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Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal

• pm90 6y ago
  TLDR: companies will likely shaft you as the market value for your individual dataset isn't that much, companies derive value by aggregating data over a large number of consumers.
  • chrismcb 6y ago
    How are you getting shafted if your individual dataset isn't worth that much?
    • LatteLazy 6y ago
      The only reason I'll pay you a dollar for your data is that I'll make 2 dollars selling you shit you wouldn't have bought otherwise using it. And for me to make 2 dollars, you need to buy 20 dollars worth of shit. Shit you didn't actually want or need.
      • jfoster 6y ago
        If I sell my data for a dollar and subsequently ensure I only buy what I need, am I ahead?
        • LatteLazy 6y ago
          That's a fine question. I don't know you. You might well be impervious to advertising. And if so, you'll gain a dollar. But I know the average person is NOT impervious to advertising. Quite the opposite, since ww2 billion dollar companies have risen based entirely on the fact most people are very susceptible to advertising. And every year, advertising gets smarter, more specific, more common, more aggressive, more tailored etc. So you'll have to ask yourself: are you smarter than the average bear? Or rather, are you smarter than Googles billion dollar bear hunting machine designed to catch bears that are too smart to be caught by any other bear catching machine? And are you smarter than it is, even though you gave it all your data for a dollar? And instead of a dollar, you settled for free email and tailored autoprediction to save you typing... Sometimes the smartest thing to do is admit you're not THAT smart. I know I'm not.
        • titzer 6y ago
          The entire reason advertising exists is to subvert your conscious assessment of what you need, and when you do buy something you "need", you buy the right brand. It's just stochastic brainwashing.
        • AshWolfy 6y ago
          what makes you think you are special and able to resist manipulation?
          • jfoster 6y ago
            Not asserting that I am. It was a hypothetical.
      • asciident 6y ago
        Very cynical take assuming retail is zero-sum. It could also be helping you find the products you need at an opportune time, increasing the value for all parties. Or based on purchase patterns, they're able to stock inventory more accurately based on predicted purchases, and save on storage and transport.
        • LatteLazy 6y ago
          That's fair. But how much of advertising actually informs you of a new and useful product? Vs how much just tries to upsell you, convince you you want something you didn't want 5 minutes ago, or push brands that add nothing substancice? I know I'm a cynical uni bomber type, I don't expect anyone to 100% agree or for adverts to disappear. But dwhen was the last time an advert actually informed you of a product you didn't know about and would have been interested in buying if it weren't advertised to make it so? Most modern advertising is a less than zero sum game for the consumer.
          • pochamago 6y ago
            I would say yesterday, potentially. Saw an ad for totally watertight running shoes, which was not something I thought existed. Haven't looked into the product enough to buy them, but it's a good bet I will, and they would be of great utility to me.
            • crpatino 6y ago
              How did you keep your feet dry one year ago? How often did you go out running in the rain in the last five years? How much more often would you run in the rain if you had those shoes? If you end up paying $20 extra for the watertight shoes but only end up running 2 or 3 extra hours in the rain and wear the shoes out the normal way... sorry to tell you, but they scammed you plain and simple. If you use the expensive shoes only when raining and keep another pair for regular use... you may get the worth of your money back after several years, but then you have to consider if the opportunity cost of those $100. Did buying that offer was [one of] the best thing you could have done?
            • 6y ago
      • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
        It seems highly unlikely you will make your money on selling people things they don't want OR need, I mean you can certainly make money selling things people don't need but that is because they want it. I guess I have at times bought something I did not want or need, but that was because my wife or kids wanted or needed it.
    • wmf 6y ago
      It's an externality. The harm to you and society from being tracked and data-mined is worse than the profit that companies make from that data. Even if they paid you all their profit it's still bad. And in reality they would find a way to pay even less than that.
  • thetinguy 6y ago
    If only there was some way a collective could pool their power to negotiate better terms.
  • hatmatrix 6y ago
    By why is our data valued or priced at the individual level rather than the profit it generates the company in aggregate?
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Because it's really hard (I think?) to attach an exact profit number. Actually it probably isn't, given the data hoarding likes of internet companies, but it's the line they will push.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    a confused, self-contradictory argument
• viraptor 6y ago
  I was thinking about a related idea recently - how much is my grocery information privacy worth for me? Summed up, I'm currently saving just over 11% on all the groceries + ~7% on fuel cost by sharing that information with 5 companies. (car insurance, CC, shop card, honey, airline) I'm not attached to this, I'd rather the programs like this get destroyed. But also by stacking the offers, I believe I'm getting more value here than they do. So for now I'm cool with this exchange. Would others put the privacy/money break-even somewhere else? (This is assuming reasonable shopping - I make a full list before starting to order a pickup, I rarely actually go through a shop, so there's no upsell here)
  • grawprog 6y ago
    Sure, until that information is used to give individualized prices and other things. Or used to hide things or show you only things the algorithms decide you like....or should have according to them. Already i've read things about hotel websites and stuff altering prices based on which device you're using to browse their site. In a world where your personal shopping information is bought and sold and things become increasingly online, it'll become a game of individualized shopping lists and prices, individual sales. Another perfectly crafted corporate bubble for people to live under where prices, suggestions and sales are individually tailored and at the whims of people siphoning all your personal information. I don't need my own personal omnipotent digital god dictating everything in my life. Even if it saves me a few bucks.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      It's much easier to do that for hotels than for groceries since comparison is harder. It will be quite widely known and sightly abused if your grocery chain starts doing that. The shops will always have the reference price in public after all. The pricing difference that actually matters (moving old stock) is already mostly done without personalised data. Sales are a standard.
