4 ms·

This is all a form of privacy arbitrage. Users are trading their privacy in return for access to content at no $$ cost. The problem is that the deal is not full

This is all a form of privacy arbitrage. Users are trading their privacy in return for access to content at no $$ cost. The problem is that the deal is not fully transparent to the end user. The amount of privacy they are actually trading is far higher than they imagine. The Blacklight tool is great in that it gives a user visibility into the actual privacy cost of a given website. Whereas they maybe thought their general interest in a topic was the only thing traded, they can now see in how much detail the tracking goes. Far beyond what most likely anticipated.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago
You didn't make the complete argument. The problem isn't just that users are not aware of exactly how much privacy they give up. Even if the user knows exactly, you get a sub-optimal Nash equilibria like scenario. The problem is that * the user perceives that giving up a few details about themselves doesn't seem like it would benefit the ad company that much. This is the marginal benefit (to the ad company) per user. * the company builds a database of user data and gets some total benefit. From this you calculate the average benefit per user. The problem is that the average benefit per user is much bigger than the marginal benefit per user. So each user doesn't see the danger, but collectively there is a big problem.
- judge2020 6y ago
  But certainly, in some contexts, the user benefit isn't marginal at all. People know YT tracks their habits and shows them ads that are sometimes extremely specific to what they do both online and in the real world, but they still will use YT since the lure of an ad-supported platform that gives you access to billions of hours of {entertaining | educational | relaxing | etc} content instantly. Search is also extremely useful and accurate for 99% of people and the tracking is probably as a viable trade-off for access to it (although most will use adblock on desktop), although the problem of most people not knowing the full extent of their Tracking still persists.

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

You didn't make the complete argument. The problem isn't just that users are not aware of exactly how much privacy they give up. Even if the user knows exactly, you get a sub-optimal Nash equilibria like scenario. The problem is that * the user perceives that giving up a few details about themselves doesn't seem like it would benefit the ad company that much. This is the marginal benefit (to the ad company) per user. * the company builds a database of user data and gets some total benefit. From this you calculate the average benefit per user. The problem is that the average benefit per user is much bigger than the marginal benefit per user. So each user doesn't see the danger, but collectively there is a big problem.

judge2020 6y ago
But certainly, in some contexts, the user benefit isn't marginal at all. People know YT tracks their habits and shows them ads that are sometimes extremely specific to what they do both online and in the real world, but they still will use YT since the lure of an ad-supported platform that gives you access to billions of hours of {entertaining | educational | relaxing | etc} content instantly. Search is also extremely useful and accurate for 99% of people and the tracking is probably as a viable trade-off for access to it (although most will use adblock on desktop), although the problem of most people not knowing the full extent of their Tracking still persists.