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How to fight the surveillance economy

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Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#51

Post by AndrewKemendo »

confounded wrote: post #37
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case it should be regulation on the Ad industry, not necessarily regulation of data - because that's not getting at the core incentives. The data gathering is a symptom of the Ad market. If you don't address the Ad market incentives, they will simply find another vector to getting to you. Noam Chomsky has been very loud about this for a long time, well before data gathering was a thing. So it's a long term p…

The problem here is defining what is and is not an ad. Do I want my communications, browsing, purchase and location history to be used to rank me for job applications? To be used to decide which news stories I see? Which products are the top when I search for something generic? For some the answer is yes, for many it is no. The only way to square this is to restore consent and data decision-rights to users, and to di…

This seems to be a common solution. I don't think it's realistic and is entirely too optimistic about the information processing capacity of individuals in society at large.

At the end of the day it's too much information for people to understand, handle and sift through to be a tractable solution.

What would end up happening is basically what we have now, consent and data decision-rights end up being proxied by third party organizations, and they attempt to segment the market and find defaults. It would just come right back around to what we have, only with different technology.

Instead, you could legislate advertising to be very restrictive. I think the less systems of paid influence that exist in the world the better, so I wouldn't cry for the demise of the advertising industry.

The tech industry needs to find a new revenue source anyway, might as well just go ahead and force the issue.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#53

Post by chillacy »

amelius wrote: post #12
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

> The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. This is sad because advertising is a poor monetization scheme. For instance, let's say you make $0.10 per user through ads. Now let's say you want to increase the price to $2.00 per user. Then oops, you can't, because ads don't allow you to make that much for any given user. So depending on your pr…

If you just divide total ad revenue by number of users you’ll find that users are worth on average tens of dollars per year to google or Facebook. For heavy users you might be worth hundreds or thousands.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#54

Post by d1zzy »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

I generally agree with the reasons why we have arrived at what we have now but I'd like to point out that the alternatives do not seem _better_ necessarily, or at least not clearly so for most people.

Current business model: provide "free" online services that are payed for by providing targeted advertising which relies on collection of data about users and building interest models. Advantage: almost 0 barrier of entry for users (all they need is a compatible browser and good enough network). We can probably conclude that most people like such an advantage. The main disadvantage is all the data collection/aggregation, it's unclear how the large population feels about this (in our tech bubble it's easy to think everyone feels strongly against it).

Alternative proposal: pay some subscription somewhere to get access to the online services. Advantage: no need for ads and behavior tracking. Disadvantage: much larger barrier of entry. Now you need a credit card or some other online payment mechanism, your real name/address/zip code will be associated with the payment mechanism, somewhere there are systems/computers that will have enough information to associate your real identity with all the online services you have used (there are technical means to anonymize this association but I don't see political will to force involved companies to do such things, think what will happen in such a situation with something like a Equifax data breach).

The larger access barrier for the alternative isn't just "convenience", think about younger people or people from all over the world in different economic and political contexts where having access to some sort of electronic payment is hard or impossible when right now all they need is a browser and Internet (the latter could of course also be an issue for many people but I'd argue is a much lower entry barrier than having access to a universally recognized online payment mechanism).

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#56

Post by michaelchisari »

d1zzy wrote: post #54
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

I generally agree with the reasons why we have arrived at what we have now but I'd like to point out that the alternatives do not seem _better_ necessarily, or at least not clearly so for most people. Current business model: provide "free" online services that are payed for by providing targeted advertising which relies on collection of data about users and building interest models. Advantage: almost 0 barrier of ent…

Once we can crack the micropayment nut, it opens a whole new world of ad-free low-cost subscriptions. I'd much rather pay $0.50 a month for a social network that has no interest in my data than deal with ads or data tracking.

But that needs to be both effortless for me as a user, and require very little in the way of processing fees. Both of which are not possibilities right now.

Cheap is better than free has always been my motto. Cheap is sustainable, does not require dark patterns for monetization and is transparent to the user.

But in order to get there, we need a way to pay small amounts of money to apps, creators and each other. And do it in a way that doesn't immediately become a lightning rod for economic manipulation and money laundering.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#58

Post by Mirioron »

d1zzy wrote: post #54
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #8

The surveillance economy is a direct result of advertising becoming the default business model for Internet companies. At its root, advertising is attempting to predict an individual's preferences and subtlety nudge their preferences toward specific buying behaviors. With more granular and pervasive data inputs, you can arguably do better predictions and thus better targeting. The only counter to this is either: 1: p…

I generally agree with the reasons why we have arrived at what we have now but I'd like to point out that the alternatives do not seem _better_ necessarily, or at least not clearly so for most people. Current business model: provide "free" online services that are payed for by providing targeted advertising which relies on collection of data about users and building interest models. Advantage: almost 0 barrier of ent…

>Now you need a credit card or some other online payment mechanism, your real name/address/zip code will be associated with the payment mechanism

Do credit card companies also sell your data?

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#59

Post by Mirioron »

michaelchisari wrote: post #56
d1zzy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with the reasons why we have arrived at what we have now but I'd like to point out that the alternatives do not seem _better_ necessarily, or at least not clearly so for most people. Current business model: provide "free" online services that are payed for by providing targeted advertising which relies on collection of data about users and building interest models. Advantage: almost 0 barrier of ent…

Once we can crack the micropayment nut, it opens a whole new world of ad-free low-cost subscriptions. I'd much rather pay $0.50 a month for a social network that has no interest in my data than deal with ads or data tracking. But that needs to be both effortless for me as a user, and require very little in the way of processing fees. Both of which are not possibilities right now. Cheap is better than free has always…

>Once we can crack the micropayment nut, it opens a whole new world of ad-free low-cost subscriptions.

Online payments are hard to do because of lots of legislation around money. This means that it's going to be annoying. There are also many people that can't pay online, because they simply don't have access to these payment methods. You could argue that we will eventually digitize our money and that would solve the problem, but I doubt that that's going to happen any time soon. People would be too afraid that Visa and MasterCard would basically control their life.

The way you might make it work is if you did what Steam does - you can put money onto the platform that you can then spend later. If you had an entire ecosystem built around that then it might be possible that people would do micro payments to content providers.

>I'd much rather pay $0.50 a month for a social network that has no interest in my data than deal with ads or data tracking.

I wonder if it could cost that little. I guess it could.

Re: How to fight the surveillance economy

#60

Post by confounded »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #51
confounded wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is defining what is and is not an ad. Do I want my communications, browsing, purchase and location history to be used to rank me for job applications? To be used to decide which news stories I see? Which products are the top when I search for something generic? For some the answer is yes, for many it is no. The only way to square this is to restore consent and data decision-rights to users, and to di…

This seems to be a common solution. I don't think it's realistic and is entirely too optimistic about the information processing capacity of individuals in society at large. At the end of the day it's too much information for people to understand, handle and sift through to be a tractable solution. What would end up happening is basically what we have now, consent and data decision-rights end up being proxied by thir…

I don’t think we disagree much. If businesses want to do things where informed consent isn’t possible (e.g. because of the complexity of the bargain which they require users to accept), then they probably shouldn’t be doing them.

My point was not that advertising doesn’t need to be regulated (and that better protections for users/people obviate the need) but rather that advertising is not the only way to duplicitously exploit personal data to for profit.

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