Slashdot Mirror
Millennials Willing To Share Personal Data — For a Price
jfruh writes "The rap on the under-30 crowd is that they don't care anywhere near as much about online privacy as their elders — but that's not quite true. According to a recent study by USC's Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, millennials are just as concerned about the use of their personal data online as their elders. The difference arises when it comes to why they share that data: older users share with someone they trust, while millennials share when they perceive that there's something in it for them."
Exactly. Access to a service or a social network is not "something in it for them". In fact, even if someone is willing to pay for your data, you shouldn't be willing to do that and it's hard to even accept that as "something in it for them".
Worse, this article says they're smarter about it , yet the reasons they give for sharing information by these twits are "for coupons and local deals" and "in exchange for targeted advertising" those two things are the same thing, obviously) and... Well, actually, those are the only reasons the article gives. What as shitty, meaningless, irrelevant article. It's literally just an infographic full of information from which the author has derived the most absurd conclusion.
"Teens are smarter about privacy, because they don't care about their privacy as long as it's being used for something in their benifit... like advertise to them".
I give up. Fuck it.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that creating multiple online personas and putting in occasionally fake information doesn't make them "smarter about it". Haven't we all learned, by now, that your identity can be derived by advertisers with only a few minimal pieces of data? Just because you're using a different username and email address at a site or to register for something doesn't mean *shit*.
I remember the article a few years ago where high school students took a poll which showed they generally feel there is too much free speech, press should be regulated by government, etc. Then, you have many going around saying things like "well, we have to give up some liberties for safety". And . . . well, none of this should surprise any of us.
We are destined to lose our freedom and our civil liberties. It is unavoidable. Every generation of children are raised in a society just a little less free than the prior one. For instance, young adults in 2013 don't know of a world without a TSA or a world where you didn't have to show your ID before boarding a domestic flight or a world where they weren't fear-mongered with threats of terror every single day. The things that have occurred in the last twenty years that repulse us about infringements on every citizen's rights are things which are just "every day life" and "normal" for young adults, today. Kids born today will know nothing of a world when there weren't cameras constantly monitoring and archiving their every move or drones in every city minding the behavior of citizens.
Article didn't go into it, but I think of it more like this some times:
Google is probably the biggest one for me. They take my personal information and show me ads that I always ignore but which are targeted specifically at me. In exchange, they give me loads of tools that I don't have to pay them for at all (Gmail, Drive/Docs, Search, Calendar, free place to upload and stream my music on practically any device I own, Android to an extent, etc.).
So, yeah, technically, all I'm getting from it is targeted advertising, maybe a few deals I wouldn't have found otherwise. But in reality, the money they're making off of getting targeted advertising done is paying for all of these tools that I don't pay any real cash for. In my eyes, I'm trading my personal information for those tools, and I couldn't care less about the advertising. Essentially, my personal information is a valuable currency that I never run out of. It's just limited in where it's accepted, and it requires a little more discretion in where I do want to use it than other currencies.
Look, it's really easy to remember how things work, and it really doesn't matter what the market is. All you have to is remember one very simple thing and you will have a clue.
If your not paying for the product, you are the product.
Similar words have been spoken of Baby Boomers and Generation X by the generations that preceded them. For every meth smokin', Wall-Street Occupyin', Tweeting Millenial, there is a brave, young, volunteer soldier and firefighter, putting the needs of his community and his family above his own, desparately struggingly to make ends meet while being berated and dismissed by a grumpy ex-hippy ticked off that the money he didn't earn with his stock picks in the roaring 90's won't buy him the private island he was planning to sail off to in his yacht.