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I put all my personal data on eBay

olifro.st

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Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#111

Post by donatj »

sbhn wrote: post #107
irregular-john wrote: post #37

Absolutely 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!"

Facebook and google sell your attention and your clicks. They will sometimes make 100 dollars a click depending on the content of the ad and how targeted it was to your profile. For example, type car insurance into google, click the top advertisement. Ka’ching, that was 100 dollars transferred from one adwords account into Google’s. Your simple click, and the data associated with it, is someone else’s money.

And why is that a problem perse?

Your search query may have just saved you more than that on car insurance alone. I've gotten arguably many many thousands of dollars of value from Google in my life.

I think you're simply not considering the immense value good internet search adds to life.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#112

Post by intended »

hk__2 wrote: post #82
kelnos wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is peer pressure and has nothing to do with the way Facebook monetize its product. Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product. They know that human connections aren't fungible, so they can gain adoption through local monopolies.

> Sure it does. Facebook relies on the concept of peer pressure and people's desire for a sense of belonging to continue to monetize its product. Every single social network relies on this concept; the way it’s monetized is independant of that.

Sorry I kind of missed the independence part - in the main, no social network has value unless it has most of the target audience on the network.

So monetization results are entirely dependent on having those people subscribed.

Thus all the emphasis on techniques to get people hooked/attracted/addicted etc.

That’s sort of an operating cost/basic imperative to the social network.

So when you say it’s independent , what do you mean?

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#113

Post by intended »

donatj wrote: post #111
sbhn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook and google sell your attention and your clicks. They will sometimes make 100 dollars a click depending on the content of the ad and how targeted it was to your profile. For example, type car insurance into google, click the top advertisement. Ka’ching, that was 100 dollars transferred from one adwords account into Google’s. Your simple click, and the data associated with it, is someone else’s money.

And why is that a problem perse? Your search query may have just saved you more than that on car insurance alone. I've gotten arguably many many thousands of dollars of value from Google in my life. I think you're simply not considering the immense value good internet search adds to life.

It’s not being excluded - the issues is the various secondary effects. Not to mention the honeymoon period is over and antagonists have figured out how to use this information to direct political power in ways institutions are unable to adapt to.

These two aspects are the marginal change that people are focused on now. (From my perspective).

That’s why, imo, there’s no mention of how valuable search is, same way there’s no mention of how useful browsers are.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#114

Post by intended »

komali2 wrote: post #102
craigsmansion wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. But what does this mean functionally? I d…

The idea of the market itself is based on things like that: there’s no reason to value a shiny yellow metal, but we do.

Practically, this is centralization of information and it’s sale which is enabling people to target and herd ideas and behaviors in ways we do not have responses to.

Not that this is very new as a phenomenon! But the tools available today allow this to be mechanized.

So where artisanal bakers would have to make campaigns and do all of the data gathering and follow up work on their own, we’ve now made factories to do this.

Since essentially we are talking about collective concepts, consent and beliefs being influenced in an automated manner, this is “different” than what has come before.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#115

Post by intended »

white-flame wrote: post #46
manigandham wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching This is very subjective. You cannot speak for everyone, and meanwhile Youtube generates petabytes of analytics every day showing what people really like, down to each individual.

My specific, stated metric was pigeonholing. You receive less information online when these systems are employed, ie more repetition in the same space. Youtube optimizes for maximizing the viewing time across the most common types of viewing associations, namely people watching for entertainment, not looking for information. If you ever look for information in a new topic, you tend to be signposted back towards your…

This is basically the obesity/fast food scenario, but just for ideas. YouTube Facebook etc being the new McDonalds.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#116

Post by snackman »

_csoz wrote: post #59
white-flame wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

> it would be like buying a pair of shoes and then expecting to get a partial refund

I'd think of it more like treating any consumer of a product as an investor at the same time

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#117

Post by majewsky »

Mononokay wrote: post #103
sytelus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a satire. I can easily see a service where people can simple upload their FB data and the service bundles it up in to groups of 10,000 for sell, takes 30% cut and distributes rest of the proceeds. There are tons of folks who have most of their posts public on FB would be willing to do this. There are companies who wants to model users, train/test algorithms would be willing to pay for it.

It's...still satire.

Poe's law applies.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#118

Post by ino »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #110
rb808 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol this is great http://flopstarter.com/1dprinter/

If you could print very light lines and the costs were very low, I'd be interested. As someone who works a lot with handwritten formulas and pencil & paper sketches, I'm constantly annoyed by how strongly lines and squares are printed on paper. It's distracting and there is no need for it.

Print in lighter shades of grey.

Re: I put all my personal data on eBay

#120

Post by olalonde »

irregular-john wrote: post #37

Absolutely 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, it's a loud minority that's especially vocal on HN. Mostly people who have read 1984 too many times or have lived in a totalitarian state and worry about the slippery slope.
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