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If Data Is the New Oil, Are Tech Companies Robbing Us Blind? (digitaltrends.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It's an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars -- and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region. The essential bargain that's driven by today's tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains -- whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly "free" services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.
In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money. For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.
In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money. For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.
Data is not the new oil.
"users feed in their brains -- whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems"
So, that's how all those self-driving cars learn how to recognize street signs and other vechicles.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Companies are making billions of dollars trading on "facts" about you and me. They compile and sell this data with no recompense. They make no real attempts to ensure the data is accurate or that our lives aren't negatively impacted by errors. And when they inevitably get breached and our data gets stolen, they offer a token few months of credit monitoring (especially ironic coming from Equifax). Gee, thanks.
The dinosaurs are lucky; they aren't around to give a shit that they're being sold for profit.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I saw Google, Facebook, and the others for what they were the second the came on the scene. Not a social media account or cloud account do I possess and none will I have.
I enjoy good products and good services and I think they should cost money. For this reason, I happily pay for Fastmail, an email company that treats me with respect and solves any issues quickly. They are humble, transparent, and worth the money I have shelled out for years. The only other company I think one can trust with their data is rsync.net. I would not give me data to anyone else willingly.
"We reserve the right to share your information with ..." ..."
"You grant us an unlimited license to
Yeah, we've been robbed blind, and for decades longer than this current all-seeing-eye craze. Contracts of adhesion should have been outlawed a long time ago.
Yes, obviously. And I've been saying it for years.
We are now the product. We are no longer the consumer.
What moron said that "data is the new oil", and can we please name and shame him?
I mean, why oil? Why not "the new lupens"? Or, the "new bath salts"? Wait, I know, "data is the new hydrogen".
You are welcome on my lawn.
What did you think Afghanistan was all about? Terrorism?
If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.
IMHO it's extreme consolidation, not much more.
I'm currently testing "cloud only" for most of my computing needs. I've been thinking about this for quite some time and now I'm giving it a testrun.
I meet a guy at our local hackerspace who uses Chrome OS exclusively. He won't go back.
The side effect is that I'm spending less time at the computer and getting more real work done. Going all-out Google can be a really neat thing. Google watches over you and that's not just a bad thing. The speed at which I get work done and the time and effort saved by using specialized cloud services for every specific little detail about my work as a developer does have a solid positive impact on my overall productivity.
The only problem with highly optimized systems such as an all-present cloud is that they are notably fragile. If we're all using the cloud and the cloud goes down - then we're all screwed.
I woudln't say the companies are robbing us blind. I see a few targeted ads and some analysis of the documents I'm writing might have prompted some professional service to send me a premium test voucher right smack as I'm preparing for freelance carreer options again. This is probably no coincidence "Preparing for a freeelance career in IT" probably is a Google Target Option or something.
Creepy? ... In a way, yes. But then again, we know about NSA ever since Snowden and still we haven't managed to build a zero-fuss end-to-end encrypted replacement/update for E-Mail, so it can't be that bad.
BTW, I'm more scared about the NSA than Google at this point. ... But I wouldn't use Facebook aside from using it with a spoof account either.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Until the internet, dating services weren't free.
Now you give some info, and get something that used to cost real money.
you're getting something of established value for your information.
Trading information for a service. You're being paid very directly for your information.
perhaps the services aren't that transparent about how your info will be used. Be careful!
You get what you pay for.
Sounds like four things going on here:
1) Publicly available data - Google and Facebook could buy what they don't already know about you from Axciom, etc. So there's little unknown public data (by definition) you could offer that would be of much value.
2) Data you've produced - Like the translation of Harry Potter for training Google's translation algorithms. This would be data you've produced, not about you. Sounds more like run of the mill licensing but multiplied by a billion samples.
3) Task based data - Solving captchas is really the same as Mechanical Turk. Price discovery for those micropayments has pretty much been settled over the last decade of operation.
4) Intimate data - Anything you wouldn't talk about at the dinner table, deeply personal desires and habits mainly. But it's going to be difficult to glean accurate sexual peccadillos from data mining someone's Kroger shopping list. Offering specific intimate details about yourself (not just sexual) would seem to be very valuable to marketers. Basically the set of all stuff about you that's impossible to get publicly.
So it seems that 4) is where the micropayment money would be. Otoh, given the amount of deeply personal info folks already expose to marketing companies like Facebook, why would any business offer more than a pittance for this info?
Like to read? Big deal, lots of people do. Your hobbies? G and FB already know from your browsing history. Etc, the set of actually valuable data that's worth paying for is vanishingly small.
The real valuable data is what your intention at this moment is and making money from matching a seller to that buyer. Which of course is exactly what Google has already perfected.
Massive Data collection and AI are determining "democratic" votes loosing the term "democratic" and turning it into manipulated.
Are we becoming all Zombies manipulated by strings somebody knows how to use?
Sure seems like it.
What would be an antidote?
If Data is the New Oil, then Data Privacy is the New Ecology Movement.
Since it's mined, it's the new coal.
Remember when people were concerned we were sleepwalking into a surveillance society.
