31–40 of 175 posts
Seems like an is ought question that is long settled: look at the credit reporting agencies. We may be doing impressive new things and figuring out how to learn a lot more about people, but who owns data on a person is a dead and buried question.
Not dead and buried in Europe with GDPR coming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the value of my data alone probably is worth less than a dollar Calculating the value of your data is pretty easy actually. Just take the market cap of the company divided by users to get an average. Google is at about $700B with may ~2B global users, so global average is more like $350/user. The value of US users is probably 10X less developed parts of world (based on ad rates) so US users are worth more like…
>Calculating the value of your data is pretty easy actually. No it's not. You're mixing up the value of the data with the value of your attention. The world has made a killing off of advertising long before personalization came about so saying it's all due to personalization is a bit silly imho.
The thing is, I don't actually have my data. Perhaps if I collected it and stored it, perhaps put it behind an accessible API and supplied Google et al with an API key to access it I might have a case for charging them for it.
The remedy, of course, is to establish intrinsic properties rights over our own data. No different than copyrights.
Maybe we need a new catchphrase.
I propose bodyrights. It captures the notions of self, privacy, identity, and sovereignty all in one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't free. You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits. And because the stock market machine demands greater and greater profits they need larger stronger monopolies to generate those obscene profits.
It's not like advertising didn't exist before the internet so blaming the tech giants solely for it's impact on society seems odd. They didn't create advertising, they simply took away advertising money from other mediums.
The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them. Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate…
Remember, they're showing us ads in addition to collecting volumes of information on us, so we're paying in two ways.
And frankly I don't mind the ads, by principle, but I do mind that a few companies are able to use them to track us nearly everywhere online without allowing me to review what they're collecting and who is collecting it.
Here in the US, we cried tyranny when our security agencies were collecting metadata to monitor threats. And then we gave everything we had to Facebook and Google and didn't bat an eye as they sold us to anyone who pays.
Seems like an is ought question that is long settled: look at the credit reporting agencies. We may be doing impressive new things and figuring out how to learn a lot more about people, but who owns data on a person is a dead and buried question.
USA's credit reporting agencies are a bight on humanity. All the power with none of the accountability, ambiguous rules ruthlessly enforced, profiting from other people's misfortune.
(1) Google, Facebook and the like do have a cost, just that it's data instead of money. The fact that we're one step removed from money obscures the true cost associated with the services. And when you combine that with the fact that the services themselves obscure what data they're collecting/have, there's no way for an end consumer to know if they're getting a 'good deal' since they have no idea what they're paying. A fix to this would be radical forced transparency - every consumer should be able to find out what data any company has on them - both collected and bought (and bought from whom for how much.)
(2) Data is too large a competitive advantage in certain industries. It seems similar to me to utilities. Barring local law I could try and start up a new water company and displace the incumbent but it would never work - the huge fixed costs make the industry prone to natural monopolization. Same here except with data. There are absolutely ginormous costs associated with collecting user data that could rival Google's or Facebook's (if it's even possible). You could start a company to try to beat Google but you'll never get the data to make it good enough to compete and since you're not good enough to compete you'll never get the data. The free market here has done it's work - it's generated something new and useful and beneficial to society, now we should nationalize it so that it stays that way.
The media portrayal of the tech world would be more impactful if it weren't so hyperbolic, dramatized, and skewed. There are myriad valid complaints about the tech world, but Facebook paying you for you posting your photos is not one of them. Facebook is free. Google search is free. 15gb of gmail/google drive is free. You get those free, truly amazing services for nothing because the companies found ways to generate…
They aren't free. You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits. And because the stock market machine demands greater and greater profits they need larger stronger monopolies to generate those obscene profits.
> You pay for them in high prices for good and services. Those companies pay advertising which increase prices plus their tech size profits.
I don't think this is falsifiable. It sounds sort of feasible in the abstract, but how can we empirically measure that effect? As it stands, I could just as easily respond that, no, these companies make prices more efficient, because their advertising methodologies are more effective so companies spend less on their platforms than they would for equivalent ad campaigns elsewhere. Then we'd have to figure out how to investigate whether modern companies advertise more due to growth of the market, or because they have to due to catch up with everyone else using the tech advertising platforms. Narrowing down the answer, if there is one, would be nontrivial. Then I could also say that advertising makes tech services cheaper, because Facebook and Google earn more from user data than they would if they forced everyone to pay $20/month.
Which of us is right? We can't really say, it's effectively an opinion because, even if technically falsifiable, these claims are far from being empirically demonstrable.
This wouldn't be such an issue if they couldn't see the data on which they are computing (and individual data wouldn't be exposed in data breaches either). But I'm not sure if Google even cares too much about doing that (I know they've experimented with this, but nothing on a scale that matters), and Facebook certainly doesn't. Apple seems to be the only one that does somewhat with its differential privacy approach.…
It's basically this. Imagine I have two data sets that are identical, except one has your specific data and the other doesn't. It's possible in some circumstances to infer information about you by asking for things like averages on the datasets. Differential privacy is a method for defeating attacks that rely on that type of "leakage" of information. It assures that if two datasets are close enough, queries on those datasets will not yield significant information about their differences (i.e., the presence or absence of one particular data point won't be detectable).
It's all about how queries of the data perform, and not at all about the data itself.