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Let's make them pay for using our personal data

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Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#111

Post by lucideer »

cameronbrown wrote: post #108
lucideer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mental gymnastics is in defining "selling data" as "selling all data Google has about you". This isn't a binary where it doesn't count if it's partial. Google provides selective contextual data about individuals to advertisers who target those individuals in exchange for money. Those advertisers are 3rd parties. Google sells data to 3rd parties. End of. They don't need to be handing over the full database for it…

Fine, how about a subset? Prove that an advertiser has seen one instance of my exact location, or an instance of my search or web history. 90% of the 'valuable contextual data' is that I searched for something related to an ad's keywords. The other ~% is targeted data. Targeting anonymised, generalised demographics/keywords which billions of people fit into does not class as selling private data. I'm not arguing to t…

> that there is a big difference between targeted ads and selling data.

I'm not arguing that the data received by the advertiser through targeted ads is anywhere near as valuable as a selling a dossier full of an array of information about a person, but... they're both examples of selling data. Unless you're redefining English language verbs... data is being sold. About a person. To a 3rd party.

There's a difference in scale and value, but there's no difference beyond that.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#112

Post by jszymborski »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #26
jszymborski wrote: post #23

I've been thinking instead of paying individuals, gov't should levy a tax on PII that is stored. A $/person identified/fingerprinted would be interesting. This would allow ethical companies like Firefox and Signal to operate at much lower margins than Chrome and Messenger.

I like this. One worry I have with paying individuals is that it becomes predatory for poorer people. If you struggle come back-to-school season, it might be tempting to let companies vacuum up your data for a quick buck. Sundar Pichai touched on this recently, criticizing Apple for making privacy a "luxury good" (of course, Google doesn't give you privacy at any price). We should make companies value our privacy in…

I think that enforcing strong privacy creates a "herd immunity" similar to how vaccines work. Collecting vast information on individuals allows companies to work in the disinterest of the public.

I also think that services that have become essential to receive public services like email should be regulated as such, with availability and cost guarantees. That's a whole digression on eInfrastructure though....

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#113

Post by tzs »

sp332 wrote: post #72
nostrademons wrote: post #49

Pretty sure the mechanics as detailed in the article are factually wrong. Google does not sell personal data. It collects all the personal data it can and then stockpiles it, where it becomes an asset that the company can use to build products and charge rent (largely from advertisers, but also from consumers). Selling an extremely valuable proprietary asset to competitors would be a really dumb move - the money in t…

Google does sell personal data, a little at a time. If I make an ad that targets young dog owners in Seattle, then when someone clicks that ad I know Google thinks they're a young dog owner in Seattle. Google sold me data about that person.

That's one of the concerns I've heard raised over ad-supported email providers that target ads based on the content of your email.

One way that could alleviate this but still allow targeting, although it might be too expensive to implement in practice, would be only allow ad targeting to be based on attributes of the viewer that are either very broad (e.g., gender, income quartile, age group, geographic region) or that correlate highly with use of the advertised product and do not correlate will with non-users of the product.

For example, targeting "young dog owners in Seattle" would be OK on the "young" part and the "in Seattle" part because age group and region are whitelisted broad categories, but would not be OK on the "dog owners" part unless the product was in a category that dog owners use but people who are not dog owners do not. Dog food, for example, or a dog walking service.

The idea is that if someone ran an ad for dog food targeting "young people in Seattle", rather than "young dog owners in Seattle", the respondents are going to largely be dog owners, and can reasonably expect that they are outing themselves as such to the seller. So allowing using "dog owners" in the targeting doesn't really give away any more information on the responders. The targeting just serves to not waste the time of people who don't own dogs seeing ads for dog food.

If, on the other hand, "dog owner" could be used on the targeting for unrelated products, someone could target "young dog owners in Seattle" with an ad for something that almost everyone wants, and the people who respond out themselves as dog owners without having any way to reasonably know that they are doing so.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#114

Post by munk-a »

cameronbrown wrote: post #108
lucideer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mental gymnastics is in defining "selling data" as "selling all data Google has about you". This isn't a binary where it doesn't count if it's partial. Google provides selective contextual data about individuals to advertisers who target those individuals in exchange for money. Those advertisers are 3rd parties. Google sells data to 3rd parties. End of. They don't need to be handing over the full database for it…

Fine, how about a subset? Prove that an advertiser has seen one instance of my exact location, or an instance of my search or web history. 90% of the 'valuable contextual data' is that I searched for something related to an ad's keywords. The other ~% is targeted data. Targeting anonymised, generalised demographics/keywords which billions of people fit into does not class as selling private data. I'm not arguing to t…

> Prove that an advertiser has seen one instance of my exact location, or an instance of my search or web history.

