain and save this information
| either //
|
| This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the
| population as whole.
| maybelsyrup wrote:
| > This is a popular view here. I don't think it's true of the
| population as whole.
|
| I think you're right. They can get to the point where they
| care, but my intuition is that it'd take a real crisis, and
| even then there's plenty of incentive with this topic to move
| on as fast as possible. We (the public) are pretty fickle,
| and it's psychologically threatening to admit we've had a
| voyeur living in our bedroom for a decade.
| [deleted]
| meh99 wrote:
| There's still billions of people who believe in helicoptering.
|
| Being watched by sky wizard and judged at all times is their
| expectation. It is their agency.
|
| Write down whatever you want, how does one resolve the reality?
| We have documents in place to cover all these things.
|
| Yet here we are still.
|
| You're doing what the people you aren't ok with do; expect
| everyone to undertake creating and importing some wholly new
| perspective.
|
| We know how to regain our agency: take control of it away from
| the aristocracy.
|
| The species has done this again and again. It's not new.
| matz1 wrote:
| No, I am okay for them to be able to know.
|
| Them knowing is not the problem. Them using it to harm me is
| the problem. These are different thing, latter is a problem,
| former is not.
|
| Let pick this one example :
|
| 'your restaurant visits and shopping habits'
|
| Just them knowing is not problem, in fact them knowing can also
| benefit me: e.g when they want to give me gift.
| javajosh wrote:
| "If invasive tracking is outlawed then only outlaws will use
| invasive tracking." The problem is that symmetry is
| impossible.
| matz1 wrote:
| I'm not advocating to outlaw invasive tracking, rather
| advocating on solving the problem of the use of invasive
| tracking to harm people.
| amelius wrote:
| They will frame it as you harming yourself.
| xibalba wrote:
| Would you please demonstrate to me how I, Joe Q. Public, can
| find out, via collected data that I can access, with whom
| another person is sleeping with?
|
| Or, in lieu of that, walk me through how that would be done
| with Facebook's, Google's, or Apple's data via your first-hand
| knowledge of those data and where and how they are stored and
| accessed?
|
| These fear mongering comments about data collection have
| _never_ demonstrated real world harms, AFAIK. It reminds me of
| the genetically engineered foods bogeyman that, in spite of a
| complete lack of empirical evidence, continues to be trotted
| out as a huge danger.
| bluGill wrote:
| Not all of it is data you can access as the public. However
| as the author of a program with access to internet and
| location you can easily upload where the phone is at all
| times and thus figure out when two are near each other. (this
| is why newer phones OSes let users choose if the program can
| access these things all the time or only when active)
| criddell wrote:
| Facebook, Google, et. al. might not make the data available
| to you, but they have it.
|
| If the information is stored on servers in China, then the
| Chinese government has it as well. Maybe you aren't a Chinese
| citizen so you don't care, but it's at least worth
| considering.
|
| The politicians we elect to craft and enact legislation that
| affects the big data companies are always at risk of being
| essentially blackmailed by those companies with the
| incredibly detailed and personal information that those
| companies have on politicians.
| smithza wrote:
| I am very skeptical about the implications of this take.
| You paint this as "big data companies are actively
| lobbying/threatening politicians to enact legislation
| helpful for big data _using their big data troves_. " There
| are politicians who work in good faith and have non-
| controversial backgrounds who would not be liable to these
| blackmails and _still_ don 't work hard enough to enact
| legislation to protect citizens. This is not a big data
| conspiracy as much as lack of political willpower.
| korse wrote:
| You need to know something about your person of interest,
| other than a name. Then you need access to multiple data
| sets.
|
| Use a list like this as a starting point.
|
| https://www.oag.ca.gov/data-brokers
|
| Commuter data is good, so is foot traffic. Data sets centered
| around health and income or quality of life can be beneficial
| as well. The game is to use publicly available information
| about your person to tie them conclusively to set of entries
| in an 'anonymized' data set.
|
| If you aren't at least investigative journalist tier or the
| resources you need cost too much/require a corporate
| presence, then hire someone to do it for you who already has
| the pipeline set up. PI's have been available to Joe Q. for
| years and they still are. This all just makes them even more
| efficient.
| zarify wrote:
| There have been a number of instances here in .au where
| centralised location/health/etc data has been misused
| (stalking, checking out potential dates, domestic abuse or
| aiding domestic abusers) through inappropriate access. I
| doubt we're unique.
|
| I'd argue that it doesn't need to be "Joe Q. Public", because
| companies are made up of Joe Q. Publics.
| Raidion wrote:
| I'm undecided on this topic, but playing devil's advocate:
| Does the fact that this knowledge exists, and only in the
| hands of some of the largest (and most pervasive) tech
| companies in the world, make this information 'safer', or
| does it mean that it's a 'force multiplier' that increases
| the risk that this information will be used a) to enable
| anti-competitive behavior or b) be co-opted by authoritarian
| governments to suppress dissent.
|
| I personally think that if I give this data to a company, and
| they keep it "safe" and only to support features that are
| beneficial to me, that's totally OK, but I wouldn't like
| companies reselling my mobility data to health insurers
| (without aggregation or cohorting) to give me a 100%
| customized insurance rate, regardless of how beneficial that
| would be.
|
| Data that's used to distill people down to a number and value
| them precisely seems to have a potential to enforce
| systematic inequalities and further improve the lives of
| "haves" at the cost of "have nots".
| kbsspl wrote:
| Safer in what sense ? What would be your take on government
| tolerance to the existence of such data ? Someone from the
| clandestine teams would always want to utilise it ? How
| well could the businesses resist.
|
| Anti competitive behavior, I would think comes
| automatically with such massive centralisation. What's
| scary is the ability to mass incite riots, using knowledge
| of the most susceptible audience to fake news and pushing
| it out incendiary posts to exactly that audience. India has
| faced multiple such incidents already. Deliberate ? Maybe
| in the sense of affinity algorithms.
|
| With the backdrop of the Stanford experiment, and a host of
| other biases giving almost tribal warrior behavior, should
| such affinity data be allowed for collection ?
|
| My apologies if this sounds drastic, but data collection
| generates micro nukes, generated based on turning
| individuals into an array of microcrucibles.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Or on the flip side of that question: is it safer in the
| hands of the user, to be shared as desired, by explicitly
| opting in, or would it be safer in the hands of a corporate
| entity?
| supercanuck wrote:
| Here you go...
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_comments/2.
| ..
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Think along the lines of dating apps that show your distance
| to other users. That could be mined for changes in proximity
| over time - one day you are miles apart, then next day you
| are within 500ft of each other for the whole night.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| If you think the problem is merely Facebook, Google, or
| Apple, then I think you are underestimating the amount of
| data and who is processing it. There is an entire industry of
| companies you have never heard of that are thinking up ever
| more creative ways to put data together from various sources,
| identify it, correlate it, and then sell the 'insights' to
| whoever wants to pay.
|
| At the very least, at a bare minimum, I think we need
| legislation that covers how this kind of data processing
| happens by third-party companies and we need to provide a way
| for citizens to at least _see_ what data has been collected
| about them and what 'insights' it has generated.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Which company, apart from Facebook, Google and Apple, would
| remotely have access to any of the data on that list?
| Facebook Google and Apple don't share data with data
| brokers.
| belter wrote:
| I have a bridge to sell you.
|
| "Gmail messages 'read by human third parties'"
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44699263
|
| "One company told the Wall Street Journal that the
| practice was "common" and a "dirty secret". ...Google
| indicated that the practice was not against its
| policies."
| saddlerustle wrote:
| That article is just describing gmail APIs, which
| requires explicit user consent via oauth to enable. This
| is no more shocking than gmail supporting IMAP.
| belter wrote:
| "The companies said they had not asked users for specific
| permission to read their Gmail messages, because the
| practice was covered by their user agreements."
