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I put all my personal data on eBay
- Zekio 8y agoDidn't know Ebay suddenly allowed digital goods again
- Keverw 8y agoHe could probably be putting it on a CD, DVD or USB drive and mailing it out. But looks like only shipping to the UK... Says "May not post to United States" for me.
- Haegin 8y agoHe's supplying it on a one time USB drive and only offering collection in person from London, UK.
- joering2 8y agoAlways did, you just have to state you own copyrights: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-items/digitally-delivered-goods-policy?id=4289 https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite... When you sell digitally delivered goods on eBay, you must include a statement in your listing that says you legally own the content or are authorized to sell it.
- megamindbrian2 8y agoI am planning on doing this with my medical record.
- bredren 8y agoWhy stop there? Let's see someone auction their whole genome sequence.
- codetrotter 8y agoI imagine the first person to do that would get a very low amount of money in return. Then in the future we will look back at that person like we do at the guy that bought a pizza for 10,000 BTC. Like, someone had to do it, and it wasn't worth much at the time, and if he didn't do it that way he probably would have done it some other way, but still the feeling remains that he could have gotten rich instead.
- cjbprime 8y agoThere are already hundreds of people sharing their whole genome sequence publicly. http://www.personalgenomes.org/ http://www.personalgenomes.org/
- _o_ 8y agoOr credit card details ;)
- sunsetwifi 8y agoSomewhat related: https://marketplace.streamr.com/ https://marketplace.streamr.com/ Streamr is a marketplace to sell your data streams (vs static data in this case).
- dddddaviddddd 8y agoThis type of data typically had low individual and high collective value.
- jacquesm 8y agoSelling your personal data as an individual is not going to work (yes, I understand this is a joke posting). If your data has to be re-imported into the various systems that normally exchange consumer profiles (advertising platforms for instance) it will be a net loss, besides that the chances of you hitting one of the properties is nil. So without the association between your profile and your online presence that data has little value on its own and as a single profile. But in bulk, with a correct association between your profile, your recent online queries, expenditures, location and so on it becomes valuable.
- weinzierl 8y agoFully agree and in addition selling your data would only be useful if it contained enough identifiers to unambiguously tie it to a single identity. But this data would most probably enable the buyer to impersonate the seller. Not a good idea as OP obviously realized himself and hopefully redacted the data in addition to his disclaimer: > What’s Not Included > Permission to steal my identity and open a sweat shop. On the other hand, the bar for identity theft is so low, that it probably wouldn't matter.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoI had a similar idea to sell peoples personal data in bulk with their permission and then give people back a portion of a monetary award. Then people would bid for certain properties about the personal data. I was inspired to do something like this from the below article from the ACM https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223045-a-theory-of-pricing-private-data/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/12/223045-a-theory-of-pr... . One of the issues I found was while I could easily charge people for the sale of large amounts of personal data the way to pay out would probably be in some kind of ACH with a minimum amount of money to accumulate for that.
- tramGG 8y agoThere are some people[0][1][2] want to sell your data and use your data to train ML. [0] https://synapse.ai/ https://synapse.ai/ [1] httsp://datum.org/ [2] http://doct.ai/ http://doct.ai/
- yeukhon 8y agoHow do I know you are not keeping the money to yourself? Also data without government official id is not convincing enough.
- scary 8y agoIt's scary how much information we actually have out there without knowing.
- spodek 8y agoWhoever wants it already has it.
- simple10 8y agoThere are quite a few new blockchain projects[1] aiming to directly remunerate users for data. They're essentially trying to shift the middleman share of the data market into the pockets of the actual data owners – the people. Advertisers typically aren't interested in single person (personal) data. The minimum size aggregate audience is 1M people to have any advertising value. [1] https://datum.org/ https://datum.org/ https://wibson.org/ https://wibson.org/ https://datawallet.com/ https://datawallet.com/
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoStaying with the 'I'm just making a point' aspect, what portion of the proceeds are you sharing with your family for disclosing their addresses? Or have they all signed waivers?
- hsnewman 8y agoSeems to be self aggrandizement/someone who wants to market themselves...I'll just move on.
- wybiral 8y agoAside from the fact that it's a joke... Isn't that what social media is for in the first place?
- anonnel 8y agoLet’s normalize our exploitation with humor.
- Chilinot 8y agoI wouldn't say it's normalizing the exploitation. It's putting it in perspective. My first thought when I read this post was "Why would you do that? That seems really stupid!", but then remebered, this is what we are already doing essentially. Only on a larger scale, and hidden from view.
- anonnel 8y agoAnd to think - if you didn’t have such a good memory, metaphors like this would be lost on you!
- squarefoot 8y agoThis is going to get interesting only when someone offers a good sample of blood with no strings attached (that is, you're free to clone me or even use my DNA to plant evidence for a crime). I admit an extremely generous offer would make it tempting to me.
- tenryuu 8y ago> Loads more, like who I vote for, my boss’s name, and where all my family live. So their selling other people's data too?
- huebnerob 8y agoSo crazy it just might work
- jacquesm 8y agoEvery time someone on FB shares a picture with other people in it they are doing just that.