With all the subsidiaries and partner companies - and even just shell companies - out there, why should we be doing such gymnastics in order to support the advertising industry. If a company bought access to some data what's to say they couldn't eventually re-sell it to another company with another slice of that pie... or have that data inherited on acquisition.

That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to sustain an industry that really isn't providing a lot of value.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#115

Post by pkaye »

rootusrootus wrote: post #110
jefftk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an adverse selection issue. Let's say you make $10/month/user from ads, and offer the option to pay $10/month to not have ads. Users with less money are less likely to take you up on that, and are also less valuable as an advertising audience, so you start bringing in much less per month per ads-only user. Advertising effectively allows a company to charge richer users more, which you lose when you switch to…

That is an angle I had not considered, thanks! It seems like a chicken & egg problem, in some ways. A business that was built more traditionally than a unicorn could still make good money at $10/user/month, certainly it's possible to build Facebook-level social networking without employing nearly as many developers as they do. But without the network effect, the value is not there. I don't want to pay to be by myself…

I think app.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net) tried that approach and failed to get traction.

I view it kind of like Craigslist. If I put something there for free tons of people are interested. If I charge even a dollar the interest drops by a magnitude.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#116

Post by nostrademons »

clairity wrote: post #95
sp332 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be a lot more OK with this if Google were only using that data about me themselves instead of letting anyone with a little money use it too!

> "I would be a lot more OK with this if Google were only using that data about me themselves instead of letting anyone with a little money use it too!" that would be better, but google would still be subject to attacks by adversaries and (secret) subpeonas by governments. much better would be if they did their analytics on user data in real-time and store only the results while discarding the source data right away.

They have a project to do exactly that:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collabo...

IMHO this'll end up being one of the most influential research developments of the last few years, but it's only a couple years old at this point and needs a lot of supporting infrastructure (which'll have to be done by people outside of Google - the mothership has no economic incentive to support this) before it really works well.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#117

Post by wdr1 »

sp332 wrote: post #72
nostrademons wrote: post #49

Pretty sure the mechanics as detailed in the article are factually wrong. Google does not sell personal data. It collects all the personal data it can and then stockpiles it, where it becomes an asset that the company can use to build products and charge rent (largely from advertisers, but also from consumers). Selling an extremely valuable proprietary asset to competitors would be a really dumb move - the money in t…

Google does sell personal data, a little at a time. If I make an ad that targets young dog owners in Seattle, then when someone clicks that ad I know Google thinks they're a young dog owner in Seattle. Google sold me data about that person.

That's pretty different from what's in the article.

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#118

Post by theartfuldodger »

The initial concern of "the service would have to be paid for" is insurmountable to this generation.

If the average Grandma and High School kid had to pay per query to Google in return for ad free search ( Google did have this product with CSE) what miniscule percentage of users would pay?

The Brave Attention Token tackles this problem in a logical manner

Re: Let's make them pay for using our personal data

#120

Post by fyfy18 »

velcrovan wrote: post #10
danpalmer wrote: post #3

Arguably, they already do. They pay us in services such as communications software, social software, search, etc. Also, this is very common in some countries/industries. In the U.K. if you want to buy insurance or open a bank account etc, you’ll often use a comparison website, and they will likely give you an incentive (such as free cinema tickets) for choosing a service through them. This is paid for directly by the…

The argument is that the intangible costs of the current scheme (life under total surveillance) make it desirable to force a direct dollar-value recognition of people's personal data. A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up c…

I don't have a problem with the theory of targeted ads, in fact as a consumer it is actually useful. If you start looking for a pair of boots, then see that a brand you like but was out of your budget has a sale on, so you buy those boots you really wanted but couldn't afford. That's useful for a consumer.

The problem is that targeted advertising mostly just sucks. Last year I bought wireless headphones from Amazon, and everyone I visited them again for the next two weeks I had recommendations to buy wireless headphones. So even Amazon can't do it properly. What if I'd browsed on Amazon and bought from another store?

The other day I saw an ad on twitter for an wine company, in the "why am I seeing this as?" section it said that it is targeted to males (yup), aged 35 and above (no) who live in the United Kingdom (no). And to top it off, I don't even drink.

The problem is targeted ads mostly don't work, their targeting is so simplistic (see something you like, then blast you with ads for that over and over) or just assign you to such a general bucket (age range and location) that it isn't useful. Even "likes" aren't that useful for targeting - just because I "like" a brand doesn't mean I want to be blasted with ads from them or am going to buy every product they sell. I like Thinkpads, but that doesn't mean I'm going to buy every new ThinkPad that is released.

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