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.'"
It's probably news to your average fuckwit who thinks the police exist to protect society (rather than protect the ruling classes from society), that government exists to make the world a better place (rather than consolidate money and power into the hands of the already rich), that the media exists to inform the public as to what is going on (rather than to make a profit while at the same time telling the public what the ruling classes want them to be told).
All of this is trivially demonstrable if you read about the media (Chomsky, Macluhan) rather than the media itself.
"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."
Seriously?? No WAY!! And here was me expecting it to be, like, where overweight people would demean themselves in public for free!
Whoever is spending money on researching this, is probably preventing someone really good from researching something really useful - maybe we should remember that when posting such utter non-news..
The key to privacy is 'covenience' which roughly translates to how hard it is to preserve your own privacy.
Not the other way around, you dolts.
But now we live in an online world where doing practically anything except watching an ad requires 'registration'. So you HAVE to give up some information everytime. And even where all/most of that information is bogus you still have to thrash through it.
Think of it - most online purchases require a great deal of 'registration' - -
- "Are you one of our favored accounts?"
- "Please log in and we'll retrieve your profile."
and what they've basically done is take a system that works more or less ok - shop, pay, ship, thanks - and perverted it into an exercize that more or less makes the actual purchase secondary and the mad type type type type type typing of pages and pages of information for them to store the real point of it all. And 6 months from now when you've forgotten your password, account, secret questions #1, 2 and 3 and you try to purchase another box of screws or printer ink or god knows what and you need to have them send you your password again it's clear that the real purpose of this is the information itself and buying something is merely a door prize to the event.