Banking On Your Personal Online Data

snydeq writes "While privacy groups are working to lock away your personal data, a better — or perhaps supplementary — option may be to let you sell it for what it's really worth. 'Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, or Pinterest, the truth is the product is you — all that data about you used to target ads and sales pitches. It's hardly a new business model — it's how trade publications have made their money for decades — but in the online world all that information is easily stolen, traded, and spread. ... If the data has value — and we know it does — its creators (you and me) should be paid for it. And if we take over the selling of our data, all those companies using it now have to respect us and abide by our standards.'"

Comments

um, no

[Anonymous Coward]

And if we take over the selling of our data, all those companies using it now have to respect us and abide by our standards.

Uh, no they don't. This isn't magicalhippieland.

Re:um, no

[causality]

Seconded. The idea of them playing by our rules is almost as laughable as us playing by theirs.

Indeed. The idea that they will "respect us" is absurd. In their minds they have already stripped us of all humanity and made us into a dollar-denominated commodity just like so much furniture or livestock. This alienated, dehumanizing system which presupposes that anyone other than me should decide what my needs and wants are constitutes my major philosophical problem with the whole concept of marketing. That, plus the fact that no one has asked me if I consent to be tracked and marketed to, and my consent is assumed by default and this is a violation, is the minor philosophical reason why I block all ads from all sites.

The major practical reason is that my data obviously has value to various companies, yet those companies have never approached me with a contract or other offer -- meanwhile they would call it "theft" if I took their properties (intellectual or material) without compensating them. This is garden-variety hypocrisy in an unusually obvious form. The minor practical reason is that advertising is the most biased source of information imaginable and therefore not good enough for me if I were actually making a purchasing decision.

What these people do respect is scarcity. Even if it's artificial (like all intellectual property). The only way to create that is to have more and more informed users who know how the game is played well enough to understand how to stop playing it if they so choose. If an IP address is the most personal information of yours they can obtain, you're doing it correctly.


As an aside, these "My Clean PC" morons? Even if I had a desire or a need that this product could satisfy (which I don't), the way they keep spamming where they are unwelcome would tell me everything I need to know about who they are and what kind of business dealings I could expect from them. They obviously subscribe to the "loud and annoying = sales!" school of marketing. That school needs to go extinct like all the rest of the dinosaurs, along with the idiotic people who reward it with money at the expense of themselves and everyone who has to deal with spam.

If the data has value...

[John Hasler]

...its creators ... should be paid for it.

So you think you should pay for data created by businesses (eg, football scores, integrated circuit pinouts, instruction sets, financial statements)? You believe in copyright on information and data rather than just on creative expression?

Re:If the data has value...

[Seumas]

Exactly. I am no more the creator of data about myself that my bank and medical provider has than a tree is the creator of a painting I made of it. We are the subject of our data; not its creators. And while we should have control over it, the fact is that we don't and never will. Further, the idea that we should have the right to buy and sell it is silly. The value of your PRIVACY is far more important than the $10/yr you could get in the value of your DATA.

You already do sell it.

[gallondr00nk]

When you sign up for these services, you're already tendering your personal information. The agreement is "you let me use this service, and I'll provide you with X information." Yes, it isn't an explicit agreement, but we all know how this works now.

Like any commodity, your price is set by demand. Saying you want to sell your information for cash is fine, but when the price is already set by the fact there are millions of others signing up to the service for free then your bargaining posture is pretty weak.

Re:You already do sell it.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

When you sign up for these services, you're already tendering your personal information. The agreement is "you let me use this service, and I'll provide you with X information." Yes, it isn't an explicit agreement, but we all know how this works now.

You missed the point of the article. We are selling it now, but the market is ridiculously primitive. It is all take-it-or-leave-it, no options for negotiation and basically no transparency. For all intents and purposes we've replaced cash with personal information as the currency of online services.

But where everybody pretty much knows the value of a dollar, few, if any, people have much of a grip on the value of their personal information. We know what it is, but we have no idea of what it can be used for in the hands of the people we trade it to. So essentially we are writing blank checks to pay for things like facebook and google.

Re:You already do sell it.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sure, there's transparency. There's total transparency. Everything you enter into your GMail account is property of Google. Everything you enter into your Facebook account is property of Facebook.

I think you just proved my point.

A hell of a lot of more than that is collected about you. Every page with a facebook like button on it reports back to facebook that you browsed there. Same thing with all of those web pages that use googleapis.com - pages that you have no idea are ratting you out to google. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Go install Ghostery to get a feel of just how much your online life is being spied on by companies you've never even heard of.

We are being paid already.

[Superdarion]

But we are being paid for it. With google's services, for instance. Our product is our information and I think Google pays us handsomely for it with their search engine alone.

Re:We are being paid already.

[wannabgeek]

Wrt search, Google is getting handsomely compensated for it by their search ads. So, we don't have to pay for it through our information. Our intent (which we disclose through the search term) is enough.

Sell?

[devnullkac]

Have we learned nothing from the evil corporate empires that feed us our culture in click-wrapped agreements? Don't sell your personal data... license it! And sue the bastards to death if they share it with anyone else!

Commercialization makes online rights irrelevent

[Anonymous Coward]

"Our social space online has moved from the public square to the shopping mall.

From the public sphere where we can fight for our rights and influence the laws and bylaws that govern our conduct, where we can engage in civil disobedience when we oppose the rules, to the private sphere, where we have no rights, and can be expelled and excluded at the pleasure of the private owners of the platforms.

Today, if somebody is hosting content that somebody else objects to, that content is not likely to be hosted by a server they control, but rather by a commercial social platform. Such content can be removed with no due process, with no recognition of the rights and liberties of both parties, simply the unilaterally imposed rules of the platform operator.

