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No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I think the difference is the obvious exchange of value (money for bread)

by mLuby 8y ago

No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I think the difference is the obvious exchange of value (money for bread) in the first case suggests that's the entirety of the transaction. So the baker additionally "taking" the customer's data feels like stealing. But in the second case, it feels more acceptable that the exchange is (data for bread) since we all know there's no free lunch. There's a reason when you give someone something for free they ask "what's the catch?".

josho 8y ago
In my case I’m not buying bread nor being given the bread. I just browsed the neighboring store and this baker still has those details on me. Ie. I use no google products. Yet by just surfing the web and being tracked through google’s products or by emailing people with gmail, google has almost as much information on me as if I were their user.
est31 8y ago
Mobile phone carriers take your money and still sell your data. Same for some credit card companies.
FiveSquared 8y ago
And the lack of clarity. The People You May Know things on FB is due to contacts being shared, which is pressed into the user. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why...
tux1968 8y ago
But FB is not giving anything away for free. They are selling your attention on to advertisers. While it's not a cash transaction between you and FB, it is a barter agreement with you. It's not correct to cast FB in the role of selfless baker giving away free bread.
- delish 8y ago
  The parent's example accounts for this. Gratis, you use Facebook; they sell your information. That's why people, before they hear about Facebook's revenue model, ask, "What's the catch?"
  - tux1968 8y ago
    No. You use Facebook, they already make money by providing access to your eyeballs to advertisers. Selling your information is an additional take. In either case, all I was saying is that the analogy with a baker giving you food to stay alive for free, is a little too generous to be applied to FB. Maybe it's a bit more like a baker that only gives you free bread once you've come to his store to shake hands and listen to the sales pitch of 10 of his business friends. And then after all that he still quietly spies on you and sells whatever he can glean about you, to people you've never met.
CivBase 8y ago
> No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I disagree. If he is not transparent about what he does with his customers privacy, he is still a "bad neighbor" as the OP put it. Even if he makes everyone sign a contract which explains his actions before giving them the bread (GDPR-style), the transaction would still be sketchy to me. IMO, to be as fair as possible to the customer, the contract would have to be very clear and concise. Otherwise, the wording of the contract could easily take advantage of the customer's lack of time, short attention span, or poor reading comprehension.
ludocode 8y ago
> No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I would say that's even worse. By giving bread away for free, he's making it impossible for other bakeries to compete unless they do the same thing. This is why there are no serious competitors to services like Facebook or GMail. It's impossible to compete with free unless you monetize the data. I say this as someone who pays for ProtonMail. Do you think it's possible to convince friends and family to start paying for email as well when they already get it for free?
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  I refuse to believe it is impossible to earn money by showing ads without allowing full scale tracking. It’s just easier and more profitable to not care.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    It’s just easier and more profitable to not care Easier yes, more profitable no. Selling direct advertising is the most profitable of all: the money all goes to the site without 20 trackers and 8 seconds of auction-waiting on each of your pages, resulting in a better experience for everybody.
    - thekyle 8y ago
      > the money all goes to the site without 20 trackers and 8 seconds of auction-waiting on each of your pages, resulting in a better experience for everybody This doesn't prove that direct selling is more profitable. Sure there is no ad network taking a 40% cut but sites also need to run their own in house sales staff then.
      - rhizome 8y ago
        I'm sure an enterprising programmer or two could whip up a self-serve ad facility the same as they have with any other ecommerce plugin. And I'm pretty sure that per-unit it is indeed more profitable.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
And yet when I buy products on Amazon, I still get tracked. (And to boot, they actually seem to be the hardest ones to opt out of tracking, or at least turn off the user-visible personalized recommendations.)
chrischen 8y ago
I don’t think the distinction is in whether or not the bread is free, it’s in whether or not that the data collection is disclosed as a non-monetary cost to the bread.
Negitivefrags 8y ago
"the customer's data" I have a question. How is it the customers data? The data is about a transaction that happened in the bakers store. It's all information that was plain for the baker to see. The baker did the work to collect it. In fact, all the information is about the interaction directly with the baker. How is this not the bakers data? Can someone walk into my store and somehow give me something that belongs to them against my will? And then impose requirements on me about what I can do with it? Or it only belongs to them at the point I write it down? Now I start to agree that there are concerns at the point in a computing scenario when people are gathering data that isn't a part of the transaction actually taking place without the person knowing. But shouldn't that be on the browsers to deal with?
- AlexandrB 8y ago
  > I have a question. How is it the customers data? The data is about a transaction that happened in the bakers store. Translating this analogy back to tech inverts your argument: It's my phone, and it's my computer. Thus any data collected from or generated on these devices is mine. I'm just letting a company use these hardware resources temporarily to deliver a service.
- deogeo 8y ago
  I refuse to look at being informed upon from a purely capitalist perspective. A perspective that reduces such essential and intangible concepts like privacy, down to mere questions of property - what belongs to whom. You can argue all you want that nothing was 'taken' from you, yet at the end of the day you will not be able to take a single step without your corporate masters knowing about it.
- bryan_w 8y ago
  That's exactly what I've been saying. If you actually cared about your privacy, you don't need a cookie law popup on every page, you just need to get the browser to stop sending cookies. Mozilla and apple claim to want to protect your privacy, but their browsers continue to sell you down the river

by mLuby 8y ago

josho 8y ago

In my case I’m not buying bread nor being given the bread. I just browsed the neighboring store and this baker still has those details on me. Ie. I use no google products. Yet by just surfing the web and being tracked through google’s products or by emailing people with gmail, google has almost as much information on me as if I were their user.

est31 8y ago

Mobile phone carriers take your money and still sell your data. Same for some credit card companies.