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Regardless of what those third party companies told their
| users, users would have had to accept a pretty clear
| dialog [1] delegating access to their Gmail accounts.
| That's just how google oauth works.
|
| [1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/aBTMm.png
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Up until very recently, a lot of this could be done by
| any of a number of innocuous looking apps with tracking
| toolkits installed. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not.
|
| Even now, the problem is that you want the data
| sometimes. Like maybe you use Life360 because it's handy
| for your family. Well, it knows how fast you drive (it
| likes to tell me my wife's top speed after she goes
| somewhere...). It has enough accelerometer access to
| decide if you've been in a wreck. It's a GPS app so of
| course it has pretty tight location information. And
| maybe you consent to all this, but hidden somewhere in
| the TOS it says Life360 may share this info with selected
| partner companies. Now it gets slurped up by big data
| warehouses.
|
| Maybe you install a sleep tracking app. Now they know how
| well you sleep, and I would bet they could pretty
| accurately figure out if/when you're having sex.
| Depending on the device, they might even be able to guess
| whether or not it was solo.
|
| Perhaps you don't like the limited options Apple has for
| pedometer data, so you install Pedometer++. Another
| possible avenue for data collection.
|
| Or Instacart, Uber, Uber Eats, etc.
|
| So. Much. Data.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| This is a good point and a good reason to prefer first-
| party apps!
|
| No need to hide it, Life360 clearly states right near the
| top of its privacy policy "In order to keep our Service
| free for most users, we generate revenue through trusted
| data partnerships. We share device data, including
| location and movement data, with trusted data Partners
| for tailored advertising"
| zikduruqe wrote:
| You cellular company has first party signal data, that
| even the big tech companies don't have.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| All the internet access examples on that list would use
| encrypted connections, so a cellular company wouldn't be
| privy. Cellular companies do have _course_ location data,
| but to be pedantic that doesn 't really apply to any of
| OP's list.
| thegagne wrote:
| Server name indicator from ssl is not encrypted and
| neither are most dns queries.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Dating sites would have that kind of data and have been
| breached in the past (Ashley Madison was one high profile
| instance, as I recall).
| saddlerustle wrote:
| I don't recall the Ashley Madison leak having anything
| remotely similar to the data on OP's list.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| I was replying a later comment that was considering
| whether that list should include knowing who you've slept
| with.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I've somehow never heard of this, that's a wild story.
| decasteve wrote:
| Akamai and Microsoft.
|
| When your Apple device communicates with "Apple",
| many/most of those IP addresses are owned by Akamai.
|
| Even when you search DuckDuckGo, both the search results
| (Bing) and web servers that serve the content are owned
| by Microsoft (Azure).
| saddlerustle wrote:
| That covers one or two of the list I suppose, but is
| there any reason to believe Akamai is lying to its
| customers and harvesting their users' data? I can't think
| of any incentive for them to do that, it would be brazen
| fraud for an insignificant revenue source.
| alexanderdmitri wrote:
| Akamai's privacy policy on personal data:
| https://www.akamai.com/us/en/privacy-policies/privacy-
| shield...
| decasteve wrote:
| I wasn't trying to make a point other than sharing
| examples of companies, like Akamai, that store a lot of
| personal data on behalf of others. Storing data with
| Apple is storing it with Akamai, and all of the other
| third parties involved--where "third parties" becomes a
| blanket term in privacy policies and not an exhaustive
| list. The "chain of trust" in this regard has some
| missing links.
|
| So far as their businesses are concerned, the data is
| safeguarded and I would never expect it to be sold--not
| by the top of the data food chain in any case.
|
| But there's the issue of data being stored with US
| companies requiring being subject to US laws, such as the
| USA PATRIOT Act.
| swiley wrote:
| >your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the
| friends you have
|
| That's got to be extremely noisy, does anyone have any links
| about this?
| alextheparrot wrote:
| Paper has some flaws, but this is a good seed point.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802?sid=98dc0a8b-4443-4.
| ..
|
| IQ:
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2013/03/07/121877211.
| ..
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| What an awesome list of examples!
| polynomial wrote:
| This naturally invites the question, what percentage of the
| general populace is in fact sane? (sincerely curious to know
| what number hn readers would assign to that.)
| anticristi wrote:
| > Ending the data economy may seem like a radical proposition,
|
| Not in 2021. In 2018, GDPR went into force in the EU. In 2018,
| CCPA went into force in California, US. In 2021, VCDPA went into
| force in Virginia, US. At least with GDPR serious fines were
| passed.
|
| The right to data privacy is no longer a John-Lennon-like hippie
| idea. It is law. Now go and fix you business model.
| emodendroket wrote:
| This reminds me of when people want to "reverse financialization"
| or "get rid of the shareholder value model." How are you going to
| reverse an idea and what are you going to replace it with?
| jjulius wrote:
| >How are you going to reverse an idea...
|
| In this case, make mass data collection and targeted
| advertising illegal.
|
| >... and what are you going to replace it with?
|
| The model(s) we had before - generalized advertising based on
| who advertisers believe the broader audience that watches X
| show or views Y website is.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Making "mass data collection" illegal seems pretty fraught. I
| doubt that anybody would want that in its literal form. I'm
| not sure anyone is too interested in nuking our tech sector
| either but maybe I'm wrong about that part.
| julienb_sea wrote:
| We derive great benefit from the "data economy" in the form of
| services which are NOT free to develop or operate but have no
| cost associated with their usage. We also enjoy the benefits when
| it comes to social connections, disaster recovery, and tracking
| our lost valuables. It is not going away.
|
| The potential pitfalls of the data economy are about overbearing
| or violent governments, or about poorly managed data protection.
| This has much more to do with the bad actors than the tools they
| are using. It's sort of like saying we should ban information
| distribution because bad actors can spread misinformation.
| prohobo wrote:
| This is a bit weird... The Reboot is sponsored by DFINITY, which
| is the company behind the Internet Computer and did a
| presentation at the World Economic Forum in 2020.
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw)
|
| The WEF is 100% pro datamining the shit out of everyone, and
| AFAIK they only invite people who share their vision of the
| future. So, why is DFINITY making presentations for them while
| also sponsoring anti datamining journalism?
|
| I'm not saying that "THIS IS WRONG!" I'm just confused as to
| what's going on here.
| peter303 wrote:
| Irony: I got an "accept cookies" button when reading the article.
| akomtu wrote:
| If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine, then
| surveillance capitalism is a modern steam engine with lots of
| sensors optimizing its performance.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| >If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine
|
| I rather like this simile. Kudos!
| 34679 wrote:
| Anyone engaged in the collection and sale of data should be
| required to maintain a list of their customers. Upon the sale of
| data, the customer should be required to provide their list to
| the broker. At the point of collection/consent, the list should
| be made available to the consumer.
|
| For example: You want to vote in an online poll by company A.
| Company A collects data about you and sells it, so you must agree
| to their privacy policy. Company A's privacy policy discloses
| that they sell your data to Companies B, C and D. Companies B, C
| and D have provided a list of its customers to Company A, and
| Company A includes those lists as well. In addition, the
| customers of those companies provide lists (as all data brokers
| would be required to do).
|
| If its seems like it could get overly complicated with huge lists
| of data brokers for a simple online poll, that's the idea. You
| shouldn't have to wonder how many entities you're giving access
| to your information when, for example, you want to vote for MLB
| All-stars. MLB wants your name, address, email, phone number, and
| they disclose they'll "share it with partners" but they don't say
| who those partners are, how many exist, and if they have their
| own "partners". Vote for your favorite player and you could be
| getting a phone call for life insurance 15 minutes later after
| your number has been passed through 5 different companies.