In the case that the content is controversial, and the objecting party is powerful, the operator has strong incentive to remove it, and very little incentive to put themselves at risk to keep the content online.

The powerful interest that wish to control content online no longer need coersive laws to do so, they simply need co-operation from the platform owners. Such co-operation is happily provided by most operators, and is often even a precondition of their financing.

Commercialization has made online rights irrelevant

The world where “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” can not exist on Facebook, and can not be built by capital."

- @dmytri

Be careful what you wish for

[Tim the Gecko]

What are the two factors that make telephone companies stupid, evil and bureaucratic? Billing and regulation. With Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, etc., we've lucked into a world with no billing (advertising pays), and not too much regulation.

snydeq's proposal seems to open the way to a world where the money flow takes on a life of its own (huge departments keeping track of who gets what), with an inevitable regulatory tidal wave sweeping in soon after the first agreement is signed.

What would be scary is how little I may be valued. I'm not buying a car soon, I can't drink alcohol, and I am socially inept with zero spending on Cialis. It seems like the MLB should stop me watching the World Series for free.

Re:Anti SEO post

[Billly Gates]

Lets fuck up this SEO troll's game? If another slashdotters respond back to this troll with the following cut and pasted back all his potential customers will see 2 women eating shit and vomiting in each other's mouths. You all have my permission to cute and paste this. Obviously not work safe ...

MyCleanPC is a shitty product! There is no crappier product than MyCleanPC.

In actuality this will fuck up the SEO from this scam artist who wrote MYCleanPC.com and counters his slimy spamming advertising MyCleanPC .

If everyone here on slashdot points to other disgusting sites for MyCleanPC, then people searching for malware virus removal with MyCleanPC will have an awful surprise! :-)

If goatse was still around I would have used that sigh.

Stop repeating that !!

[Taco Cowboy]

The guy's intention is to get as many mention of "mcpc" as possible to push it in front of SEO listing

Do not repeat that "mcpc" !!

Do not fall for his game !!!

Re:Stop repeating that !!

[Billly Gates]

No the SEO is paying him to link to his site in reference to MyCleanPC for the actual url. The url is the key ingredient to get a top Google page rank without paying for it which this scam artist is trying to do.

What will happen is if someone does a search for the key terms My clean pc, sucks, worst product ever, do not buy this, and then mcpc the link to the girls eating shit will show up.

Obviously no slashdotter is going to click that so his audience is for Google readerbots. Also Google does rank things higher with the rel=no follow as scam artistis have caught on about the penalty of over doing SEO.

So since I randomly picked that one lets keep it up! Or have whoever is in charge of slashdot since Timothy and CMD Taco left to simply ban all posts with that url. If what I read is true and it is scareware then these assholes should be in jail. How is MyCleanPC different than something evil like Anti Virus 2010 or MacDefender? The comments I read on youtube is it is impossible to uninstall or at least very hard making a rewipe the most viable solution for just casual PC users.

Re:Anti SEO post

[inode_buddha]

Here's some even worse stuff... just in case you need ammo

http://ftw.generation.no/?n=627
http://www.zentastic.com/videos/bmevideo-trailer.wmv
http://www.zentastic.com/videos/bmevideo-trailer-2.wmv
http://www.zentastic.com/videos/bmevideo-3.wmv

(genital dissection vids, prolapseing, gay group, etc.)
Because I get *sick and tired* of forum spammers...

Cha-ching

[girlintraining]

And if we take over the selling of our data, all those companies using it now have to respect us and abide by our standards.

That's adorable. You think corporations respect you. Nothing could be further from the truth. You are a means to an end, nothing more. Specifically, money. They'll do anything for money, and since they have way more of it than you, it's you that will be going to them for everything, not the other way around. You want that cell phone? Surrender your personal data. Car? Personal data, please. Internet access? Groceries? Housing? Furniture?

Capitalism without restraint leads to depotism.

Re:Anti SEO post

[EdIII]

You forgot one thing...

Installing MyCleanPC, and the subsequent ass-raping your PC will receive, is vastly more preferable than the mental-ass-raping you will receive by watching 2 girls 1 cup.

Thank you very much. I had almost forgotten about that travesty on the net. Thanks for freshening up those wounds for me.

Targeted Ads.

[jhobbs]

I'll happily share anything and everything advertisers want to know about me if I could ever just get ads that were relevant to me. As an example, Hulu gave me ads for diapers, Charter Cable Internet, and Gucci Cologne in the last show I watched. Charter isn't in my area, I hate kids (and I'm gay so the odds of an accidental one are near zero), and I buy unscented everything. Facebook's targeted ads are just as awful. I mean, its like no one wants my money. And with no wife or kids and my own business I have plenty of it to spend.

That's such a visionary idea

[martin-boundary]

I for one welcome this idea, and I move to extend it to its logical conclusion. I *also* want to be able to sell my wife(1), my kids(2), and my kidneys(3) if I want to, too. It's too hard to think about enforcing all those arbitrary rules, let's just let the market decide(4)!

1) The neighbour stups her already when I'm in the office, so there's a market. I should be compensated in money terms.

2) There's that paedophile I see every day in the park, so there's a market. It's inevitable he'll grab my 7 year old anyway, I should be compensated in money terms.

3) The rich old woman down the street really needs a kidney. She might just get lucky on the waiting list, so I want to get in on the action now. She'll pay anything!

4) I really need the money! Honest!

Re:Anti SEO post

[inode_buddha]

Actually yes it is real. There is worse stuf than goatse and tubgirl out there. Never mind the trolls, I say (I can deal with that) its the spammers that *really* annoy me tho.... those links are great for google-bombs and totally fuckup their results. Especially if you can redirect their paypal button to one of them..