Now everytime I turn on my phone, it contacts Google and does an install of whatever Google Play tells it to. I didn't choose this, it was a 'free-bee' feature that came when I installed an OS upgrade.
YouTube on Android needs approval to upgrade.... it's needs new permissions. What permissions does a video player need now? Access to your contacts, your GPS position, your SMSs, your Microphone, your device ID and call information. i.e. who you talked to, when, where you are, who you are, who you associate with, what you said to your friends. None of this is NEEDED by Google, it's WANTED by Google.
Try uninstalling Google Play and it will uninstall every app you bought. It's like going into Walmart, and buying stuff, and deciding you don't want to visit Walmart anymore and Walmart taking all the stuff it sold you back, and keeping your money anyway.
The situation is a joke, suppose Putin doesn't put in Trump, suppose he got a proper dictator into power and not a wannaby self-deluded one. A few laws later and all that data would be there to do a stasi wet dream of a surveillance.
No website that does not require me to give a credit card to buy stuff has anything usable. They don't even have my real name, age, address or nationality. The few that do, will know if I bought an Arduino or a pair of trousers or a toaster or The Undercover Economist or some lightbulbs or polyurethane adhesive. But none of that is any sort of reliable indication of what I would buy in the future. Hell, even I don't know what I will buy in the future.
Even if the credit card companies could consolidate all the activity across all my cards, websites and bank accounts, it would just add up to someone who buys groceries, pays bills, buys clothes, who travels, buys gifts, home improvement goods, has hobbies and interests. They could discern the size and age of my family, possibly make a stab at my job and income, make of car and holiday destination.
But so what? They tailor a few advertisments to me - that is better than pushing random ads in my direction.Except I use an ad-blocker so I have no idea what is being directed at me. Occasionally I notice that something appears on a website that is associated with something I recently bought - but since I have already bought it, it has no relevance. They have missed the opportunity.
If companies place a monetary value on this sort of data, they really are paying for nothing. They might as well offer to buy the leaves that fall off trees for all the relevance it has. But I suppose that in an industry where they can't buy what is valuable, they place value on what they can buy. But they are kidding themselves.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Using and paying for collected data works until you realize that if you base your business decisions on collected data you are following the flock, you aren't the leader.
Either you are the leader breaking new ground or you just follow the stream by collecting data or buying collected data.
As an example - if you have a shop selling electrical supplies then you make the bulk of your income selling outlets and standard appliances. Those special bleeding edge appliances like a lathe you sell rarely don't really render any direct profit. But you forget that they actually attracts customers and any customer buying them also buys a lot of other stuff "by the way" that renders a profit. If you blindly trust big data then any product that don't give a profit in sales is going out of stock and that makes your shop end up as just another shop with bland contents.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Pretty soon, A.I. will be able to identify you in public; first when you voluntarily give up your "identity" (such as use a fingerprint scanner or iris scanner) then at a distance when facial recognition or voice analysis will be able to pick you out of a crowd. Maybe, paired with enough data, you'll even be tracked from a great distance based on your clothing and gait analysis.
They'll be able to learn what you do, what you drive, what you eat (and where and when) and of course who you associate with (and maybe why!). Soon, your preferences and habits will become part of your profile; whether or not you like your coffee black, are you an aggressive driver, do you look at other members of the opposite sex.
Let's hope that the people keeping this data don't get hacked (like Equifax!).
Finally, this will be paired with your genetic profile (full disclosure, that's what I analyze). Then, unless pesky privacy laws prevent this, they'll be able to match your habits/health/profession with your gene expression. In the best outcome; you'll get an e-mail from Genes "R" Us saying that with a simple modification of your genes administered (via oral CRISPR) you could be 20% more effective in your work/sex life/happiness. In the worst outcome you'll be subtly manipulated to purchase products that for some strange reason appeal to you; or you'll find yourself doing things that aren't in your best interest (like becoming very irritable when exposed to a certain scent). Of course, if the people who are manipulating you are allowed to make changes to your DNA then you could literally end up their puppet. (Well, once they have behavioral genetics figured out).
But don't worry, this won't happen for at least another 5 years!
Your logic is backwards. Big Data gives you the ability to do deep statistical analysis, and find subtle connections that you would miss if you only looked at "small data". This is the opposite of what you are saying.
The first person to apply Big Data to retailing was a guy named Sam Walton, who had a shop in Bentonville, Arkansas. Contrary to your prediction, he didn't fail.
"So why are we giving [personal data] away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results?
Simple. Most of us are sheep...too lazy and/or too stupid to care about the value of what we're giving away for nothing. Not all of the sheeple are technologically incompetent, either. Far too often you hear "Oh, privacy is so yesterday" arguments from those who insist they have nothing to hide, so they don't care if they're tracked and commoditized every moment of their lives. Those people are actually the biggest problem, because they help move the yardsticks and make people like me, who actually DO care about privacy, to jump through all kinds of hoops in an effort to preserve something that should be the default option. And if any of them are connected with me in any way, the EULA's they sign so blithely often give tech companies permission to go after any data of mine that may be residing on their machines. My email address and phone number, for example.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
"In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly "free" services...
