I wonder how much more organizations would value PII if we could legally demand all of the PII of the executive officers for that same price.
Or if the company had statutory liability for any leaks or misuse of material in their control.
My private information is worth $30
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: My private information is worth $30
#32> They will not take responsibility for their actions, and they will not compensate you for the damage they caused. They will just offer you a small amount of money and hope that you will forget about it. Paying for a wrongful action is taking reponsibility and compensating. But also "for the damage they caused" - what's the damage if the info is already out there? > The basic problem is that they do not care about u…
Author here.
What I mean is that for an institution of higher education and intellectual research, the bar for ethical action should be higher. An apology (with guarantees and plans for improvement with oversight) is better than put a low price and call it cost of doing business. The damages or negative consequences are going to happen no matter what as information is already out there.
My point is not about the money that as person I would get or not. My personal private information is mine and should be protected and the law require that. If anyone consider that it is worthless or not is irrelevant. And because the affect does happen on a scale. This breach for example affect probably close to 200k or more (maybe much more).
My point is we shouldn't normalize that, just if "corruption" is widespread in a place then we should fight it not just say this is how things works. Same thing should happen here. And we should hold people responsible for the decisions liable. This way the simple decision of ignoring cybersecurity or outsource to the lowest bidder suddenly becomes unattractive.
Also I don't understand the logic is that because I got "abused metaphorically" before then it is not a big deal if this happens to me again. Why do we accept this in such case and not in others? And actually in my particular case, the university breach was probably the first breach of my personal information (others happen later). why would that change anything?
Re: My private information is worth $30
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is my opinion that, as with anything that can be copied infinitely for free, his (and my) personal information is worth $0. I realize I’m responding to an account created four minutes ago but… the output of nearly all work done on a computer meets this criteria. Is all work done on a computer worth $0 in your view?
>I realize I’m responding to an account created four minutes ago but… the output of nearly all work done on a computer meets this criteria. Is all work done on a computer worth $0 in your view? Yes. Also, this website is very pro-piracy, which means they generally agree with me. (Saying this last part because by mentioning the age of my account it seems you're accusing me of being a troll,)
Interesting! I imagine this website is also full of software developers, startup founders, VCs and others who earn a living in software. How do you reconcile all of that work actually being worth $0 with the fact that we are earning a living?
Re: My private information is worth $30
#34my dog ate my homework.
Re: My private information is worth $30
#35Maybe my perspective on Universities is quite different, but I don't understand the complaints of the author. This is a public University, they likely outsource some of their IT and somewhere a data breach happened. This data breach apparently affected all employees and students/former students. The faceless "they" the author is blaming in all likelihood was effected more drastically than him. The 30 dollars is not a…
"likely zero"
If I was (and have been) subject to a data breach, I can guarantee the damages involved are not zero. Even if no specific fraud has taken place (yet).
Time is money.
Re: My private information is worth $30
#36Class actions like this are opt in; by accepting the settlement you accepted the terms and lost your right to sue for a different (more appropriate to you) value. Planet money did a a great segment on how these work and why America is set up this way. I learned a lot about it. You should definitely take a listen[1]. If you aren’t on Apple then search “What to do when you’re in a class action?” And find the podcast (n…
This one is opt out: see https://www.uofmdatasettlement.com/
"IF YOU DO NOTHING
Get no benefits. Give up your rights to sue the University over the legal claims in this case."
Re: My private information is worth $30
#37Class actions like this are opt in; by accepting the settlement you accepted the terms and lost your right to sue for a different (more appropriate to you) value. Planet money did a a great segment on how these work and why America is set up this way. I learned a lot about it. You should definitely take a listen[1]. If you aren’t on Apple then search “What to do when you’re in a class action?” And find the podcast (n…
This one is opt out: see https://www.uofmdatasettlement.com/ "IF YOU DO NOTHING Get no benefits. Give up your rights to sue the University over the legal claims in this case."
I also confirm that I did not submitted a claim to be included.
Re: My private information is worth $30
#38> But also realized that if I had written this in Arabic it would have been much more concise. The poetic nature of writing in grievance in Arabic is much more effective than in English. But I will leave that for another time.
You piqued my interest. I’d like to learn more about that.
Re: My private information is worth $30
#39The $30 settlement doesn't mean that's what the data is worth. For better estimation, we could look at how much discount various places are giving for information. For example my shopping data is apparently worth many hundreds a year. (So a few thousand in total by now) Which is silly considering it's basically the same things on rotation and anyone with even simplest data analysis could correlate all my shopping anyway. But PII isn't that interesting without any other activity attached. So... probably less than my shopping and it doesn't change so there's no need to refresh. Probably in the hundred dollars range then? Unless someone wanted to use it for impersonation where financial hacks, then maybe it goes up to thousands as well? (Large percentage will not convert)
Re: My private information is worth $30
#40The author thinks that $30 is an inappropriate amount, but does not suggest what he thinks the correct sum should be. It is my opinion that, as with anything that can be copied infinitely for free, his (and my) personal information is worth $0.
> It is my opinion that, as with anything that can be copied infinitely for free, his (and my) personal information is worth $0. This would include all software, every movie, song, book, photograph, and TV show available anywhere. I'm glad that the rest of society has decided to place the value of those types of things a little higher than you do. The multi-billion dollar a year industry of buying and selling our mos…
The problem is that "Free Market" economics (which some people still argue is a valid economic theory for some reason) states that the market will decide what things are worth. The market decided a long time ago that movies, songs, books, photographs etc were, in fact, worth nothing. That's the effect of digital media. It's completely incompatible with the free market.
Weirdly enough, the people who were most vocal about this so called "Free Market" were the people who tried to defend their ability to make money from things that can be copied infinitely with almost zero overhead.
This isn't an opinion on whether or not digital media should be free, it's a statement about digital media being completely incompatible with outdated economic theories.
The person you're replying to may actually believe that his personal information should be worth $0. The only reason it's not is because it can be used for targeted advertising and a bunch of even more horribly dystopian purposes.
So, the fact is you're both correct. Personal data should be worthless (in fact, it should be only available with the permission of the "person") if not for bad actors profiting from the purchase and sale of this data.
The broken economic theories of free market economics state that digital media should be worthless, except that current laws and regulations extend out-dated intellectual property laws to protect incumbent distributors and rights holders (this only rarely actually protects the creators of the media). The idealistic goal of the creators profiting from their creations has been corrupted beyond recognition.
Basically, the things you both are discussing are both nuanced and broken. They exist outside of the context you're putting them in.