| hedgedoops2 wrote:
| CCC has a longstanding policy demand called the "Datenbrief"
| ('data letter'). Under this proposal, every corporation that
| keeps personal information about a natural person would be
| obligated to, once a year, mail the subject a letter containing
| their information, with instructions how to exercise their
| existing statutory deletion/correction rights.
|
| If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for
| the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights
| / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply
| an obligation to inform the subject about it.
|
| I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data
| holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion
| letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization
| that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose
| of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure.
|
| [1] https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief
| bdamm wrote:
| The author writes as if exploitation is a new phenomenon. It is
| annoyingly naive.
| ayngg wrote:
| Data feels like the next resource (like hydrocarbons or other
| resource extraction) where it can be exploited for massive profit
| while its costs externalized for the rest of society to bear.
|
| Like how it took decades for society to come around to human
| influenced climate change, it will probably take a while for
| people to accept the social and mental health costs associated
| with the extraction and use of this resource, or we will get to a
| point where people are manipulated enough to be insulated from
| such a realization.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| If you can't hide your activity just pollute their data to the
| point it becomes unuseable. Give them data that makes them lose
| money.
|
| Search random stuff you are not interested in and see them
| desperately throw money into the toilet.
|
| Search plane tickets to Congo, saxophones, windsurf equipment,
| paintings of toucans... the most random shit you can think of.
|
| Then you will start seeing ads for that, which is seeing the ad
| tech imploding in front of your eyes.
|
| The more you do it and the more other people do it, the less
| profitable ad tech becomes.
|
| Also search for stuff outside your demographics, like stuff for
| older people, so they get your profile wrong.
| cevered wrote:
| I highly suggest you guys checkout Decentr. They are building
| blockchain platform that allows individuals to have ownership
| over their personal data to exchange and leverage for economic
| benefits in a decentralized and secure way. I think it's false to
| say we can't collect data in a secure way therefore stop the data
| economy. We should be seeking to empower individuals with the
| ownership of their own data to create a true data economy.
| aeoleonn wrote:
| when I hear "blockchain" my eyes glaze over
| Jwarder wrote:
| How paranoid should I be of a browser plug-in that promises to
| track every interaction I make and provide that data for
| advertiser targeting?
| cevered wrote:
| All of your data is stored in an encrypted wallet/ID via
| decentralized storage solutions. Only you have access to your
| data and control over your data via a private key like a
| crypto wallet.
| ipsin wrote:
| As I understand it, CCPA means any California resident could
| hypothetically write a data broker, get their own file, and
| determine how much _actual_ tracking is going on.
|
| All the hypothetical examples are realistic, but... what are the
| names of companies that are actually providing that level of data
| about me?
| ram_rar wrote:
| Similar to KYC (Know your customer) [1] in financial services
| industry. We need Know your Data Broker for customers, where in
| customers can know which data brokers have used their
| information. Most of the data brokers run in the dark and very
| few outside of tech are aware of it. Data Brokers should allows
| customers to be opted out and purge information from their
| systems if needed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
| Barraketh wrote:
| Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now
| sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy
| on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie
| tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data
| breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be
| worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit
| companies collect your non-anonymized personal data.
|
| Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they
| like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually
| socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience,
| you can build better more targeted products. And the open data
| exchanges were a great moat against platform centralization like
| FB. The fight against open data exchanges make the comparative
| advantage FB has in advertising to you larger. That's actually
| pretty bad, because FB has some pretty bad incentives wrt to the
| attention economy and optimizing for engagement. A world where
| advertising on independent websites is effective is a much better
| one - it would let websites put out better content, it would
| decrease the power of social networks, it could fund better
| journalism (which is being decimated right now), etc.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Honestly, I 'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising
| gets._
|
| Couldn't have happened to a worse industry
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Advertizing needs to be _pull_ , not _push_. That is, when I
| have disposable income and am looking to spend it, there ought
| to be a place I can go to browse ads.
|
| Otherwise, get the fuck off my attention span, stop bloating
| the web, and stop polluting public spaces with irrelevant
| information!
| adkadskhj wrote:
| > Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they
| like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually
| socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche
| audience, you can build better more targeted products.
|
| Maybe this works well for some products, like "I know i need to
| buy milk, what should i buy?" but it has often been used in a
| form that appears like an abusive relationship.
|
| Think about all of the kid-targeted ads from 30 years ago which
| peddled sugars and psychological tricks to get kids frothing at
| the mouth over their food and toy products. These weren't
| merely advertisements, but targeted attacks to the brain. And
| of course things haven't changed, it's just iconic to talk
| about early TV's cereal commercials hah. As with many product
| advertisements, they're not just trying to make you aware of
| the product - they're trying to bypass your consciousness and
| hook straight into your brain.
|
| That was 30 years ago, and we've had the misfortune of seeing
| this evolve. Now social media advertisements are hyper targeted
| with similar tactics but more nefarious goals. Misinformation
| at the hands of targeted advertisements has been the source
| many-a controversies of recent years.
|
| My point is i'd agree with you if advertisements haven't been
| so blatantly manipulative over the last 50+ years. If they were
| simply "Hey, you like X, try Y?"; but they're not. That ship
| sailed before i was even born. And it's only gotten worse with
| time.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Data can still be anonymized and dangerous. In extreme cases
| de-anonymization is available and for all the rest it still
| results in the targeted individual being exposed to
| manipulations and attempts at influence. And the amount of
| influence that advertisers wield absolutely needs to be curbed
| to an absolute minimum or, even better, non existence. People
| need to be making decisions on their own _rational_ self-
| interest and not emotional overtures amplified by an intimate
| understanding of someone 's fears and sensitivities.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| > Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they
| like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually
| socially positive!
|
| What is the math here? How do you account for society-wide lost
| productivity from spending time consuming advertising? Or for
| people making sub-optimal purchasing decisions when products
| that are worse for their needs happen to have bigger
| advertising budgets?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> matching consumers with products that they like_
|
| Is not advertising, it's sales: the seller establishes a
| personal relationship with the buyer, finds out what the
| buyer's needs and wants are, and proposes a product or service
| to them that satisfies those needs and wants. Advertising is
| nothing like that.
|
| Not to mention that most things that get advertised for,
| _nobody_ sells the way I just described above. The only
| products most people buy that get sold that way are houses and
| cars, and those aren 't the kinds of things advertisers are
| trying to sell using harvested personal data. Most products
| that people buy that are advertised that way, they choose
| themselves, they don't have a personal sales person helping
| them.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has
| NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that
| resulted in personal harm.
|
| How could you possibly make this claim in good faith, let alone
| believe it?
|
| EDIT: typo
| drocer88 wrote:
| "but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has
| NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that
| resulted in personal harm"
|
| Do you have a link for this?
| Barraketh wrote:
| Well, it's hard to prove the absence of a negative - I think
| that it's on the people claiming harm to provide some
| examples. However, I'm not even sure what a cookie data leak
| would look like. The large advertising brokers are handling
| petabytes of cookie tracking data per day. To gain any
| insight out of it you need to run jobs on giant clusters. The
| volume of the data makes it basically impossible to
| exfiltrate. So yeah, I'm pretty confident in this statement.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| > The large advertising brokers are handling petabytes of
| cookie tracking data per day.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| Also, you don't need a copy of every single byte that a
| tracking company collects; summaries are more than enough
| to be useful to track individuals across the internet.
|
| > The volume of the data makes it basically impossible to
| exfiltrate.
|
| An attacker doesn't need to try to exfiltrate a large
| fraction of collected data; only the data that's likely to
| be interesting to them.
|
| See Facebook/Cambridge Analytica [1] for an example of just
| how incompetent a technically-sophisticated company can be
| when it comes to protecting their users' (and their own!)
| data from potential adversaries.
|
| [1] In particular, the comments from Alex Stamos, the CSO
| who said "We have the threat profile of a [...] defense
| contractor, but we run our corporate networks [...] like a
| college campus" (from
| https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/19/facebook-security-chief-
| alex... )
| bitexploder wrote:
| Their claim is logically dubious anyway. It's not the cookies
| themselves but all the associated data that cookiesnlet big
| tech associate to profiles. This claim they are making about
| cookies are not associated with a breach is highly suspicious
| and not a good faith argument IMO. Even if they are not
| directly linked, cookies and tracking tools exist in a system
| and don't exist in a vacuum. They are the tip of the spear.
| Sure the tip isn't what kills you, but having the whole spear
| rammed through you sure does.
| edgyquant wrote:
| While I agree with this it should be easier to opt out without
| disabling JavaScript across the internet.