- dymk 8y agoTIL when I tag a friend on Facebook I'm also tagging their political beliefs, work history, favorite food, and venereal disease status.
- jacquesm 8y ago> So their selling other people's data too? I was answering that particular question. Either you didn't get it or you pretended to not get it, hard to tell the difference from here.
- kelnos 8y agoWell, yes. Say you tag a friend in a photo at a political fundraiser, protest, etc. Or you tag them posing by their company's logo, or at a booth their company is running at a trade show. The context of a photo matters, and FB can extract an awful lot of information out of seemingly-innocuous things these days.
- olifrost 8y agoAsked mum and dad and they're all cool with telling people where they live. I live with them anyway.
- amasad 8y agoI just finished reading Radical Markets (http://a.co/7cNafHl http://a.co/7cNafHl) and it's funny to see this HN story because the last chapter was about "data labor" where the authors claim that we're all working for FB/GOOG/etc to generate data to train the AIs that makes profit for these companies. And that it's time for "data workers of the world to unite" into a "data labor movement" so we can get paid for our work (I found it kind of silly but worth thinking about). This assumes that a single unit of data (say a person's personal data as in the OP) is worth something on it's own. The counter-argument to that, which is also presented in the book, can be summarized as the resolution to Adam Smith's "diamond-water" paradox (roughly, why is it that while water is more useful, in terms of survival, than diamonds, diamonds command a higher price in the market). The answer is that the price is determined by the marginal value of the last unit of good available rather than the average value gained by its consumption. So while the average value of personal data is high (you can build a service like Google or Facebook) the single unit value (as in the OP) is low. I'm more convinced by this side of the argument.
- jessewmc 8y agoI'm struggling a bit with your second paragraph. I think there's something interesting here, but I'm not quite clear on your argument. Data is the opposite of the paradox of value, in that one person's data is completely useless, but each additional person worth of data adds a greater and greater marginal utility (probably not linearly so, maybe an s-curve or something). Is this what you are saying? I haven't read the book you link so perhaps that is why I misunderstand.
- amasad 8y agoYou have it mostly right. Thanks for clarifying my sloppy writing here. I just wouldn't say "completely useless," especially at the start of the s-curve but then at the shoulder of the s-curve you have diminishing returns.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago> I found it kind of silly but worth thinking about This was my reaction to 95% of the book. Until Radical Markets, I'd never read a nonfiction book that I found so absurd and detached from reality and yet provoked so much useful thought. I worry that others may not realize how detached it is, and that the net effect may not be positive, but we'll see.
- verelo 8y ago> "Permission to steal my identity and open a sweat shop." What if I just do one of those things? This guy needs a lawyer.
- nneonneo 8y agoContext: this fellow (Oli Frost) is something of a social media satirist, having previously built LifeFaker (http://lifefaker.com/ http://lifefaker.com/, a place to buy your way to Instagram fame), and Flopstarter (http://flopstarter.com/ http://flopstarter.com/, a Kickstarter clone for terrible ideas). I found the latest idea pretty funny - actually trying to monetize your data instead of letting companies do it for you is kind of a cute turnabout. In any case, please do view this project as an artistic endeavour - a work of satire.
- saintPirelli 8y agoI wish he had an RSS feed.
- olifrost 8y agohttp://olifro.st/feed.xml http://olifro.st/feed.xml
- saintPirelli 8y agoCheers!
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago> instead of letting companies do it for you Yay, it's 1999, and disintermediation is the word. P.S. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disintermediation&year_start=1900&year_end=2018&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdisintermediation%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=disintermediat...
- zehnfischer 8y agoI think it's real data about is actual life though. Kinda blurrs the line
- rdiddly 8y agolifefaker - That one was like staring point blank down the throat of a beast that eats human futility and status-jockeying, and in the darkened distance you can faintly hear the tortured howling of a million lost souls... in other words, mission accomplished!
- zceee12 8y agoHey @olifrost, presumably this contains personally identifiable information of several individuals connected to you - are you seeking their individual consent too?
- choward 8y agoWhy should he? I don't have a Facebook account and yet people post pictures of me without my consent.
- irregular-john 8y agoAbsolutely a serious question here: what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit? These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want. Providing those services is not free, and yet the prevailing sentiment across the internet seems to be, "Wow, I can't believe FB was using my data to sell me ads!"
- cm2012 8y agoI don't understand this either. The big ad companies have a huge incentive to keep your data secret, so only they can serve you ads. The big privacy danger will always be the government through the ISPs.
