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.
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
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.
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