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| I want a system that tracks me and is 100% transparent to me.
| Toks wrote:
| Exactly. It's not the tracking that is the problem, it's the
| lack of control/transparency. I want a personal data bank
| where I can decide who knows what about me.
| meh99 wrote:
| Don't expect that with big corporate hoarding it all for
| you. It's "their infrastructure" and their business.
|
| The west wants to be free of life's problems while also
| being free to optimize time to avoid dealing with them.
|
| It's almost as if physical reality is full of real
| constraints our imaginations can refuse to acknowledge.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak
| or data breach that resulted in personal harm.
|
| This is a very specific statement. It may be true. But, even if
| we accept for the sake of argument that it is, it's not quite
| the same statement as, "Mass personal data collection has never
| resulted in personal harm," which, while seeming quite similar,
| also happens to be false.
| Barraketh wrote:
| I'm trying to differentiate between data that is anonymized
| (cookies), and data that is not. I'm unaware of any data leak
| of anonymized data that resulted in any harm, but if I'm
| wrong I'd love to hear about it.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Perhaps? But focusing on that specific case means you're
| not aiming for the same goalpost as the article was.
| Barraketh wrote:
| I think you are right - this was a brain dump of some
| things I've been thinking about, specifically on how the
| fight against cookie tracking is making centralization
| worse and companies like Facebook more powerful. This
| article generically criticizes both, but I think there's
| actually a tradeoff here, and not making the distinction
| may lead to bad policies
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| How about intentional publishing of "anonymized" data? It's
| intentional, so it should be even less potentially harmful
| than an unintentional leak, right?
|
| Well, Yahoo's publishing of supposedly "anonymized" data
| still poses a privacy risk to any of their users:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp3d8v/yahoos-gigantic-
| anony...
|
| That's just one of many apparently "anonymized" datasets
| that has been trivially deanonymized by
| researchers/hackers/internet-stalkers; so there's plenty of
| harm to be done.
| akdej27nd91ng wrote:
| Fun fact: one of the top 5 digital advertising platforms
| "anonymizes" user identifiers with a simple hash
| algorithm and "salts" all of the hashes with the same
| "salt". Can you guess the "salt"? Hint: it is commonly
| found on a dinner table and is used to season food.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| I can't say I'm at all surprised. I've had similar
| conversations in a non-advertising field with non-
| technical managers where their attitude basically boiled
| down to "What do we care?" when it came to problems that
| would cost someone else money.
|
| I also can't see attitudes like that changing until
| companies that collect data are seriously held to account
| for any leaks/abuses of the data that they collect.
|
| Potential penalties would probably have to include
| criminal charges, in much the same way that individuals
| and companies can be held criminally liable for
| mishandling toxic waste.
| nickff wrote:
| But "[m]ass personal data collection" is a huge superset of
| "cookie tracking data"; the former encompasses all credit
| card information database breaches (such as Sony's), along
| with all government and healthcare database 'leaks'.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| We could limit it to "for marketing purposes" (which is
| what I meant, though I failed to specify it) and still find
| plenty of clear-cut examples of harm. This isn't breaking
| news. I took a class in graduate school that was largely
| devoted to studying examples of them and discussing their
| ethical and policy implications, and that was years and
| years ago.
| cryoshon wrote:
| >actually socially positive
|
| >If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build
| better more targeted products.
|
| in practice, these two concepts are incompatible. everyone has
| buttons that can be pushed with the help of detailed
| psychological profiles made by advertisers.
|
| if you push those buttons enough times, it's typically
| unhealthy for the person and financially beneficial for the
| pusher all the while.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I see a couple some framing issues your comment. For example,
| the comment links (A) cookie tracking data with (B) people
| giving advertising a bad wrap. But, I think that people give
| advertising a bad rap for many reasons beyond simply cookie
| tracking. Given that, I worry that the idea "cookie tracking
| never led to harm" distracts me from the larger issue of
| generalized corporate and governmental data surveillance,
| especially considering that it seems like personal data
| breaches usually deal subtle harm to people.
| spinningslate wrote:
| >Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets.
|
| Work in advertising by any chance?
|
| If you read the article, it's not primarily about advertising.
| It's about privacy and the negative impact to society on losing
| it.
|
| The ad tech firms were certainly pivotal in creating the
| dystopian surveillance world we live in. They deserve every
| single bit of bad rap they get for that and, personally
| speaking, I really hope there's a _lot_ more bad rap heading
| their way.
|
| >the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER
| been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in
| personal harm
|
| I don't know if you're deliberately positioning that
| duplicitously or not. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
|
| Whether there are cookie-based breaches or not is, in practical
| terms, irrelevant. Read the article. With cookies, and without
| breaches, the Facebooks and Googles of the world allow
| advertisers to promote smoking to children or payday loans to
| those with financial troubles.
|
| Advertising is a wide spectrum. At one end it's relatively
| benign: billboards and the like. Some feel even that is
| unacceptable. At the other is the FB/G hyper-targeted end. In
| and of itself it is extremely creepy. But the article is about
| much more than just the weird experience of wondering how they
| knew to target you for erectile dysfunction treatment. Or
| divorce lawyers.
|
| Ad tech has bootstrapped a global panopticon. That's the
| problem here.
|
| Oh, and next time your insurance premium goes up mysteriously,
| have a think about your browsing history.
| troutwine wrote:
| > Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets.
| Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is
| creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is
| that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any
| leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing
| people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak,
| where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal
| data.
|
| I mean, why not both? I simply cannot think of someone who
| dislikes tracking-as-advertisement and is pro central
| clearinghouses for more targeted personal information.
|
| > Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they
| like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually
| socially positive!
|
| Only with the unstated premise that tracking _will_ happen and
| it's better if that tracking is done in a decentralized
| fashion. Sure, I can agree that there shouldn't be a monopoly
| at the focus on online tracking-as-advertising, but there's an
| additional argument that the space _should not exist in
| itself_. These arguments have been rehashed endlessly online
| and especially on HN so they probably don't bear repeating
| here, but the either or choice you represent is disingenuous.
|
| EDIT: fixed a typo
| Barraketh wrote:
| The premise is slightly different. I'm mostly differentiating
| between cookie tracking and social networks (and some other
| large online platforms). The large online platforms don't
| need to track you - you give them your data willingly.
| Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking you,
| but because you keep posting things to it. Cookie tracking is
| an alternative way to build up an effective advertising
| profile that is decentralized and anonymized, which I think
| has some value.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| > The large online platforms don't need to track you - you
| give them your data willingly.
|
| Most people don't know the extent to which companies track
| them across the internet and their devices. It really would
| be better described as "stalking" given that there is a
| clear intent by most online platforms to be as stealthy as
| possible when it comes to their data collection activities.
|
| > Facebook knows a lot about you not because it's tracking
| you, but because you keep posting things to it.
|
| That's not at all true. People who have explicitly chosen
| to _not_ have a Facebook account still have their data
| sucked into the maws of Facebook's data collection systems.
| [1]
|
| > Cookie tracking is an alternative way to build up an
| effective advertising profile that is decentralized and
| anonymized
|
| Cookies cannot possibly be used to build up any sort of
| decentralized "advertising profile" across the internet -
| either you allow third-party cookies for tracking and the
| advertisers become the centralized data collectors or you
| don't and the cookies don't really provide any information
| that a website couldn't already collect (and which,
| critically, wouldn't be useful to produce an advertising
| profile for anything other than a single website).
|
| > [..] which I think has some value.
|
| Value for whom? It seems that you're very interested in
| talking about the value of data for those who collect it
| and are completely disregarding the value or cost to the
| people who are being tracked.
