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.

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.

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

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.