They aren't "ostensibly" free. They're actually free (as in beer), which is the main reason people today will happily trade their digital soul in exchange for a zero-cost app or service. The fastest way to offend a Millennial is to make them open their wallet for an app, social media, email, web hosting, or WiFi service.
"...while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business."
Uh, when speaking to the IDGAF generation, try and remember that they only care about the FOMO moment. They're rather YOLO about all that "one day" future shit.
Can I have a backstreet Brazilian?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Very few persons who are ultimately responsible for data breaches are held to account.
It's time to fight back - from within.
*** Don't be dull.***
should click-bait headlines like this be on slashdot?
Want a Google, Microsoft or Yahoo account? You now need a phone! #Google-Microsoft-Yahoo-Hate-Poor-People
Want to register Office 2016? You create an account, redeem your key, Microsoft suspends your account, the software you just paid for is now held hostage
Want to use Adobe? Hahahaha! Not even the home version will work with out an "Adobe" Account.
Microsoft has Windows 10 spying on you left and right despite the sliders which make you think some is turned off.
Android needs location services on just to use advanced Bluetooth functions.
Apple / Android don't REALLY turn off Bluetooth and WiFi even though it looks like it did.
Verizon spies on your every step of the way even if you don't opt in to the deeply disturbing spy plan.
This is only a small amount and everything I've experienced or found out in just a few weeks.
As a country, we need to create some sensible privacy laws. Companies a user-damaging.
If you as a private individual elect to use services such as "Google Docs" or Microsoft "Office 365", then implicitly you are using on-line services and functionality to capture and store your creative output. The terms [for Google, certainly] under which this happens are pretty clear. See:-
https://support.google.com/dri...
However, if you elect to purchase products [say CDs or Blurays] from an on-line retailer, then your use of that on-line service is captured, analyzed, but then used to sell other product to other people. Amazon are pretty transparent about this - look for "The Page You Made" as a link on their site after you've been browsing for a bit...
There are two key differences. Firstly, Amazon are using your input as a mechanism to generate profit for themselves - income that they do not share with you, despite the fact that they are at least partially dependent upon you for the information. Secondly, the respective terms and conditions - crucially, for activities that are legally similar - are very, very different.
The retailers believe that they own anything you "do" with their web site. The cloud utility providers make it explicitly clear they make no such claims. Obviously, these differing opinions can both be legally claimed thanks to the terms and conditions that we implicitly accept when we access these different resources. It's equally obvious that the effort that the retailers put into their analysis pays off - or they would stop.
Where this gets interesting is the way that the retailers are essentially leveraging our use of their product to market yet more "stuff" to us, thereby actions which benefit the retailer but not the consumer. I would be quite happy to argue that my use of a retailer's web site constitutes a unique creative activity on my part and that, as such, my actions should be considered a copyright-protected work, and something that I explicitly do not agree to be re-used, in any way, without my express permission. Unfortunately for me, the law [and the retailers] would laugh themselves silly.
I think we can pretty quickly conclude that the dynamic in the relationship between retailers and consumers [and this is no longer exclusively related to on-line shopping, given the way that CCTV and wifi tracking is now being used to track shoppers around stores] has become seriously imbalanced. When that happens, we rely upon the law to keep the game even and fair. Unfortunately, these retail changes are coincident with extraordinary levels of lobbying, and essentially it pitches private citizens against both the state [because the state wants to spy on us] and corporations [which also want to monitor and track us].
Sadly, I think the chances of our seeing fair and equitable protections for shoppers or service consumers being enacted as law stand less of a chance than the proverbial snowball in hell.
Shame.
more accurate search results
The bigger Google gets, the more time I waste trying to trick its algorithm into not giving me everything-including-the-kitchen-sink results that are anything but "accurate". That seems to be the foundation for most business models these days - exchanging less and less value for more and more of money, data, or whatever.
As for tech companies "robbing us blind", why would we expect them to be any different in that regard from other kinds of corporations?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
There is a gross misunderstanding of wealth in this topic.
The reason personal data is valuable to companies is generally that it can be used to sell that person a product in exchange for the wealth he controls. Companies aren't merely curious. If a person creates no wealth, then eventually the companies are as indifferent to his preferences and habits as they are to those of squirrels. Personal data has value as a path to acquire that person's wealth.
Other kinds of data creation (like computer programming) have been compensated for awhile now. That's part of the traditional economy now.
"Consumer" is not a career path.
-Dave
And even if Wally World is big it's not the sharpest knife in the box breaking new ground, it's a bread and butter shop that sells on low price in bulk. A small shop can't afford to be a bulk retailer without having some really sharp knifes that attracts people.
The sharp stuff in a shop is what's tingling your senses and leads you to get inspired the same way that your senses are tingled by watching a rock climber or other extreme activity compared to watching a middle age person slacking off somewhere - that don't tingle any senses at all.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Errrr, GDPR anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It goes a long way to recognizing people should be in control of what happens to their data and that organisations should safeguard this information. It's a great start.
Publish your private data with a license to restrict access and enable you to limit and monetise others use of your data.
Go well