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921092
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| "Marketing is manipulation and deceit. It tries to turn people
| into something they aren't -- individuals focused solely on
| themselves, maximising their consumption of goods that they
| don't need"
| questionableans wrote:
| It doesn't have to be that way, but that's typically the most
| profitable strategy, because most products actually suck.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The only data that can't be leaked is the data people don't
| have. When the OPM could be hacked, everything can be hacked.
|
| Based on this, the only solution is to make sure nobody has any
| information that may possible be leaked and, at the time or
| later, be connected to me.
|
| In addition to that nobody targets ads with value, because
| valuable products are super rare and don't need advertising
| because those show up in magazines, on blogs etc created by
| people interested in the field, because sharing those products
| give value to their readers.
|
| I tested it recently on youtube, both by my locked in account
| (15? year old google account with a ton of info) and in a
| firefox container. The first ad was for some casual mobile
| game/scam and the second was for something I can't remember
| anymore. I also don't remember the first ad I got on the
| account that wasn't logged in, but the second one was for a
| website that sold used iPhones, something that I am very much
| interested in.
|
| So, despite knowing a ton of me, Google couldn't show me a
| related ad that was better than the ad it showed when it had no
| data.
|
| For a very long time the ads in gmail were all about getting
| loans no matter how poor my credit was, when my issue was that
| I need a good place to invest my money, not take on expensive
| loans.
|
| Currently they were trying to sell me extra chargers for
| electric cars, of which I don't own any.
|
| Facebook showed me a generic ad for cancer awareness aimed at
| somebody 15 years older than me (they know my real date of
| birth).
|
| Previous to that they showed me a ton of ads for extra comfy
| travel trousers.
|
| Twitter got the closest by showing me ads for places to buy
| crypto (yes I am interested in that space, no I won't by stuff
| from ads that scream scam to me).
|
| I don't know what will replace ads, and it is possible that ads
| might bring some value in specific cases but in general they
| are a waste of money. I suspect Google etc knows this, but
| can't say it for obvious reasons.
|
| Brand awareness ads might make sense, but it doesn't really
| make sense to target those much.
| questionableans wrote:
| > Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they
| like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually
| socially positive!
|
| Well, sometimes. But what people want is not always good for
| them or for society at large. Targeted advertising has a side
| effect of hiding what exactly is being advertised to society.
| There's obviously the extreme cases of "vices," but what about
| things like junk food? People love it. Targeted advertising can
| induce cravings that make people buy and eat things they know
| are not good for them. Or for another example, what about
| pesticides and gas guzzling trucks? I don't want all my
| neighbors' vanity being exploited in order to pollute my
| neighborhood. We can openly talk about what we all see on TV,
| in newspapers, or on billboards, but if I'm not seeing the same
| ads as my neighbors online, those conversations aren't going to
| happen.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Advertising that uses targeting is nothing else than
| manipulation and fraud and should be banned.
|
| Disclaimer: I worked in advertising.
| kazinator wrote:
| Part of the data economy is this curious phenomenon: nicely
| styled web articles, where 99.9999% of the effort goes into
| producing the graphical artwork (often just for that article, not
| from a stock library!), and the text is just someone banging out
| some Reddit-comment-level crap for 5-10 minutes.
|
| Imagine this in a plain document with no CSS:
| <body> <h2>Why We Should End the Data Economy</h2>
| <p>The data economy depends on violating our right to
| privacy on a massive scale, collecting as much
| personal data as possible for profit.</p>
| <p>...</p> ...
|
| Now it's just the rant of some loser who doesn't even know the
| first thing about making an attractive web page, and doesn't have
| any friends who are graphical designers or artists to help him or
| her sell the idea to the masses.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I think we should go further, into a full review of what it means
| to own something. However this is rather ambitious considering
| that the idea of ownerhsip lies at the very foundation of
| civilization as we do it.
|
| But the nature of "digital property" has changed things. If you
| think the printing press changed the nature of human societies,
| just wait until the internet has existed for a few hundred years
| and their corresponding number of generations.
|
| Capitalist market economies, trade-centric as they are, have
| evolved around a world in which all property is exclusive.
| However starting from printing press up to "model-T"--style mass
| production (the development of industrial societies) reduced the
| cost of copying and duplicating stuff more more until the
| creation of the internet brought about "digital goods" (such as
| all your personal data) which has duplication costs _below_
| marginal (I think digital copying has essentially ZERO cost).
|
| Digital goods provide a huge boon if we are able to stop trying
| to force-fit them into a system which works great for physical
| (i.e. exclusive) goods. Why and how did Microsoft become what it
| is during the 90s? because of huge savings in duplicating their
| software in a society that expected said duplication to have a
| not-negible cost.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Articles that make declarations about how bad X is and then
| follow that up with empty calls to action like "We need to end X"
| to get people nodding their heads in agreement are common and
| cheap. What's your solution? Is there one?
|
| Sure, you can draw attention to something bad, but if all you
| ever do is live off the drama and frantically declare that X
| "needs to stop" (I loathe that airheaded phrase like few others),
| what good are you? Who's going to stop it? Passive voice does not
| impress. When I need to eat, I eat. I don't say "I need to eat"
| and leave it at that. I'd starve.
|
| Clearly you think it can be stopped. Clearly you think it's not
| just an unfortunate malady of the age that we must bear. You
| think it can be fixed. Where's your proposal? How are we going to
| shift the tech economy away from surveillance?
|
| The growth of the data economy is like the growth of finance.
| Neither finance nor data gathering actually produce anything.
| They can help produce something, inform or facilitate the
| production, but it's not productive in itself. In the limit,
| you're left with a hot potato economy where people gather data to
| sell for the purpose of gathering more data.
|
| Maybe this is incentivized by the killing of the industrial base.
| Everything we buy is from China. All the US does is consume.
| meh99 wrote:
| It's not a journalists job to dictate policy.
|
| It's to emotionally masturbate a message.
|
| Then the people will look at the politicians offering fixes.
|
| This is the whole point of division of labor.
|
| So many on this thread are looking for Superman. Did you found
| the company you work for and take out the garbage, while
| refilling the snack machine?
|
| You want someone like PG to write down some elementary math and
| say it's a solution to something?
|
| No one does it all.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| The "data economy" is just an extension of the "Advertising
| Economy".
|
| Of course the idea of an "Advertising Economy" should cause
| people to pause a bit since advertising, by its nature, can only
| help maximize profits for somebody else. In theory the money that
| gets pumped into advertising can only be squeezed from the
| profits of other companies who are doing some optimization,
| weighing the cost of advertising vs the increase in their market.
| The maximum amount it makes sense to pay an advertiser is
| proportional to the increase in the audience they provide, with
| the assumption that your profit - fee * population_ads > profit *
| population_no_ads.
|
| One thing should be very clear, advertising cannot create value,
| it can only extract some of the surplus value that other
| companies are creating. This puts a pretty hard limit on how big
| advertisers can grow.
|
| The solution to this was of course to take the byproduct of
| advertising, the generation of large amounts of demographic data,
| and transform that into a product. Suddenly selling, sorting and
| manipulating data create an entirely new class of products and
| create demand for new professionals as well.
|
| The advertising industry, specializing in creating the illusion
| of value when their may be none, has done a brilliant job of
| convincing everyone that data is inherently values. Allowing tech
| companies to sell not only their data, that is often of
| questionable actual value, but the infrastructure to use this
| data, and sell training in the skills necessary to work with big
| data.
|
| The "data economy" is just advertising turned in on itself.
| Anyone who works with data knows deep down that all of this is a
| farce, but I think we still have a bit of time before all of this
| hits the fan, so enjoy the ride.
| dk775 wrote:
| Damn sometime I think as an analyst in LE that the obsession
| with data while crime skyrockets is stupid. I also vehemently
| hate advertising. Never thought that the whole time I pivoted
| from public policy > stats > data as a result of advertising's
| influence. Makes me sick, time to crawl back towards stats and
| get out of this world.
| networkid wrote:
| "Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize
| us", Really? Maybe it's all your politicians does?
