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Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

eff.org

81–90 of 133 posts

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#81
post #4

I was thinking about a related idea recently - how much is my grocery information privacy worth for me? Summed up, I'm currently saving just over 11% on all the groceries + ~7% on fuel cost by sharing that information with 5 companies. (car insurance, CC, shop card, honey, airline) I'm not attached to this, I'd rather the programs like this get destroyed. But also by stacking the offers, I believe I'm getting more va…

How do you know that without these programs you'd be paying more than you do now?

In essence you should be paying less because these programs also cost money. Just think of all the expensive smart people that make these programs work.

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#83
This is just a bunch of falsehoods

> You wouldn’t place a price tag on your freedom to speak. We shouldn’t place one on our privacy, either.

You do place a price tag on a lot of your freedoms, that's what your employers pay you for. And it's not like people are going to be forced to give their data, or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary.

We either put a price tag on all user-generated content (including private data) or we abolish all intellectual property laws and copyrights. Suggesting otherwise is dishonest double standards.

> should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them.

The system is already sucking all their data. There's nothing else. If anything this will force companies to compete and pay them more than $0.

> Facebook is a massive, global company with billions of users, but each user only offers Facebook a modest amount in revenue.

Plenty of websites would be kept alive if they could earn $28 / year from each one of their users (hell, i 'd be rich), and in fact it shows why such a scheme would be beneficial for the web and the world as a whole.

Privacy and attention are currently being grabbed , stolen and sold in marketplaces nowadays . It's just so wrong to try to convince people to keep doing so.

This isn't 2003, and the price of "free services" is no longer high enough to justify giving our data for free (by law). I don't even understand what's the motive behind this post, and why Hailey felt the need to support such abuses

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#84
post #80

Have never understood EFF's objection to 'pay for privacy' (covered in the middle of this article). Being able to pay for privacy is better than not being able to. It creates the beginning of accountability for cos and optionality for users.

Because privacy is a right. And being bribed into giving it up is not a solution.

happiness and safety are rights too. Some people get paid extra to give up some of their safety or happiness and we consider it the right thing to do. It's not all black and white

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#85
post #51

I refuse to give my mobile number at grocery stores though they tempt me with offers/discounts :)

which is a fair bargain - you still have the option to opt out , but others have the option to get the offers. Demanding that nobody should have access to those bargains reeks of snobism imho

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#86
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, these huge chains have bean counters that do exactly these kind of calculations, and in general, no. That's why I mentioned selling the same information to 5 companies. I get each of them separately maybe paying a few bucks. I'm assuming that a few of them resell the information to the same market making that information less useful and giving me more value. But at $70+ a month for the very repetitive shoppin…

By selling to multiple companies is likely to devalue your information. That has been factored in to the discount pricing (in aggregate, over the entire population of people that use these discounts), because that's the point of the people who calculate this.

Sure, but it doesn't matter if you sell to 1, 2, or 5 companies: they've all priced this in to their individual models, which means you can't really get any better with any individual company by, say, giving them an exclusive license to this particular data. But, in aggregate, you can do better selling to more companies than any individual model prices in. Which means the Nash equilibrium here is, unfortunately, a race to the bottom, but, it remains to be seen if we've reached that or not.

Hmmm.

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#87

This is just a bunch of falsehoods > You wouldn’t place a price tag on your freedom to speak. We shouldn’t place one on our privacy, either. You do place a price tag on a lot of your freedoms, that's what your employers pay you for. And it's not like people are going to be forced to give their data, or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary. We either put a price tag on all user-generated cont…

> or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary.

Sure you can avoid using Google and other spying companies products, but you kind of then getting yourself excluded from the society that see no problem with that. If you don't want to give your data you essentially need to stop using internet or put a lot of effort to learn how to avoid your data to be taken away from you.

I agree that it should be straight up illegal to collect data that there is no essential business need for. Company should be allowed to take personal data to process an order, but it should be illegal to run any kind of analytics that involves personal data and even "anonymised" data should not be allowed to be sold or used for advertising or to manipulate customers into sales.

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#89

What about renting data? In that way, it is not once off but for instance per "query" or time, same way Amazon is "selling" us books. Those books are not quite ours, so data companies would buy are not quite theirs?

You'd need a way to disable access to your data that doesn't involve suing big companies that have lots of lawyers. And, there's no way to prevent them from copying it.

Re: Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

#90
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a really evil example, consider a version of Android Auto which knows when you’re low on fuel and auctions your “nearby fuel stations” search result slots to the highest bidders, in exchange for which the bidders get notified that they can jack up their prices on you.

This is already happening. Uber is making you pay more when your phone is low on battery (because they know you don't have too much time to think about how you're getting back home). Airline companies are showing you higher prices if they believe you can afford it, from the information they're getting about you (like your user agent).

Disgusting
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