- white-flame 8y agoFor one, it pigeonholes your internet experience. Systems like this basically take the simplest, stereotyped, one-note view of you from a snapshot of your online activity, and constantly projects that judgment back at you. Buy a microwave oven on Amazon, for example, and now you're seeing microwaves everywhere. If you browse Youtube with cookies enabled, it's a terribly limited experience compared to with cookies blocked. The recommendations are circular within the topics you've browsed and never expose you to the broad content out there. It's a much better experience when recommendations are simply associated with the video you're currently watching, instead of from your viewing history. The data selling effect causes this sort of thing to percolate among your entire web experience. Another is simply monetization of the self without being part of that direct monetization stream. To some people, if actual money is made off them, it seems unfair they don't get a cut. Receiving services doesn't suffice in those people's minds. Many people are fine with sites selling ad space & what's being viewed, but are not fine with their personal information being attached to it, for basic privacy concerns. So, of course, there's the Big Brother aspect which is socially unhealthy, and has chilling effects on freedom of expression. Obviously, there is strong, negatively associated generational memory still in play from places like North Korea and Nazi Germany, where people are/were constantly spied on for "incorrect" beliefs and statements. Certainly the personal data collection & warehousing portion of this industry can evoke similar fears here. People have already experienced negative effects like ending up on no-fly lists for zero understandable reason, presumably because of government snooping with false positives or incorrect association with similarly-named people. Imagine if every time you went to a store, a federal agent followed you around with a clipboard with 2 columns labeled "Terrorist?" and "Child predator?". For every item you looked at, the agent would make marks evaluating how much that reflects one of the two columns. You're an upstanding citizen with zero affiliation to those categories, yet marks are being made. That's what online surveillance (for whatever reason, including PII-linked advertising) feels like to many. Even if the columns are "only" political affiliation or touchy social issues, the same response can be had.
- jmcomets 8y ago> Condition: Used Very nice touch.
- aw3c2 8y ago*Facebook data
- mcdowall 8y agoJaron Lainer - Who Owns the Future is a great read on the topic of owning and monetising ones data.
- z3t4 8y agoThis is an interesting thought experience. What is all this data actually worth ? How can you monetize it ?
- mortdeus 8y agoI actually think this is going to be the next big thing. Some sort of data broker app that helps users market their own data for a commission. Like an app that can look at the data and basically say, "okay, so judging by your data, we think you are a big fan of Nike products? Is this something you would like us to market on your behalf and if so would you like to make this data more valuable to advertisers (and yourself) by filling out a survey that provides a better understanding of how important this product is to you?
- mortdeus 8y agoLike Google surveys that doesn't suck because it only pays in Google Play credit.
- nneonneo 8y agoOK but why wouldn't you cut out the user as a middleman, and just market to the user directly? If I knew you were a fan of Nike, I could just sell that to Nike directly instead of asking you to in a roundabout fashion. As many people have observed, the current digital economy really already facilitates you monetizing your data, by allowing you to have access to innumerable resources for free. Those resources don't cost zero to operate, but you pay for them with your data.
- laser 8y agoHave you seen https://datacoup.com/ https://datacoup.com/ ? They've been around for awhile, and I used them for awhile, until I decided the $1 or w/e I was getting per month wasn't really worth it to me, given that I had no idea where my data was going.
- kizer 8y agoThe idea of selling information you choose directly to advertisers, intentionally, is much healthier than Facebook / Google etc spending tons of time inferring shit about you.
- djhaskin987 8y agoOver $100 so far with five days left
- nathancahill 8y agoSpin off the classic joke: Identity theft? I've had my identity on eBay for a year and no one wants it!
- foolinaround 8y agoA good reference in this context would be www.datacoup.com, which allows one to monetize their data in a safe manner.
- lifthrasiir 8y agoThat reminds me of a (satirical) personal data exchange website [1] which criticized a lot of personal data exposure incidents in Korea. Most amusingly, the website, which had absolutely no actual personal data or functions (and clearly indicated it's a joke in the first click), was blocked by the South Korean government. [1] http://trademyinfo.libsora.so/ http://trademyinfo.libsora.so/ (in Korean) [2] https://libsora.so/posts/trade-my-info-warning-or-kr/ https://libsora.so/posts/trade-my-info-warning-or-kr/ (in Korean)
- lotusko 8y agobehind this is the question of morality,I think.
- slim 8y agoIt's considered an infringement of GDPR. eBay should take it down
- linker3000 8y agoHow do you believe this is infringing the GDPR? IANAL, but... Ebay are processing the data as instructed by the data subject (Art 6. 1a) for the fulfillment of a contract to sell the data (Art 6. 2b). https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/
- svilen_dobrev 8y agowe're being comoditized. Either as becoming end layer in a tech stack, or a supplier to an aggregator.. all the same.
- borlum 8y ago@olifro do you ship internationally?
- fuadbest 8y agoI want oreo update s7 adge for free please help me
- HeavyStorm 8y agoRaw data? No value in that.
- paulpauper 8y agodamn..it's starting to hockeystick. and these are pounds so it's like $400 now. Reminds me of the the million dollar homepage and other gimmicks that get a lot of money and attention initially and then fail when replicated.
- dznodes 8y agoIf you tried to sell your on ATM number and PIN or SSN# and Credit Card Credentials, your Ebay account would be shut down in less than 24hrs. You would be guilty of "identity theft" for not adequately protecting your own identity. (i.e. credit worthiness)
- tsbertalan 8y agoA comic that I assume was inspired by this stunt: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/free-love https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/free-love
- stefek99 8y agoYes: http://jenniferlynmorone.com/ http://jenniferlynmorone.com/