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Ban ad targeting first and suddenly it won't be economical to
| store such data.
| Aunche wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work at a company that collects user data.
|
| The author is fearmongering big tech because she envies all the
| money they are making. Facebook does not sell user data, and I'm
| pretty sure the author knows this but intentionally perpetuates
| this misconception anyways. Facebook would collect about as much
| user data regardless of whether they used it for targeted
| advertising.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Just have it so that any time a person or company's data is sold
| or leased, the company doing the selling must mail (via physical
| correspondence) the person or company with a notification of what
| data was sent and why.
|
| People will get tired of the junk mail and companies will lose
| money trying to peddle data.
| nostrademons wrote:
| People should own the data about them, and should be free to rent
| or trade usage of it to companies in exchange for money or
| services. Actual ownership should continue to rest with the
| person, however, who can revoke access the same way that a
| landlord can evict tenants or a worker can quit.
|
| The biggest barrier to this has been that lots of valuable data
| (eg. Facebook's social graph, Android contact data) is data about
| _relationships_ between people, not the people themselves, and so
| would logically have multiple owners. But that 's not really a
| big barrier with modern technology: the crypto world solved
| multi-person ownership with multisig wallets several years ago.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| Simply assigning a price to an activity doesn't solve the
| ethical and moral issues that can arise from that activity.
|
| Having a price for something doesn't exactly help victims of
| human trafficking (whether the illegal organ trade,
| prostitution or anything else). What can help those victims is
| regulation and aggressive criminal prosecution of anyone who
| seeks to gain from the suffering of others.
|
| Unless people actually have a realistic and practical way of
| "revoking access" to their data which results in serious
| penalties for companies which continue to use said data
| (including company-destroying or even criminal penalties for
| senior managers/benefactors) then the negative-externalities of
| data-collection won't ever really be curtailed.
| nostrademons wrote:
| The difference that ownership would give is _consent_.
| Western liberal democracies are based on the idea that you
| can do what you want as long as all parties agree to it.
|
| I willingly give my personal information over to a variety of
| firms knowing what they do with it, because I value the
| services I receive more. It's not your place to say whether
| that's okay or not, because it doesn't affect you.
|
| Human trafficking + consent = immigration. Organ trade +
| consent = organ donation. Prostitution between consenting
| adults arguably should be legal anyway, and already is in
| many places in Europe.
|
| And yes, there should be a practical way to revoke access to
| data. There are ways to accomplish this technologically (eg.
| capability-based security keeps the data within your
| possession and you export the particular query that an
| outside firm would use; federated learning lets them train
| machine-learning models on the data without the data ever
| leaving your possession). We just don't use them yet, for the
| most part.
| websites3434 wrote:
| The people who are OK with this kind of thing -- "But nothing bad
| has ever happened to anyone IRL" -- are obviously not part of a
| minority ethnic/religious/sexual orientation/gender group. This
| kind of technology is already used to do harm in China. Those of
| us in those groups don't have the luxury of "waiting to see if
| the nightmare becomes real" because of some of us would be in the
| crosshairs, not potential bystanders.
| slim wrote:
| In Palestine too
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldier...
| jeffrogers wrote:
| "They generate profits by compiling a profile of you from your
| data trail and then selling it to the highest bidder"
|
| Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread
| use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but
| are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into
| a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like
| data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data
| correction... and when to provide some sort rehabilitation
| method, people will eventually become just a collection of their
| mistakes and forced into one bucket or another.
|
| We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set
| of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be
| collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used
| for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.
| infogulch wrote:
| Somehow organizations get an immense amount of value out of
| tracking everything you do, say, think, and buy; everywhere you
| go; and everyone you meet. Two questions:
|
| 1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent?
| (Hint: they shouldn't.)
|
| 2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's
| gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should
| just do it my damn self and actually get something out of it.
| It's like we need an open source community for personal data
| collection, aggregation, and analysis.
| ianai wrote:
| Exactly, there's a dollar value to you that they're not paying
| you. You'd need a "property right" over it. (You are your own
| "property" already anyway.)
| amelius wrote:
| Too late. You already clicked "I agree" on that EULA.
| ianai wrote:
| Since the civil war, you can't sign ownership of yourself
| over to another. The ownership of data that intensive seems
| the same thing.
| amelius wrote:
| Ownership is the wrong word, since you will always own
| your data. The problem is others claiming to own it too.
| lukifer wrote:
| This is a fundamental, and perhaps insoluble, problem
| with the moral principle of liberty and self-ownership:
| to what extent should you be permitted to voluntarily
| limit, surrender, or exchange that ownership?
|
| One can certainly make a case that even limited-scope
| non-compete clauses in employment contracts are an
| affront to human dignity; on the other extreme, there are
| those who would claim that freedom necessarily includes
| the "right" to sell one's self into indefinite servitude.
| Where do we draw the line? I don't see an intrinsic
| "bright line" or Schelling Focus on the question. What is
| the "statute of limitations" on the Present Self being
| constrained by the choices of the Past Self (at least, in
| the context of contract enforcement)?
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| > Where do we draw the line?
|
| I can't claim to have a complete answer to that question,
| but it seems that every time that the line is drawn too
| far towards the direction of slavery (i.e. away from
| individual liberty) there is a substantial power-
| imbalance.
|
| That seems to suggest that any situation where there is a
| large power (information, monetary, etc.) asymmetry
| between two parties will lead to one side being heavily
| disadvantaged, almost certainly due to the intentional
| structure of that arrangement.
|
| If true, that would suggest that any circumstance where
| there could be a large power imbalance between parties
| must be carefully moderated and that limiting "individual
| freedom" by not allowing people to sign away their rights
| in a way that mostly benefits someone else could be a
| reasonable way of approaching this problem.
|
| Hopefully that made sense!
| infogulch wrote:
| I think the root problem is the indirect nature of that
| dollar value. It's not _concrete_ / _obvious_ enough for
| normal people to understand it. Seems to be a sales /
| marketing problem as much as a technical one.
| ianai wrote:
| And I could imagine a similar line of reasoning being
| applied for the value of the land native Americans "sold"
| to the colonists - when they themselves didn't have a
| conception of such ownership before or after that
| encounter.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think many people find lots of value in search, free email,
| Android, and other services dependent on this model. The
| argument that you're not getting anything out of it rings
| false.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I don't think so. It is not the data itself that has value. It
| is a game of information asymmetry and that corporations can
| make you desire things you wouldn't desire without that
| interaction. They then convert a fraction of that desire into
| money flowing from you to them that you otherwise would have
| kept.
|
| Maybe I am old school or too naive, but I don't see how I would
| make a personal margin with my own data.
| lanstin wrote:
| If you had a clear list of "these sort of news items/OC from
| friends makes me more susceptible to being convinced by
| questionable ideas/donate money/stay up at night." then you
| could perhaps take steps to preserve your ability to stay
| more rational, more the way you want yourself to be and less
| easy to manipulate by ads/partisans/etc.