FiveSquared 8y ago

And the lack of clarity. The People You May Know things on FB is due to contacts being shared, which is pressed into the user. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why-facebooks-people-you-may-know-makes-some-weird-suggestions/521264001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/07/30/why...

tux1968 8y ago

But FB is not giving anything away for free. They are selling your attention on to advertisers. While it's not a cash transaction between you and FB, it is a barter agreement with you. It's not correct to cast FB in the role of selfless baker giving away free bread.

delish 8y ago
The parent's example accounts for this. Gratis, you use Facebook; they sell your information. That's why people, before they hear about Facebook's revenue model, ask, "What's the catch?"
- tux1968 8y ago
  No. You use Facebook, they already make money by providing access to your eyeballs to advertisers. Selling your information is an additional take. In either case, all I was saying is that the analogy with a baker giving you food to stay alive for free, is a little too generous to be applied to FB. Maybe it's a bit more like a baker that only gives you free bread once you've come to his store to shake hands and listen to the sales pitch of 10 of his business friends. And then after all that he still quietly spies on you and sells whatever he can glean about you, to people you've never met.

CivBase 8y ago

> No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I disagree. If he is not transparent about what he does with his customers privacy, he is still a "bad neighbor" as the OP put it. Even if he makes everyone sign a contract which explains his actions before giving them the bread (GDPR-style), the transaction would still be sketchy to me. IMO, to be as fair as possible to the customer, the contract would have to be very clear and concise. Otherwise, the wording of the contract could easily take advantage of the customer's lack of time, short attention span, or poor reading comprehension.

ludocode 8y ago

> No, but someone giving bread away for free and doing that wouldn't be so clearly bad. I would say that's even worse. By giving bread away for free, he's making it impossible for other bakeries to compete unless they do the same thing. This is why there are no serious competitors to services like Facebook or GMail. It's impossible to compete with free unless you monetize the data. I say this as someone who pays for ProtonMail. Do you think it's possible to convince friends and family to start paying for email as well when they already get it for free?

tinus_hn 8y ago
I refuse to believe it is impossible to earn money by showing ads without allowing full scale tracking. It’s just easier and more profitable to not care.
- rhizome 8y ago
  It’s just easier and more profitable to not care Easier yes, more profitable no. Selling direct advertising is the most profitable of all: the money all goes to the site without 20 trackers and 8 seconds of auction-waiting on each of your pages, resulting in a better experience for everybody.
  - thekyle 8y ago
    > the money all goes to the site without 20 trackers and 8 seconds of auction-waiting on each of your pages, resulting in a better experience for everybody This doesn't prove that direct selling is more profitable. Sure there is no ad network taking a 40% cut but sites also need to run their own in house sales staff then.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      I'm sure an enterprising programmer or two could whip up a self-serve ad facility the same as they have with any other ecommerce plugin. And I'm pretty sure that per-unit it is indeed more profitable.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

And yet when I buy products on Amazon, I still get tracked. (And to boot, they actually seem to be the hardest ones to opt out of tracking, or at least turn off the user-visible personalized recommendations.)

chrischen 8y ago

I don’t think the distinction is in whether or not the bread is free, it’s in whether or not that the data collection is disclosed as a non-monetary cost to the bread.

Negitivefrags 8y ago

"the customer's data" I have a question. How is it the customers data? The data is about a transaction that happened in the bakers store. It's all information that was plain for the baker to see. The baker did the work to collect it. In fact, all the information is about the interaction directly with the baker. How is this not the bakers data? Can someone walk into my store and somehow give me something that belongs to them against my will? And then impose requirements on me about what I can do with it? Or it only belongs to them at the point I write it down? Now I start to agree that there are concerns at the point in a computing scenario when people are gathering data that isn't a part of the transaction actually taking place without the person knowing. But shouldn't that be on the browsers to deal with?

AlexandrB 8y ago
> I have a question. How is it the customers data? The data is about a transaction that happened in the bakers store. Translating this analogy back to tech inverts your argument: It's my phone, and it's my computer. Thus any data collected from or generated on these devices is mine. I'm just letting a company use these hardware resources temporarily to deliver a service.
deogeo 8y ago
I refuse to look at being informed upon from a purely capitalist perspective. A perspective that reduces such essential and intangible concepts like privacy, down to mere questions of property - what belongs to whom. You can argue all you want that nothing was 'taken' from you, yet at the end of the day you will not be able to take a single step without your corporate masters knowing about it.
bryan_w 8y ago
That's exactly what I've been saying. If you actually cared about your privacy, you don't need a cookie law popup on every page, you just need to get the browser to stop sending cookies. Mozilla and apple claim to want to protect your privacy, but their browsers continue to sell you down the river