      • grawprog 6y ago
        For now, with brick and mortor businesses because it's hard to do that in a physical place. With people increasingly ordering things online it becomes easier and more profitable to do that. If someone has your spending history, sees you buy something frequently, they have no incentive to put it on sale. Likewise, if they see something you've maybe looked at but not bought, they can put it in sale and tempt you. This is just one example. I'm sure marketers can come up with all sorts.
• jpollock 6y ago
  Don't we already put a price on freedom of speech? Isn't that what an non-disclosure agreement is?
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    NDAs will not be enforced by a court unless they are "commercially relevant and reasonable". Unless you're a political consultant of some kind no court is going to enforce an NDA that purports to prevent you from expressing your political opinions.
  • zymhan 6y ago
    No.
  • gnopgnip 6y ago
    The price of freedom of speech is the government not censoring speech that is unpopular, cartoons of Muhammad, Westboro baptists "protests".
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Nope, that's a contract between you and your employer or whoever else you sign that contract with. The government won't silence you if you do violate the NDA, but you will get a lawsuit on your ass. I don't understand where this massive misconception about freedom of speech is coming from; probably the phrase itself.
• awinter-py 6y ago
  Have never understood EFF's objection to 'pay for privacy' (covered in the middle of this article). Being able to pay for privacy is better than not being able to. It creates the beginning of accountability for cos and optionality for users.
  • backtoyoujim 6y ago
    How can that kind of inequality look like justice to anyone other than someone very economically privileged ?
    • bradbot 6y ago
      Why the downvotes? The point is legitimate. Not everyone would be able to afford to pay for something like this.
      • google234123 6y ago
        Not everyone can afford a BMW. Is that fair?
        • brianush1 6y ago
          Privacy is (or at least should be) a right. BMWs aren't.
          • kuyan 6y ago
            You are correct. The California Constitution, Article 1, section 1 gives each citizen an inalienable right to pursue and obtain privacy.
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        And what, pray tell, do you expect a service provider to do when this happens? Privacy advocates screamed themselves shrill like this and what happened is that the NYT went paywall. Then they screamed themselves shrill that the poor don't have access to good news. Well...what did you think would happen?
• amelius 6y ago
  > It’s also why we advocate strongly for laws that make privacy the default I always wonder: didn't this use to be the case? In the 80s, could we even imagine a telco listening in on our conversations? When did things go sideways?
  • x87678r 6y ago
    Earlier than that it was normal, operators could listen to anything. My grandparents had a shared line with a few dozen houses so only one person could use it at a time, and you could join the call with anyone.
    • crpatino 6y ago
      Your grandparents had the expectation that other people would listen at any time, so they would self censor as needed. Your grandparents also received a direct benefit in the form of a more affordable land line. Presumably, if they were wealthy enough to pay for a dedicated line, they had they choice to go one way or another.
  • tolbish 6y ago
    Well, I don't want to blame it all on 9/11, but it certainly didn't help.
• austincheney 6y ago
  > In truth, the data dividend scheme hurts consumers, benefits companies, and frames privacy as a commodity rather than a right. Privacy should be a right but it isn’t. At this moment privacy is very much a commodity or else we wouldn’t need articles like these.
  • lukifer 6y ago
    I'm less concerned with privacy as an individual right (though I do support that), than privacy as a collective right: the balance of power between governments and citizens, and between corporations and consumers.
• yurlungur 6y ago
  In principle it sounds convincing but in practice we are currently giving up our data for free so it reminds me a bit of the free software argument. Sure I agree but isn't something better than nothing? We are not giving up rights to make future advancements by asking for a compromise that may be more within reach. In particular, I think this idea of trading your data is easy to understand and communicate. Also, could it be the case that as soon as companies are forced to offer a price for your data a lot of the predatory data collection schemes may not be profitable enough as a result? I imagine you can't just make a crappy app and start collecting user info en masse because it now incurs a real cost. Also I think data should be traded precisely where every data point generated should be worth something. Not just as a one time thing.
• bowaggoner 6y ago
  Very nice article! Last year I was part of a working group on a data dividend proposal for the state of California, which you can read about at https://www.datadividends.org/ https://www.datadividends.org/ . Our conclusions led us much closer to the spirit of this EFF article than the term "data dividends" might suggest. We recommended against any kind of personalized payments. We considered a small universal basic income funded by a "data tax", but because of the small amount (as mentioned by the EFF), we focused on use of a data tax to fund public projects and initiatives aimed at redistributing the benefits of data more equitably. We mostly stayed away from recommending privacy or data ownership regulation because (a) California had recently passed the CCPA and (b) this question seemed outside of our mandate, but I agree that the two should be considered together.
