4 ms·

I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those meg

I'm not sure I understand correctly. Are you saying that all the personal user data is in reality not as valuable as everyone says it is? That is, all those megacorps are collecting terabytes of mostly useless data? Then why is this data collected and archived in the first place?

avarun 7y ago
Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.
benreesman 7y ago
I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.
laughinghan 7y ago
Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it. The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach." https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.

avarun 7y ago

Yes, that's exactly what he's saying. It's mostly all collected because it's easier for them to collect it than not to collect it, and nobody is stopping them from collecting it.

benreesman 7y ago

I was never involved in those decisions but I suspect that when you’ve got a multi-dollar CPM and your biggest pain in the ass is pouring concrete and running power fast enough that a few PB of spinning disks are cheap enough that you hang onto it in case you ever find a way to make it useful.

ViViDboarder 7y ago
That sounds logical. It’s also exactly the reason many of us don’t want to give up our information to these companies. There is absolute uncertainty as to how it will be used in the future.

laughinghan 7y ago

Because it costs practically nothing. If the cost is zero and the expected value is greater than zero, then no matter how little value it has it's still rational to collect it. The problem is that the individual bears a very small risk of something very bad happening: "consider the hypothetical case of a gay blogger in Moscow who opens a LiveJournal account in 2004, to keep a private diary. In 2007 LiveJournal is sold to a Russian company, and a few years later—to everyone's surpise—homophobia is elevated to state ideology. Now that blogger has to live with a dark pit of fear in his stomach." https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm The individual of course gets no benefit from the small chance the company can monetize on this data trove. So even though chances are they aren't harmed at all by this data collection, arguably the expected value of the benefit/harm to the individual is negative (harmful). But that doesn't change the data collector's calculation, of course. That's why government regulation is necessary.