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Telco CEO: Consumers Have 'Double Standards' Over Data Privacy (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Despite consumers continuing to criticize corporate attempts at monetising data, they are happily handing over data to major tech companies such as Facebook, according to the head of Telefonica Deutschland, Thorsten Dirks. Dirks argued that there is a double standard among consumers who 'scrutinize any attempt to make money off their data', while at the same time 'handing over data voluntarily to companies such as Google and Facebook.' These firms, he opined, are stealing away business across the very infrastructure that telcos have invested billions in. Calling for a wide debate around data privacy in Germany, Dirks said that he was looking into ways to make money from Telefonica Deutschland's huge store of customer data. One proposition was to leverage the anonymised data of its 44 million mobile subscribers' location and movements to support crowd and traffic control.
Perhaps instead of it being a double standard, there's a purpose behind it. There's no need to "surrender" either. Services like Facebook (deceptively) provide a service to users to share the information with people they know and "trust". Other companies that monetize the information sell it to God knows who where you're left with custom made spam messages in your inbox promising to fix that ED issue you had years ago. Meanwhile, Aunt Martha is pleased as punch that you have a new fiancé and that the two of you are hitting it off quite nicely. Now, the fact that Facebook and other similar services also monetize your information is not very well known to the general public and their targeted ads are often times ignored (unless you're particularly suckered).
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