Slashdot Mirror
Weighing the Value of Privacy
An anonymous reader writes "A new study from HP Labs shows that the reluctance of individuals to reveal private information (or how much money they would demand to do so), depends on how far they perceive themselves to be from the norm. For example, those who think they are overweight ask a higher price to step on a scale in front of their peers, than those of average weight. From the article: 'How and why people decide to transition their information from the private to the public sphere is poorly understood. To address this puzzle, we conducted a reverse second-price auction to identify the monetary value of private information to individuals and how that value is set. Our results demonstrate that deviance, whether perceived or actual, from the group's average asymmetrically impacts the price demanded to reveal private information.'"
All Open source coders are average or do they just have a high opinion of closed source ones? I think it's more likely they fall into the showing off category. If you've got it, flaunt it.
For women a public weight measurement is apparently a much bigger deal. Imagine having your dick length measured in public. Ok, maybe it's not that bad, but you get the picture...
The second bid auction, or in this case, the reverse second bid acution is a brillian idea. I wonder why it isn't used more in real life.
Everyone gets to leave a bid for something. The person giving the highest bid gets to buy for the second highest bid.
This forces the bidders to bid the highest price they would be willing to pay. It's impossible to cheat, as bidding 1 billion for a 100$ object would leave you in a lot of trouble is someone else had the same idea but bid 1 million!
Would people get this if it was an option on ebay?
The more we deviate from normality, the more value we place on privacy.
The more we deviate from normality, the more information value there exists within our deviation.
In other words, the greater our individual entropy, the more value we attach to it.
This is an interesting result; a first step towards quantification of something I had not really conceived of as quantifiable.
--Dan
I suspect that privacy is an artifact of a mass-urbanized society. Prior to the 1800s, people did not have that much privacy because they did not have anonymity. In small village, everyone knows everyone's business for better or for worse. Its only after people moved to a big city that they really could have privacy and learn to value it. At the same time, mass-media culture creates a monotypic image of the norm -- every day we are bombarded with messages of how we should be young, thin, driving a hot car and have cool dry underarms.
Culture plays a big role too. I remember reading about the Netherlands and the tendency for the Dutch to leave their curtains open. Closing your curtains (seeking privacy) was actually frowned upon because it was seen as suspicious.
It would be interesting to repeat this privacy study among different people: people in other countries, in small villages, in tribal indigenous cultures, etc. That way we could assess if the desire for privacy is universal or only an artifact of the current mass-media, mass-urban civilization.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Definitely interesting material, and it gives a new insight into things, but it doesn't seem like it explains the full range of motivations for keeping things secret.
For example, I don't think my social security number is especially deviant. I wouldn't even know what the norm would be for a social security number. And yet, I have this odd urge to keep it private. Same goes for my credit card number. I don't think there's anything substandard or abnormal about my MasterCard number, but I still want to keep it private.
I haven't done a study to back it up, but to me it seems that people would want to keep information private to the extent that they believe making it public could cause them harm. If they (like many people) have the urge to be normal or appear normal, then they are going to perceive a penalty in deviating from the norm. But likewise, if making my phone number public is going to cause me to get prank phone calls, I am going to be quite reluctant. In both cases, it's because of a belief that there will be negative effects.
By the way, I know someone who is obese who used to love to make his weight public. It went like this: he'd go up to one of those "guess your weight or age" places at a fair or amusement park, the kind where they have to get within 10 pounds of your weight or they must give you a prize. He weighed over 300 pounds at the time. The person guessing his weight would feel uncomfortable and spit out a seriously low-ball number so as not to offend him, figuring he'd be touchy about it. Then, he'd hop onto the scale which would indicate they were off by 75 pounds, and presto, free prize, every time.
What would make for an intersting study...
How much it would cost to have yourself and a group of people publicly indexed by your penis size.
Fifty men have their members examined by a doctor and their length recorded. You then get brought out in Times Square and the doctor puts you in order by smallest to largest. I wonder how much money it would take for the average person to participate.
Indeed. It is a reflection on the attitudes of our society that "eccentric", literally "off center", when referring to a person, is a derogatory term. If you deviate from the average, there's something "wrong" with you.
there is something i would ask much money for before disclosing, yet (almost) everbody has one, and i can assure you its "the norm".
its my credit card numbers.
so i guess this study is again mixing up concurrence and causality.
and the scientist is probably fat.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
I guess that is true - especially with respect to obesity. I used to do some obesity-realted research and in the mid 90's I attended a conference on obesity research, where I heard about the following study:
A study was undertaken where people having had a physical handicap (e.g., blindness, missing a limb, deafness etc.) for several years were asked what handicap they would choose instead of their current handicap if they had the chance. Almost all of participants said that they would stick with their current handicap (they sort of stick with what they know and gotten used to). However, when the same question was asked to obese individuals ("If you could choose between being obese or being lean but physically handicapped, what would you choose (and what handicap)?") almost all the obese individuals would rather prefer having a handicap than being obesity.
In my eyes this clearly suggests that the way for example obese individuals are percieved by "normal" people has a huge impact on the person, and the "deviance from average" is not necessarily symmetric and can be highly related to social standards.
