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Cafe in Providence, Rhode Island Serves Free Coffee To Students Who Provide Personal Data; Participants May Receive Info From Cafe's Corporate Sponsors (npr.org)
An anonymous reader shares an NPR report: Shiru Cafe looks like a regular coffee shop. Inside, machines whir, baristas dispense caffeine and customers hammer away on laptops. But all of the customers are students, and there's a reason for that. At Shiru Cafe, no college ID means no caffeine. "We definitely have some people that walk in off the street that are a little confused and a little taken aback when we can't sell them any coffee," said Sarah Ferris, assistant manager at the Shiru Cafe branch in Providence, R.I., located near Brown University. Ferris will turn away customers if they're not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas. According to Shiru's website: "We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee." The source article additionally explores privacy aspects of the business. The cafe, which is owned by Japanese company Enrission, says it shares general, aggregate data such as student majors and expected graduation years.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas. According to Shiru's website: "We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee." The source article additionally explores privacy aspects of the business. The cafe, which is owned by Japanese company Enrission, says it shares general, aggregate data such as student majors and expected graduation years.
As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
I stopped reading at "free coffee". How can I get in on this?
Just send me all your personal data, social security number and dog's name and I will up moderate your next slashdot comment for free!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It works fine for bookface and Alphabet. The coffee shop can probably re-sell the data repeatedly.
I would go with using the socially available information for someone else. I mean free coffee is worth that much effort on my part.
... dumb/desperate enough to voluntarily do this.
Ivy League college students.
We're doomed.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
We make that trade everywhere else. Might as well get some tangible goods for it.
I would gladly exchange some slightly poisoned personal info for some free coffee. :)
(Profit!)
I can't help but imagine that there is some kind of "advertising bubble" like a stock bubble, that is going on here. Is advertising *really* that valuable? I see ads, and they influence my purchases, and that is money to be made. (Well, shifted, since no new good was created.) So if they know my birth date and favorite color, they can target ads to me better. But how much better does that influence my purchases compared to the original ad they showed me? How much more money is there to be made from the more targeted ad? Is it worth a cent? A dollar? Ten dollars? Do advertisers really pay real dollars for that? Will companies really pay more for those targeted ads? Do they really really turn into profits somewhere?
I wonder if advertisers are using the concept of "targeted" ads to jack up advertising prices to the point where the ROI is not sustainable. I am hoping that it will turn out that targeted ads are not much better than regular ads, and there is a market "crash" that happens, and suddenly personal data becomes worthless.
"Weep for the future Na'Toth. Weep for us all."
that is all.
Name (fine)
Phone number (work)
Email (throwaway I use for orders)
Major (sure)
DOB (sure, year is correct, but month and day are made up)
You ask me for data, I'll give it to you. It may not be accurate, is all. Because you have given me no incentive to provide accurate data, and I don't trust you. After all, this is about coffee, not something important. You get what you could have looked up anyway.
See how they like it. :)
[($)]
Brown...
Coffee...
Bullshit...
Do you see the pattern, here?
This is obviously financed by UPS.
#DeleteFacebook
Since these Ivy Leaguers may be involved in writing some kind of privacy policies or legislation that gets imposed upon the rest of us.
...to see just how little society values its data.
The western world is sort of appalled at only serving one set of people.
Isn't this discrimination?
"To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. "
Concentrations? Well, instead of Café, they should have named it 'Camp' and perhaps offer a free id tattoo?
But now since we have Godwin out of the way, does that mean they have their data for life and the students get coffee for life?
I don't know if it's anymore discriminatory than Costco selling only to Costco members.
When anyone can become a college student for $35 a year, we'll talk. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Minorities are less likely to attend college, so there might be something there, in theory. That said, in practice, the sorts of people who hang around in coffee shops all day tend to be hipsters, and I'm pretty sure that's not a protected class.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Is cost what determines if something is discriminatory?
Can I rent a dorm room at a public college campus without being a student?
So they say they release aggregate data...but they are collecting phone numbers.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
....please don't ever, ever bitch about your personal information being used commercially.
-Styopa
No, but it is one fairly straightforward way to prove discrimination. Minorities statistically make less money on average than people in the majority (whatever that might mean in a given region of the world). Therefore, anything that costs a lot of money will probably be rarer among minorities, statistically. Therefore, one might reasonably argue that tying an otherwise unrelated service to such an expensive thing (in this case, being in college) is prima facie discriminatory until proven otherwise by some other plausible explanation for why such tying is necessary.
That "otherwise unrelated" part is critically important, of course. No one in his or her right mind would claim that Apple is discriminating against minorities for not making iOS available on low-end Android hardware, because iOS depends on the hardware, and there's a sizable cost involved in making it work on other hardware. But clearly it isn't harder or more expensive to serve coffee to non-students, nor is there any other obvious reason for the tying other than that the sponsor is only willing to pay for the personal information of college students. And I doubt that would be considered sufficient grounds for tying the two together (no pun intended).
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
... since America is sharing the Dream with Japan.
So, fuck you very much mr president.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
" Beware of Greeks bearing gifts "
Wow. Based on this: Name: Amedeo Avogadro D.O.B 23/06/1996 Concentration: Chemistry Phone Number: 602-(221-0023) - (6.022 x 10^23) Email Address: themole@molecule.com They are giving away PII information. All they need is a social security number and they have enough PII to open bank accounts in the students name. What a scam! It will be interesting to see How many of these students eventually fall victim to identity theft.
There are way too many people out there who would sell their soul (or freedom) for a freebie.
Listen, loud and clear - nothing is free . . . . except salvation, and too few are interested in that.
Read the sentence until the end, it's not free coffee.
"Free Coffee To Students Who Provide Personal Data"
That's not free.
aaaaaaa
By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas.
I'd like to imagine someone trying to go in there and telling them their interests are only "porn" and "prostitutes."
Then find out all the info you talked about... they went and sold. :)
[($)]