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What Would You Pay to Keep Your Digital Footprint 100% Private?

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• paulus_magnus2 9y ago
  The same as in real-world for not be stalked. Stalking is unwanted or obsessive attention by an individual or group towards another person. Stalking behaviors are related to harassment and intimidation and may include following the victim in person or monitoring them.
• sincerely 9y ago
  >(2) No more personalization. This is the opposite of a downside. Please, companies, let me pay you to remove personalization from, say, Google search results. The upsides are basically non-existent for a consumer.
  • intopieces 9y ago
    What is the practical difference between a de-personalized Google and just DuckDuckGo?
    • abakker 9y ago
      All the other services from google, really. If DDG had alternatives to email, docs, spreadsheets, youtube, etc, then it would be more equal.
      • boomboomsubban 9y ago
        Why should those be tied to your search engine?
      • harlanji 9y ago
        Nothing prevents you from creating more accounts, perhaps one per purpose. You're required to provide a phone number for verification, but can use the google voice # of a main account without issue. I'm sure you've thought of this, just a reminder :)
    • gpm 9y ago
      Google has more servers, AI experts, engineers, experience, ... They should in theory be able to provide far better de-personalized search results than DuckDuckGo.
• olivermarks 9y ago
  Answer to headline: Nothing. We should follow Estonia's lead IMO. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-digital-republic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di... 'A tenet of the Estonian system is that an individual owns all information recorded about him or her. Every time a doctor (or a border guard, a police officer, a banker, or a minister) glances at any of Piperal’s secure data online, that look is recorded and reported. Peeping at another person’s secure data for no reason is a criminal offense. “In Estonia, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brother,” a local told me. “You can tell him what to do and maybe also beat him up.”'
  • astura 9y ago
    How is this much different from the Fair Credit Reporting Act+HIPAA in the US other than extending some of the information covered? https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit-reporting-act.pdf https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit-r... >Access to your file is limited. A consumer reporting agency may provide information about you only to people with a valid need -- usually to consider an application with a creditor, insurer, employer, landlord, or other business. The FCRA specifies those with a valid need for access. >You must give your consent for reports to be provided to employers. A consumer reporting agency may not give out information about you to your employer, or a potential employer, without your written consent given to the employer. Written consent generally is not required in the trucking industry.
    • olivermarks 9y ago
      @Astura Estonia are actively enforcing their policy around X-road, the US (where I reside) is full of loopholes exploited by big tech platforms
    • boomboomsubban 9y ago
      It applies to things besides your credit score and your medical records for a start. The FCRA isn't comparable. It's allowing a private agency to collect data without your consent, and then give it to those with a "valid need" without your consent. Only employers have some limitations.
• confounded 9y ago
  I don’t accept the author’s trade-offs. I can have plenty of gratification and personalization on free services like reddit, HN, and Wikipedia, all under semi-disposable pseudonyms which accumulate data, but which I don’t feel threaten my personal privacy much, if at all. It’s Facebook and Google’s fussiness about real names and identities (and desire to become something akin to ultra-invasive credit ratings agencies / the next Equifax) that’s the new part about commercial surveillance, and that creates these trade offs.
  • tabeth 9y ago
    You're mistaken if you think pseudonyms somehow will protect your privacy. Your privacy will be compromised. It's inevitable.
    • pinebox 9y ago
      If pseudonyms don't matter, why does Facebook have such a hard-on for collecting real names (even trying to get people's friends to rat them out)? No, you can still do a lot with compartmentalization. Throwing in the towel just because "on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero" is just looking at the glass as half empty.
      • tabeth 9y ago
        I didn't say they didn't matter. I said they won't protect your privacy, which they won't. Also, what's up with the fictitious quote?
        • khedoros1 9y ago
          > Also, what's up with the fictitious quote? The quote's real (Chuck Palahniuk did write it, after all); the character who said it was just fictitious. They were just using it to say that you're being overly pessimistic.
  • indubitable 9y ago
    Pseudonyms are a fun one. Check out snoopsnoo.com . It's a site that using extremely primitive language parsing to create a profile of Reddit users. It's absolutely unbelievable how much we give away about ourselves when the bits and pieces are collected. Factor in linguistic analysis and I think it's safe to say that the privacy enabled by pseudonyms rapidly approaches 0 as your length of time using that pseudonym grows, even if only on a single site.
• jack6e 9y ago
  > What Would You Pay to Keep Your Digital Footprint 100% Private? The form of the question belies the real problem with our current laws around digital data and privacy: the assumption that digital privacy is not a right and thus requires extra payment to maintain. The question should be: what would you charge a company to access X% of your digital footprint?
  • cyberpunk0 9y ago
    Welcome to capitalism. If it has a name it has a dollar sign. If it can be sold it will result in a race to the bottom until everything is exploited and sucked dry
  • maxsavin 9y ago
    In the US, we pay our rights: taxes.
  • TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    Thanks for helpfully demonstrating that no one reads past the headline. The article barely even hints at the idea that you should be paying in the literal sense for privacy. It is focused entirely on what seemingly useful things are currently enabled by giving companies that engage in Internet tracking free rein with user's data. According to the author, the "price" you will have to pay for privacy is: > 1. No more free services. > 2. No more personalization. > 3. No more instant gratification.
• jasonkostempski 9y ago
  No more "free" services: Not true, advertising can be done without tracking it's only what it is today because it was allowed to happen. Affiliate links were perfect.
  • soared 9y ago
    Advertising is 100x more effective with data. If you want advertising without targeting data you'll end up with a 10x more ads on every page and each will be more intrusive than the last.
    • cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
      Good. My ad blocker was hungry anyway.
    • jasonkostempski 9y ago
      A legally required camera mounted to my chest would would be a 1,000,000,000x more effective. That should never be allowed to happen. Luckily, I know how to make my computer block the digital equivalent of that, but it could have been the default for everyone if standards had prevented the current insanity from ever exiting.
• atomicfiredoll 9y ago
  This really does feel firmly hypothetical. Well I do want my information private, it would have to be 100%. What's the point in paying Facebook or Google for privacy when every other website I encounter, even if for something as simple as shopping or reading a personal blog, is working to build and share a profile of me? I also can't help but feel some amount of distrust seeing companies like Microsoft ask $200 for a product, then inject ads and force telemetry. Paid or not, if companies can sneak in some way to increase the bottom line, some will. This isn't even to mention that they've clearly drank their own Kool-Aid about personalization being a "feature." To me, this feels like an issue issue that business isn't suited to deal with and that requires regulation.
• matte_black 9y ago
  The blood of patriots is the only price worth paying for the right to privacy.
  • 24gttghh 9y ago
    The only price worth paying? Wouldn't an entity paying you to access your information be more worth it to the individual? Or maybe politicians not getting re-elected for not supporting digital privacy be a better "price" to pay?
• zbruhnke 9y ago
  I thought about this in great depth with a company I was working on a few years ago. I built it as a Financial data API and "Oauth for finance" but the ultimate idea was always - "Can I make it so that users can glean real value from owning their own data". Put another way - "What would a world be like where a user could simply sell their data to the highest bidder for the right to buy their business?" This could mean a lot of things to me it meant don't show me ads unless I ask for them and then I'll agree to take offers from all of these providers and I'll choose the best offer to give my business to. It is the reason I honestly don't have Alexa or google home or something else in my home. Because ultimately I believe the system that wins should be one that let's me choose and that gives me value by tying me into any number of providers I wish and not by letting one large conglomerate into my home with only the ecosystem of their choosing. Ultimately I'm not sure if enough people think like me but if you do feel free to drop me a line I'd love to chat! Email is in my profile and I'll be in SF alot more starting in January but also currently reside in Los Angeles
• eveningcoffee 9y ago
  I would pay absolute nothing. That is my right that is being abused. But I would for example pay small fee for an article using anonymised payment method (I do not find subscription model viable).
• nathan_long 9y ago
  > It is the ease and convenience to which we have become so accustomed that keeps us from choosing more private (but also more clunky) user experiences. Often true, but this is a bad example: > Sure, you could turn off your geo-location settings for a taxi app so that it stops tracking your every move, but the hassle of having to manually enter your current location every time you want to use it may feel like too much of an effort to be sustainable. "Tracks your every move" and "needs you to manually enter your location" aren't the only two options. You could have "summon a taxi" button that transmits your current location to a given service one time. The crucial thing is that the user should have control of what they share with whom. That's what privacy means.
  • greggman 9y ago
    iOS (and android?) have the option to only share gps while the app is running. so for the taxi app example you're sharing no more info than you need to really. turn it on, call a cab, cab arrives, close app. The only info shared is your pick up location. Of course the cab itself could share your destination but I don't see how you'd prevent that as that info is also relevant to the taxi
    • norlys 9y ago
      That doesn't solve the problem that Google still constantly knows where I am (as long as my OS is Android). Wasn't there an article hinting that our smartphones even track GPS when it's disabled? Also, I'm quite surprised to live in a time where having to manually type an address is considered a problem.
• zipwitch 9y ago
  I would pay the same that I would pay to avoid being robbed on public roads: a small but reasonable amount in taxes to support law enforcement and safety, or as much as neccessary to leave and move somewhere with safe roads and the fundamental principles that create them.
• readhn 9y ago
  I would not pay a lot (because if i had to pay a lot i would simply reduce my digital footprint) but i would pay something. I'd say 5-10 bucks a month to keep my digital tracks in my own cloud or on devices i physically control and no one else.