  • karaterobot 6y ago
    That puts the state in the position of benefiting from the sale of its citizens' private data. At that point, what incentive would CA have to oppose further encroachment on privacy?
    • bowaggoner 6y ago
      Thanks for the reply - interesting concern. By analogy, I don't think putting taxes on cigarettes means the state will try to get more people to smoke. I also think it depends on how the money is allocated. Your concern would be strongest, I think, if the money went into some general-purpose fund. But if it funds open-source projects or a data-relations board, then I don't see much cause for concern.
      • karaterobot 6y ago
        I appreciate the response! > By analogy, I don't think putting taxes on cigarettes means the state will try to get more people to smoke. To be clear: I don't mean that the state would try to encourage companies to collect and monetize more of their users' information. What I'm suggesting is that they would have a weaker incentive to protect the privacy of their citizens if part of their revenue depended on it being infringed.
• deleted 6y ago
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• known 6y ago
  I refuse to give my mobile number at grocery stores though they tempt me with offers/discounts :)
  • elcritch 6y ago
    Apparently some enterprising people will lookup that store’s number in an map app and use that. It’s common enough habit that many stores already have an account. ;)
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    which is a fair bargain - you still have the option to opt out , but others have the option to get the offers. Demanding that nobody should have access to those bargains reeks of snobism imho
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    As is your right, and IIRC in my country, they are not allowed to deny you the discount if you don't want to leave your personal data. But that's groceries, things like lucky draws / prizes / etc are not required to let you participate if you don't fill in the forms. Anyway, there's one supermarket here with a loyalty card program (instead of an 'anonymous' discount / deal-of-the-week scheme), you get the card for free and it Just Works, and they ask you to register but it's not mandatory. Doesn't matter that much to them; while they do not have your details to e-mail you offers and the like, they still have a user profile, a unique number where they log all the purchases to.
• NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  What about renting data? In that way, it is not once off but for instance per "query" or time, same way Amazon is "selling" us books. Those books are not quite ours, so data companies would buy are not quite theirs?
  • pmiller2 6y ago
    You'd need a way to disable access to your data that doesn't involve suing big companies that have lots of lawyers. And, there's no way to prevent them from copying it.
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      It would mean that the government / judicial system would have Very Deep Access and control over the businesses to ensure whether this data is handled properly. On a smaller scale this happens in Europe (as a whole and individual countries) with the GDPR and co; audits or complaints about data ownership, required disclosure under penalty of fines for data leaks, etc. They can hire as many lawyers as they want but they will be punished if they're not careful with user's data.
    • NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
      Wouldn't that be the same as copying books or music, we could copyright/authorright our private data, in that way any unauthorized data copy would mean infringement and fines. Authorities would have ability to check databases.
      • pmiller2 6y ago
        Copyright is a very, very bad example here, since it's only enforced by aggrieved parties through the legal system. Would you want to take on Facebook in a copyright lawsuit? And, as for these databases, how is anyone going to be able to tell whether, say, Facebook really has your data, or, if it's just gotten opaquely encoded somewhere in some ML algorithm?
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  This is just a bunch of falsehoods > You wouldn’t place a price tag on your freedom to speak. We shouldn’t place one on our privacy, either. You do place a price tag on a lot of your freedoms, that's what your employers pay you for. And it's not like people are going to be forced to give their data, or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary. We either put a price tag on all user-generated content (including private data) or we abolish all intellectual property laws and copyrights. Suggesting otherwise is dishonest double standards. > should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them. The system is already sucking all their data. There's nothing else. If anything this will force companies to compete and pay them more than $0. > Facebook is a massive, global company with billions of users, but each user only offers Facebook a modest amount in revenue. Plenty of websites would be kept alive if they could earn $28 / year from each one of their users (hell, i 'd be rich), and in fact it shows why such a scheme would be beneficial for the web and the world as a whole. Privacy and attention are currently being grabbed , stolen and sold in marketplaces nowadays . It's just so wrong to try to convince people to keep doing so. This isn't 2003, and the price of "free services" is no longer high enough to justify giving our data for free (by law). I don't even understand what's the motive behind this post, and why Hailey felt the need to support such abuses
  • varispeed 6y ago
    > or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary. Sure you can avoid using Google and other spying companies products, but you kind of then getting yourself excluded from the society that see no problem with that. If you don't want to give your data you essentially need to stop using internet or put a lot of effort to learn how to avoid your data to be taken away from you. I agree that it should be straight up illegal to collect data that there is no essential business need for. Company should be allowed to take personal data to process an order, but it should be illegal to run any kind of analytics that involves personal data and even "anonymised" data should not be allowed to be sold or used for advertising or to manipulate customers into sales.
    • teraku 6y ago
• Noxmiles 6y ago
  Getting 10$ a month for using Gmail? Sounds like a deal for me. At the moment these companies get my data for free thinking about it