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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.
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.
By having absolutely no sense of self worth, and also being stupid enough to think that coffee is expensive.
RIght. So where do I sign up?
As long as everyone understands that there is another price being paid (other than cash), I don't have a problem with this.
What is the level of understanding, though? Knowing the mechanics doesn't necessarily imply understanding the impact or risks.
Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable. Much like selling yourself into indenture is illegal, selling and buying personal information needs strong regulation too, like in the EU and other European countries.
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.
The coffee is also poisoned.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
that is all.
I stopped reading at "free". What are we getting for free?
#DeleteFacebook
Of course, I'm an old curmudgeon who still believe that commoditization of personal information is fundamentally wrong and that privacy rights need to be inalienable and untradeable.
This almost sounds like a setup to expose how much your personal data is really worth. Even if its not, escaping into the real world might help people realize the value of their information. Of course, it could cause the real world to go "free" as well where everything is free in exchange for your soul.
I grind my own coffee, and at $11.99 / pound for excellent beans the 15 grams I need for a mug of coffee cost me $0.39. I sometimes buy fairly good (but not super-premium) beans at $4.99 a pound, which means a cup of what you'd get at a typical coffee shop sets me back sixteen cents.
That's good, because I drink a *lot* of coffee.
Recently I discovered a programmable tea urn at the local Asian market that'll keep up to 5 liters of water at just the right temperature for for aeropress, which takes about 100 seconds to do a brew. So I can have a far better cup of coffee than I'd get from a Keurig in just about half a minute more time, at less cost. I reckon I drink about the equivalent of 20 k-cups worth of coffee per day, and if I use the pedestrian bulk beans I'd be saving over $2000/year. Most of the time I use higher quality beans, so I'm saving more like $800.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When anyone can become a college student for $35 a year, we'll talk. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
....please don't ever, ever bitch about your personal information being used commercially.
-Styopa
Are you really able to taste a discernible difference between the two different beans you buy and grind?
Absolutely, but it is certainly easy to obliterate the differences between expensive beans and cheap beans by mishandling them.
It sounds like the coffee you drink is overextracted. Overextraction is common because it's what you get when you economize by using too little coffee and making up for that by brewing too long. The acid flavors extract first, then the sweet ones, then finally the bitter ones. By overextracting dark beans, which are naturally more bitter, you can produce a potent-tasting (although unpleasant) cup of coffee with less coffee. You also get excess bitterness from using water that is at boiling temperatures, beans that are ground too fine or inconsistently, and dirty equipment. It is also possible (although less common) for coffee to be underextracted, which produces a cup which is sour, thin and salty.
I enjoy coffee with cream and even sugar occasionally, but if the only way you can enjoy a pot of coffee is with cream then that coffee was almost certainly mishandled. Coffee is not like tea; certain varities of tea are mean to be consumed with milk and sugars, others not. Any coffee should be enjoyable black.
Making a good cup of coffee isn't rocket science, but it *is* cooking; there's some technique and care involved, and different coffee varieties and roasts require different approaches -- the way you can't really cook fish and steak the same way.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In the UK:
Obtaining a thing of value (product or service) by intentionally providing false information would be Fraudulent misrepresentation. Claiming you'd forgotten your own name might reduce it to Negligent misrepresentation.
Misrepresentation Act 1967