Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish he had an RSS feed.
http://olifro.st/feed.xml
Cheers!
I put all my personal data on eBay
51–60 of 148 posts
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time someone on FB shares a picture with other people in it they are doing just that.
TIL when I tag a friend on Facebook I'm also tagging their political beliefs, work history, favorite food, and venereal disease status.
> So their selling other people's data too?
I was answering that particular question. Either you didn't get it or you pretended to not get it, hard to tell the difference from here.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#53Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you , a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
> what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?
Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.
Others might have their own reasons
> These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want.
Want, but might not want at all cost. If enough users do not want to pay the asking price, some of these companies might revisit their race to the bottom approach. Some of them existed and were profitable before tracking become big and pervasive.
> Providing those services is not free
No, but being profitable is not a concern that overrides everything else. Maybe for the company it is, but a society has every right to say, "You can be as profitable as you want within these confines."
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#54Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you , a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
Just one example: Imagine a group of people where you are one of the few people without a Facebook account. Then there is some group pressure to push you into becoming a Facebook user and since they don't offer a paid service, you either have to convince a lot of people to use some other medium, sell your personal information or accept missing a lot of communication.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#55I just finished reading Radical Markets ( http://a.co/7cNafHl ) and it's funny to see this HN story because the last chapter was about "data labor" where the authors claim that we're all working for FB/GOOG/etc to generate data to train the AIs that makes profit for these companies. And that it's time for "data workers of the world to unite" into a "data labor movement" so we can get paid for our work (I found it kin…
We do not need a "Radical Market" to realize the fact that individual personal data doesn't make so much of a value. Advertisers don't go hunting after individuals. That's advertising-101. Or rather internet-101. The whole point of OP is not to make money off of his personal data. Its to create awareness.
You base all of your argument on single unit value being low.
What if there are a billion such listings on eBay?
> This assumes that a single unit of data (say a person's personal data as in the OP) is worth something on it's own.
This is your assumption about other's assumption. Not true.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#56Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you , a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
It's not. I personally think it's great that companies can make money out of it, while in turn i get the service for free.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#57Context: this fellow (Oli Frost) is something of a social media satirist, having previously built LifeFaker ( http://lifefaker.com/ , a place to buy your way to Instagram fame), and Flopstarter ( http://flopstarter.com/ , a Kickstarter clone for terrible ideas). I found the latest idea pretty funny - actually trying to monetize your data instead of letting companies do it for you is kind of a cute turnabout. In any c…
> instead of letting companies do it for you
Yay, it's 1999, and disintermediation is the word.
P.S. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disintermediat...
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#58Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you , a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
You are assuming that I am using Facebook. I am not. They have a shadow profile on me anyway, together with my cellphone number and lots of private information, because my friends uploaded it to get access to Facebook Messenger & WhatsApp.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#59Absolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you , a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
For one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you. Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blo…
> it pigeonholes your internet experience.
it seems like your issue is more with the inefficiency of the various algorithms rather than the use of data per se. And you re right, e.g. right now my supposedly AI youtube is full of the same type of videos.
> seems unfair they don't get a cut
This may ring true on the surface, but people always make money out of other people, by definition. Compensation would not work, it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund. One issue however is that users in this case do not have a mechanism to affect the price personalized ads so in total it seems unfair.
> and Nazi Germany,
I think you mean cold war germany. in any case it is interesting how the latest EU law completely ignores that aspect of privacy.
> a federal agent followed you a
Good point, being tracked does feel like you re being followed by an annoying salesperson. This IMHO is more annoying than the gathering of private data takes place on the internet. Privacy is not the default mode of life, in fact there are few places where one goes to when he wants to be private. Most of life involves interaction with other people and nonprivacy. One could even claim that this kind of privacy is not violated with things like ad tracking, as it happens behind screens, in safety and with relative control from the user. Of course there need to be limits to when and where this information can be gathered.
Re: I put all my personal data on eBay
#60Jaron Lainer - Who Owns the Future is a great read on the topic of owning and monetising ones data.