• baxtr 9y ago
  It really depends on what people could potentially do with my data. Maybe I’m too naive right now, but what’s the worst case? (Assuming we’re talking about corporates. I don’t think it’s reasonable to suspect it’ll be possible to pay governments to keep data private)
• soared 9y ago
  For those commentors who think digital privacy is a basic human right and should be protected by their goverment: Does that mean you'd knowingly bankrupt facebook, google, gmail, youtube, etc? You absolutely cannot assume that could just seamlessly switch to a payment model and everything would be fine. In Colorado they simply cannot convince the public to pass a law allowing liquor/beer stores in grocery sales. The public doesn't want to knowingly condemn every mom and pop liquor store because safeway would easily put them out of business. Do you really think the public would knowingly condemn facebook, twitter, google, youtube, etc.? (Fb/google/etc are not mom and pop, but the comparison still holds some merit)
  • khalilravanna 9y ago
    My thinking for the Colorado mom-pop liquor store example is: Texas is a state which allows beer (no liquor with an ABV above wine, I believe). Liquor stores there seem to do just fine with the caveat that they have to be "real liquor stores". Meaning, they can't just sell Coors and Budweiser, they have to specialize and carry the newest/hottest craft beers and employ a staff that can give recommendations. If I wanted a Miller High Life or a well known craft beer like Dogfishhead I would just go to HEB (large grocery store chain) otherwise if I wanted more of a selection I'd hit up a "real" liquor store. So yeah, sure those mom-pop places will go out of business if they don't adapt. But, hey, if you run a shitty business, you should expect it to fail, right? Analogously, if there are products that offer the same utility of FB/Google/etc with the added benefit of not farming out everyone's personal information, they should totally be bankrupted. They're making a worse product. That being said, me arguing against your analogy falls apart here. Laws being passed in Colorado means, mom-pop's will be shuttered because other businesses will canabalize them with better services. In the case of passing laws for digital privacy, Google, et. al, would be condemned because their products would become illegal, not because there's a better competitor putting them out of business. That being said, I'm sure they'd have some sort of timeline to change their products to fit the laws. My albeit hazy understanding of the EU privacy shield laws leads me to believe that was the case there. tl;dr: I'd personally be fine seeing Google/et. al being forced to adapt their products due to "privacy as a right" regulation changes. Within reason of course. I think they should have a period of time where they can make their products fit such regulations.
• sharemywin 9y ago
  The problem is one sided contracts, black box, no transparency, one size fits all solutions. The whole point of free markets is choice but that's not really what's evolving.
• singularity2001 9y ago
  It all depends on the likelihood of risk: If we were certain that hackers will get hold of all our online data and use it to completely compromise our identity and company we SHOULD pay hundreds of thousands of Dollars! If we are worried that our wife will find some compromising information on Facebook then we should pay nothing and instead explain to her. If insurance companies will use our data to raise their fees our protecting should be worth at least the difference. If trump or some evil genius inside the NSA somehow turns the US into a dictatorship and use our data to to send our children to concentration camps (quite unlikely but not impossible) we should run to the bank and ask for as much credit as possible to save our privacy. So to average the above risks we should probably pay >2% of our income for privacy. That would be 10% of military expenses.
• UncleEntity 9y ago
  > Privacy Badger detected 19 potential trackers on this page. Trying to decide if that fits in the irony category or not...
• frogperson 9y ago
  Who exactly would I be paying for the privilage?
• synicalx 9y ago
  If you're paying a third party to keep you private, then in paying them you've already breached your privacy because they need to know who you are in order to; 1. Accept your payment (arguably bitcoin solves this, but it has to be purchased, and also accepted by the vendor). 2. Work out what your digital footprint is
• oliwarner 9y ago
  The real question is why we so happily give away personal, even sensitive information to companies that explicitly —perhaps not explicitly enough— say they exploit that data to monetise their service. When you demand zero-cost email, social networks, search engines, IP-telephony, etc, you have to expect that any —if not all— data you hand over is going to be used against you. That's most traditionally the Amazon/Ebay model, guiding you into buying something you don't need, or a SKU with a higher ticket price, but as we're seeing recently, there are also parties spending money to insidiously influence the sociopolitical news and opinion you get to see. Both Facebook, Google and Twitter all boast about their ability to target adverts and "promoted" posts. And it's not enough to pay for a search engine, or shunt over to a social network nobody uses. If you want free of this, you have to make painful choices, like getting you and yours off Facebook and Google and onto services either you control or you know aren't being mined and adjusted. Getting the hell away from Windows as it tiptoes around privacy-hell. Unfortunately, because people have neither the appetite or technical know-how to run or audit their own social networks, what seems more likely is we're just going to chase people off these "liberal" platforms onto ones with even stronger tints.