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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.
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.
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.
If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.
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.
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.***
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