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| That sounds like it would be very useful, but doesn't
| really have a (monetary) "value" in the sense that most
| people use when talking about sharing the profits of the
| Data Economy.
|
| It'd be much more interesting to see that sort of data
| sharing/access occurring than simply saying that people are
| entitled to some percentage of the profit that was
| "generated using their data" (which would be highly
| susceptible to creative accounting).
|
| Preserving the privacy of individuals would still be
| challenging though.
| tangjurine wrote:
| Let's say on average you need to see one hundred ads before
| you see something you want to buy. Now if you had
| personalized ads, maybe on average you need to see ten ads
| before you want to buy something.
|
| If you are already looking through a bunch of ads for the
| sole purpose of trying to buy something, then your personal
| data is valuable to you because it saves you time. But that's
| definitely not the situation with most big tech products.
| tootie wrote:
| Google search being free is an absolute enormous amount of
| value. How much would you pay for a subscription to Google if
| it weren't free?
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Maybe a decade ago. Now using Google is an exercise of
| filtering out Amazon affiliate blogspam clogging the first
| several pages of results.
|
| "Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased
| towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers"
| -Larry and Sergey in 1998
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I don't know, I still would prefer the way it is now to a
| paid service
| judge2020 wrote:
| This has been fulfilled in full with YouTube and how
| creators fear demonetization.
| creato wrote:
| I don't think that's the same thing. If you are a youtube
| creator and you want your videos to be monetized, you
| need advertisers to want to advertise on your content. As
| amply demonstrated by many youtube creators, you are free
| to go out and land your own sponsorship deals, and then
| you don't need to worry about demonetization.
| whatever1 wrote:
| You are getting free searches, email, messaging, photo storage
| etc
| awillen wrote:
| I don't get why this is so easily glossed over all the
| time... yeah, absolutely you should be able to control your
| data and know how it's being used. You should be able to opt
| out of unnecessary data collection. But the idea that you're
| not getting compensated for your data just isn't true - you
| get some really amazing tools without paying a dime for them.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I get free searches from DuckDuckGo without paying with my
| personal information. It is absolutely possible to provide
| free services, supported by ads, while collecting little to
| no personal information.
| briffle wrote:
| I would pay a fee to some sites to keep using their service,
| without tracking/advertising. But they don't offer it as an
| option.
| yifanl wrote:
| The fee you pay would almost certainly be less than the
| value they can extract from your metadata (especially since
| it can only grow more valuable as time passes)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| There are open source map applications, paid email services
| (I use one), private-cloud office stacks like NextCloud.
|
| You could, but you don't.
| whatever1 wrote:
| There are paid options for example for email, but still
| people prefer the free options. Market has spoken. People
| just don't care about being tracked, specially if they get
| free goodies.
|
| As an anecdote: I am the only one in my extended family who
| does not use the car insurance tracker. Everyone is calling
| me out on why I dont get the "free" discount.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "People just don't care"
|
| People are being massively lied to about what is veing
| tracked and what is being done with that info.
|
| Or maybe these services are a monopoly, where they could
| start eating babies and not loose their audience anyway
|
| The best is when a service is paid and it _still_ traks
| you, like amazon
| toss1 wrote:
| I'm with you
|
| I pay for email services (and make some use of gmail for
| junk/transactions).
|
| I also would never use one of the insurance trackers.
| They literally have zero clue of what they are doing and
| interpret things backwards. E.g., they interpret higher
| g-forces as bad driving. Yet, as someone who has been
| through countless high-performance driving and race
| schools, had racing lisenses, and won multiple racing
| championships, I can tell you that what high-performance
| driving, whether racing or getting out of emergencies, is
| about wringing out of the vehicle, suspenseion and tires,
| every last bit of grip to maximally accelerate, brake,
| and/or turn. Of course, I'm usually very smooth and low-g
| on public roads, but if I do something like maneuver
| around an animal in the road, they'd see a high-G
| maneuver and charge me for bad driving, when in fact, I
| probably saved them from a claim.
|
| It is a lovely concept, but the institutional idiocy
| really bothers me.
| [deleted]
| asiachick wrote:
| You're getting their service. You want to use Facebook to talk
| to your family and keep up with your friends. You pay them in
| info, they pay you with the service you're using. Same with
| every other site, vox, theverge, slashdot, etc...
|
| Sure there are a few companies you pay that also collect your
| data and I wish they didn't but even then they'd raise the
| price (maybe willing to pay more) if they didn't subside the
| service via your info
| mym1990 wrote:
| Not sure why the above got downvoted, it seems to echo the
| other sentiments.
|
| As a developer I have a hard time imagining building an
| application that doesn't use data to provide a higher level
| of experience in some way. Of course there is a very long
| rabbit hole on how data collected to create a novel
| experience then gets used in other ways to provide revenue.
|
| We just live in a world where applications are able to hide
| almost everything that is happening behind the scenes from
| the user, and advertising drives the majority of free
| applications, and this opens a gateway to major abuse...
| teucris wrote:
| The response to expect with #2 is that you get paid back in the
| form of fast search results, map directions, live
| communications, personalized news feeds, targeted
| advertisements, etc.
|
| Pay no attention to the fact that you're not getting versions
| of these things that maximize your benefit either...
| emodendroket wrote:
| It wasn't that long ago that you'd buy a GPS unit for a few
| hundred dollars and updating the maps would be another $100+.
| infogulch wrote:
| And then there's https://www.openstreetmap.org which is
| arguably better than both.
| paxys wrote:
| 1. They are getting your consent
|
| 2. They are giving you value (via free services)
| neolog wrote:
| What do you think consent means?
| paxys wrote:
| "If you use Facebook we will collect and sell all your
| data"
|
| "Okay, cool"
| fuckyouriotshit wrote:
| "If you don't use Facebook we will still collect[1] and
| sell all the data about you we can"
|
| "But I never agreed to that."
|
| "Too bad."
|
| Under what circumstances would you describe that as
| consensual?
|
| And that's not even getting into the concept of
| _informed_ consent; something that they clearly don't
| have given the amount of user anger that gets directed at
| Facebook every time when a new leak/breach/data
| collection method is revealed.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5921092 In
| addition to the fact that they collect information about
| people who don't join Facebook (and agree to the ToS) by
| virtue of the information that others (often unwittingly)
| submit to Facebook, like group photos, mobile phone
| address books, etc.
| hvocode wrote:
| I'm all for significantly limiting the "data economy", but I
| suspect too many people have become too used to getting free
| stuff. I see this all over the place - there are products and
| services that are quite expensive to build and provide, but
| they're free because people (often unwittingly) exchange data
| about themselves in place of the actual cost. If you still want
| those products/services without the data industry supporting it,
| someone will have to pay for them. I think lots of people opposed
| to the data economy will become less opposed when faced with
| actually paying for stuff it supports.
|
| I learned this the hard way trying to sell something that
| competed with free tools from Facebook/Google/[other giant data
| monetizing companies]. Our tool was/is competitive, but we aren't
| in the business of data harvesting or advertising - so, the
| engineering cost (many years of effort) would have to be paid
| from actually selling the product. The response? People want the
| free ones, and could really care less how the engineers that
| built it were paid as long as THEY (the consumer of the tool) got
| it for free.
|
| As long as the "someone else will pay for X so I can have it for
| free" attitude is acceptable and widespread, we're likely stuck
| with a pervasive and deep data economy.
| rhacker wrote:
| We need to go back to the TV model. I mean we sold things back in
| 1995 right?