My privacy protection is a matter of principle and it thus not affected by money. I don't give a whup if someone offers me money for certain, key private information tidbits, I wont give it. Is it because I am "deviant"? No. I am pretty frickin' average, all told, but on PRINCIPLE my privacy is MINE, absolutely, and I will not give it out or sell it off to a government or a corporation or a group of busybodies.
Just wait. This research will no doubt lead to more privacy erosion on the principle that if you do not want to give up the information, then you must be hiding something bad (the result that the perception or fact that one is deviant from the norm making one more reluctant to release private information). This CAN and will be used as a means of eroding privacy. "You MUST be hiding something if you wont give it up freely. Take him away!". Patriot Act v3.0 would be about right to explicitly work from this angle.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I just read the article (skimmed bits). They managed to determine that people don't like to release embarrasing information or break societal taboos.
This info might actually be interesting to people who say "What's the problem with the government being able to do this research?" My mother is a classic example of this. The fact is that she feels she has nothing to hide. Why? Because she feels normal. Inconspicuous.
Before, I kept trying to explain that "some people do have something to hide, and it might not necessarily be harmful." This argument was totally ineffective.
This suggests another way to explain these things to people: you go to your girlfriend's house for thanksgiving to meet the family, and everybody is great. Only problem is the huge migrane headache you came with, but you're coping and really having a wonderful time in spite of that, when suddenly the conversation turns to politics: her entire family is full of Limbaugh-Loving, "Liberal"-hating Born-Again Republicans. Now, some of your friends are Republicans, and that's okay: you have good conversations with them. You get the feeling after the 5th time her father refers to "those damned liberals who want to let every last sodomist destroy marriage" that this would NOT be a good time to discuss things. Now what's the problem with your girlfriend telling the whole family that they have an excellent debate candidate sitting right here!
After all, you have nothing to hide.
This research shows that it has a lot more to do with the situation you're in (do you know the people, do you care about how they feel, do you consider yourself negatively different from the group?) than what the secret is and how you feel about privacy in general.
The participants had to reveal their personal information to people who were present, and some of whom were known to the participants. Also, the nature of the information (age, weight, and finances) is potentially stigmatic in our culture.
These results should not be generalized to, for example, online data mining attempts for such practices as direct marketing. In nearly all requests for personal information, confidentiality is maintained, the information is anonymous, and some of the information requested (zip code, subscribed magazines, etc...) is not culturally stigmatic.
I question the applicability and usefulness of this study. Its specific results could have been predicted by existing social psychological research. A study measuring willingness to divulge non-stigmatic and anonymous information would be more useful.
InstantCrisis
There are thousands of years of history that show, without exception, that power breeds corruption and abuse. The right to privacy should be considered a counterbalance to power. If those in power obliterate privacy, they do not have to fear the repercussions of their abuse of that power, because they will know where and who may resist them and how they will go about it.
What would Thomas Jefferson say to your comment? We actually have a problem in America today; Many Americans have lately fallen victim to the idea that they should sacrifice their privacy and other essential human rights (primarily those that Jefferson was so proud of) so that the Government can more effectively protect them from terrorists and other such nonsense. The only real effect is that the Government constructs much stronger defenses against it's own people than it had previously.
History has shown that it is significantly more difficult to acquire basic human rights than it is to give them up. History also shows that regardless of the reason for sacrificing them, once sacrificed, they will be exploited for other reasons. These reasons may seem rational at the time, and each new exploitation may be just a small step from the last one. But over time, the civil liberties of a people are chipped away into oblivion with this mindset.
Not only do I disagree with your post, but I believe that because of the growth of information technology combined with our current privacy crisis, America is closing in on an inevitable, new type of rebellion; Today, corporations that manage data and services that are very private to individuals are regulated and controlled with many consequences. One of those consequences is that the Government may tap into the private information flow of it's citizens, be them voice communications, auto-theft gps services, financial records or whatnot. Eventually, ad-hoc, encrypted networks that contain no Government accessible back-doors will spring up. It is even likely that communities such as Slashdot will be where such movements start, and therfore may one day be considered an enemy of the State.. Interesting thought, huh?
Projects such as freenet represent a blow across the bow of this fight for basic privacy rights. I expect that it will eventually become messy, as frustration at not being able to penetrate these networks sweeps through agencies such as the FBI, NSA, IRS, etc.. The Government will probably even try to make such networks illegal at some point and it could take years or decades before the basic rights to privacy return to our lives. But equilibrium will eventually be restored and we will have the ability to be untrackabl
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
I didn't read the article, but it sounds like an awful lot of people have concluded, e.g. based on the "weight" example, that the study suggests we are conditioned by society not to deviate from the norm. While this may be true, I think there is a simpler explanation for why people are more likely to part with "average" data vs. unusual or unique data.
This conclusion has been touched upon already (see the comment "Interesting links to entropy"). One big reason people protect their private information is because it has value--in many cases, its value (to, say, a marketer working to collect that information) is that it serves to more uniquely identify a particular person or group, allowing that group to be singled out for e.g. targeted mailings. A piece of average data, shared by a large number of people, lacks this value.
Suppose you are in a situation where you are publishing a controversial paper, but must attach your real name to it. Would you be more likely to publish the paper (knowing that friends, relatives or people you come in contact with may read it) with a name like John Smith, vs. a name that is quite unique or uncommon?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.