|
| You go to a website about babies, you get baby ads.
|
| You go to a website about electrified fences, you get ads for
| trucks, tractors, backhoe rentals (even in your area because of
| your IP address - but that's it)
|
| It's damn near equivalent to local / cable TV.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| The direct mail advertising industry was thriving in 1995. You
| could buy datasets of people by income, car ownership, shopping
| habits, etc even easier than you can now.
| brokencode wrote:
| Does anybody know if targeted ads based on tracking even work?
| Are they worth all the extra cost and complexity compared to
| traditional ads? It doesn't seem like it. Half the time I see a
| super-targeted ad, it's for a product I already purchased.
|
| Also, what ever happened to showing ads to people who aren't
| already interested in your product to expand your brand and
| maybe bring in new customers? The current ad model feels
| overfitted to me.
| questionableans wrote:
| It helps with being able to measure whether you're
| advertising to the right people. Traditional mass media
| advertising made a lot of money off of showing ads to
| completely irrelevant people. Targeted advertising makes even
| more money off of showing ads to mostly irrelevant people.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| Yes, yes they do work. That's why it's a billion dollar
| industry. It allows industries to micro-target specific ads
| for communities and speak to them directly. It gives you more
| ability to expand your brand to new customers, not less, as
| it allows to you to specifically target niche groups who
| previously had no interest in you. It's important to get a
| sense of the extreme level of refinement that firms have
| access to through data-driven marketing. Want to design a
| marketing campaign for dog-owning, outdoorsy lesbians? Subaru
| launched an ad campaign in the 90s using subtle coding in
| their wide-net ads. Now companies can do that much more
| effectively by directly targeting those communities.
|
| As for the common complaint that you always see ads for
| products you already purchased, that's actually a very good
| time to make an impression. What are the odds that you are
| thinking about buying a new dishwasher at any given moment?
| Probably next to 0. You probably would completely ignore any
| dishwasher ad you saw. Now imagine you just replaced your
| dishwasher with a new one. You probably noticed that
| dishwasher ad now. You might have even clicked on it to see
| if you got a good deal on it. You probably care more right
| now about dishwasher specs than you ever have in your life up
| to this point. Maybe there's a better deal out there. This is
| the perfect time to send you more dishwasher ads.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| The last point is wrong: once I have purchased the
| dishwasher i care _less_ about a dishwasher at any previous
| point, because I am not most likely to have a functional
| dishwasher and even if yours is better I am not going to
| buy one more.
|
| If marketers would only get this they would make so much
| more money, and I would get better ads for more relevant
| products. Instead I get ads that target me because I am in
| AGE_RANGE and live in country, or ads for scam products.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >once I have purchased the dishwasher i care _less_ about
| a dishwasher [than] at any previous point //
|
| Ever recommended something to a friend/relative, or
| bought a second one of something that works/fits/performs
| well? Or even ever thought you should. I've definitely
| bought a pair of trainers (sneakers) and then thought, oh
| I should have bought another pair. If the shop had sent
| me an email, "get a second pair postage free" a few weeks
| later then they'd probably have made a sale.
|
| I know people who have second homes definitely would re-
| buy white-goods, for example.
| ben509 wrote:
| > because I am ... most likely to have a functional
| dishwasher and even if yours is better I am not going to
| buy one more.
|
| Break the population into groups:
|
| 1. Have a working dishwasher / don't need one
|
| 2. Old dishwasher is failing, looking for a new one
|
| 3. Just bought a new dishwasher, it works great
|
| 4. Just bought a new dishwasher, going to return it
|
| I suspect group 4 is who they're targeting.
| brokencode wrote:
| Maybe for the consumer showing them more dishwasher
| information is helpful, but how could it be better for the
| company paying for the ad? The chances of somebody going
| through all the work of buying and installing another new
| dishwasher seems nonexistent at that point.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I don't know that straightforward data on this will ever be
| forthcoming. And we can produce theoretical arguments every
| which way, not entirely unlike how classical philosophers
| were able to prove, through reason alone, that objects in
| nature tended to only travel in perfect circles and straight
| lines, and never shapes like ellipses and parabolae, and
| probably produce about the same volume of useful
| epistemological output in the process.
|
| I'd think that the more interesting thing would be to try and
| find some proxies we can use as an ersatz empirical test. For
| example, what about ad prices? If personalization based on
| tracking really does work better than other forms of ad
| targeting, then one would expect that that difference would
| yield a noteworthy difference in ad prices.
|
| In short: If it really works so well, then you'd expect
| personally targeted ads to cost significantly more per
| impression than ads that use content-based targeting. And I'd
| assume that that information is reasonably public.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Absolutely. A vegetarian/vegan restaurant being able to
| advertise exclusively to those people is one great example.
| In that example you're a new customer, but you've shown
| interest in similar products so you're much more likely of a
| customer(and better spend of advertising) than advertising to
| somebody on a carnivore diet.
| peacelilly wrote:
| Nowadays cable TV targets ads too. If your diabetic grandma
| connects to your cable provided wifi router, you will get ads
| for glucose monitors and insulin pumps. Targeted advertising
| should be illegal.
| ivan888 wrote:
| We need something like the Nutrition Facts label for digital
| consent: government mandated, consistent format, easy to scan.
| Even better if it was an interactive form to allow you to
| selectively consent to specific options
| pascalxus wrote:
| And yet, with all this information about me, they still struggle
| to come up with even the slightest big of relevant advertising.
| 99.9% of the products I see advertised to me are either
| completely irrelevant to me or products I down right hate: and I
| never buy them. If they do have all the information the article
| claims, it just doesn't seem like they're able to use it in an
| effective manner. So what's the harm?
|
| the key here, is, just don't buy products you don't want or don't
| need. as long as you do that, you'll be fine. I have yet to meet
| a single Ad that forced me to buy a product I didn't really want
| or need. And, just don't let the ads manipulate you.
| holoduke wrote:
| Wasnt here on hn someone who created a bot able to randomly like
| messages on FB, search for nonsense on Google, post random tweets
| on twitter etc, spoofs GPS etc. Would love to use something like
| that
| version_five wrote:
| What these kinds of articles (that basically just say how much of
| our data is being collected, and assert that it's bad) miss is
| the whole "attention economy" side of the equation, which I
| believe is more detrimental.
|
| Data is concretely used to maximize engagement, outrage,
| polarization, etc. in order to get more attention, which is at a
| root of a lot of the public discourse challenges we have these
| days. It would be much more benign if tracking was really just
| about trying to see what I am most likely to buy and target that
| to me.
| n0on3 wrote:
| This is the point I feel most as well. I think this trend of
| burning attention is both destructive in ways and depth we
| don't completely understand yet - possibly making unrecoverable
| damage to our society on ridiculously large scale - and a blunt
| exploitation of the bias to consider attention as an infinite
| resource / not a real cost.
|
| Personally I dislike also the "tracking to show me what I'm
| most likely to buy" but this itself (assuming such thing could
| exist in a vacuum, which seems unrealistic to me) has an
| inherently limited impact.
| croes wrote:
| Still a bad thing. Most likely to buy neither means you need it
| nor you really can afford it. It's still just exploitation for
| profit.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| We can't really stop the Data Economy. If we're bleeding data all
| over the place then we can only maintain good habits of data
| hygiene. But then we know that will never be perfect. Some
| fingerprints will always remain, some breadcrumbs will always be
| hoovered up by the bots.
|
| I use adblockers and vpns and other such things but then I have
| accounts with facebooks and whatsapps. Could I camouflage my
| 'scent' with perfume? What's more - could I feed misleading data
| in? I really wouldn't mind being a VIP in the eyes of these
| shitty algorithms.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Isn't the data economy a sign of the end of the economical ladder
| ? we have nothing new to sell ..
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