4 ms·

I don't think the problem is just related to social media, that is a pretty narrow way of looking at it. We use online services for everything, from buying stuf

I don't think the problem is just related to social media, that is a pretty narrow way of looking at it. We use online services for everything, from buying stuff to ordering food or hailing a cab. I suggest reading the source cited by OP https://www.socialcooling.com/index.html https://www.socialcooling.com/index.html there are many examples such as > If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you. and > Your health insurer may collect intimate data about your lifestyle, race and more. Anecdotical: if I have a night out, I tend to pay cash rather than card. Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends. The bar where we usually go has slot machines ("pokies" as they're called here in Australia) who knows if having many transactions at that bar lowers whatever rating somewhere... I'm 40 and if you told 20-year-old me that people would have this kind of issues in 20 years, I would have dismissed it as yet another dystopian prediction that's never going to come true.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
> If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you. What is often? I have a hard time believing retail establishments with razor thin profit margins are rejecting profit unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money. > Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends. What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. There’s nothing “wrong” with driving more distance than someone else, but auto insurers have to charge more to someone that drives more, since that increases their risk of loss.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers. Your activity elsewhere shouldn't affect your ability to return an item, regardless of whether it's profitable for the store or not (of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers. I think this data should be public. Much like a credit report is in the US and can be checked for accuracy. >of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items). I know from experience there are people that abuse return policies (basically stealing by using the item and then returning it), and unless the store increases prices to make everyone else subsidize the people that abuse it, I don’t know what the other option is.
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      > basically stealing by using the item and then returning it If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. We don't need yet more scummy entities like credit bureaus which you can't opt out of. I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer? As a customer, I would only like to buy an item that came from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody. > I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend. If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  > What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. Many countries levy special taxes on alcohol. If at least a portion of that money is used towards healthcare, the subsidy by teetotallers either grows smaller or disappears entirely. But, of course, that requires correct use of said tax money.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dirkc 6y ago
  > What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford. I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need. In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need. So the discussion is about when use of data is identify losses and remove them from the system versus not using data and spreading the cost out between all participants. Healthcare is a sufficiently broad benefit that much of society can agree on subsidizing each other (except in certain countries), but even in countries with taxpayer funded healthcare, I don’t know if there would be a consensus on whether or not retailers should be able to track individuals to identify those causing losses and boot them from the system. Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. At what point does a business become large enough that it can no longer do this?
    - iso1210 6y ago
      > Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. When the profit from occasionally serving one person in a wheelchair is less than the cost of providing the wheelchair access, yet we still demand it, indeed that's why we have to demand it - if you still made money from the person in a wheelchair, you'd put the ramp in anyway.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  I'd rather not pay for someone else social care than have my card transactions tracked so that someone can build a statistical model on my likelihood to need medical care.
- mastazi 6y ago
  My point was that I could be flagged as a gambler even though I've never used pokies, I wasn't talking about alcohol consumption. In other words I'm worried about a rating being decided by an obscure algorithm that no one can vet.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> If you return goods to the store often this will be used against you. What is often? I have a hard time believing retail establishments with razor thin profit margins are rejecting profit unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money. > Even though I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, just having a few drinks with friends. What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. There’s nothing “wrong” with driving more distance than someone else, but auto insurers have to charge more to someone that drives more, since that increases their risk of loss.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> unless the customer is likely causing them to lose money The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers. Your activity elsewhere shouldn't affect your ability to return an item, regardless of whether it's profitable for the store or not (of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items).
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > The problem is that this fact is (or will be) determined by some obscure black box algorithm that might even take into account other unrelated data from social media or data brokers. I think this data should be public. Much like a credit report is in the US and can be checked for accuracy. >of course if it was up to the store they would rather not deal with the bad, terrible monsters that dare to... return items). I know from experience there are people that abuse return policies (basically stealing by using the item and then returning it), and unless the store increases prices to make everyone else subsidize the people that abuse it, I don’t know what the other option is.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > basically stealing by using the item and then returning it If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. We don't need yet more scummy entities like credit bureaus which you can't opt out of. I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > If the item is in a condition where it can be resold at full price (aka you can't even tell whether it's been used), does it matter? If anything, it reduces waste. If it's not in a resellable condition, then the store should discount the refund by a reasonable amount to make up for it. How is all of this supposed to be determined at a return counter in the 2 min interaction between a retail employee and customer? As a customer, I would only like to buy an item that came from the factory. Especially anything electronic, there’s almost no way for me to discern if someone has damaged it otherwise. I also don’t see how manufacturers could be held liable for warranties if they aren’t sure one the chain of custody. > I'm also not confident that improving the retailers' margins is going to trickle down to lower prices for consumers as opposed to go into some executive's pocket or get pissed away in marketing/advertising spend. If retail businesses had pricing power, they would be asking for more than razor thin profit margins. Retail executives aren’t currently turning away dollars from their pocket, they don’t have access to them in the first place since competing retailers will take their business if they try to.
inglor_cz 6y ago
> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. Many countries levy special taxes on alcohol. If at least a portion of that money is used towards healthcare, the subsidy by teetotallers either grows smaller or disappears entirely. But, of course, that requires correct use of said tax money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dirkc 6y ago
> What if the data shows having a few drinks increases the likelihood of healthcare costs? Otherwise, people who don’t have a few drinks are subsidizing people who do have a few drinks. The whole idea behind health care is that some people subsidize other people - ie. most people are healthy and use less health care services than they pay for, while a few people get sick and require health care services that they would never have been able to afford. I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need. In any case, it's not okay for insurers to have fine grained access to what people buy, eat, drink, do. I struggle playing it out in my mind in a way that doesn't end horribly.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > I'm fine with subsidizing other people, the alternative is to be okay with people that have problems to be thrown out of the system and not receive the care they need. So the discussion is about when use of data is identify losses and remove them from the system versus not using data and spreading the cost out between all participants. Healthcare is a sufficiently broad benefit that much of society can agree on subsidizing each other (except in certain countries), but even in countries with taxpayer funded healthcare, I don’t know if there would be a consensus on whether or not retailers should be able to track individuals to identify those causing losses and boot them from the system. Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. At what point does a business become large enough that it can no longer do this?
  - iso1210 6y ago
    > Certainly, no one would argue against the right of a small business owner to refuse to do business with a customer that is causing them a loss. When the profit from occasionally serving one person in a wheelchair is less than the cost of providing the wheelchair access, yet we still demand it, indeed that's why we have to demand it - if you still made money from the person in a wheelchair, you'd put the ramp in anyway.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I'd rather not pay for someone else social care than have my card transactions tracked so that someone can build a statistical model on my likelihood to need medical care.
mastazi 6y ago
My point was that I could be flagged as a gambler even though I've never used pokies, I wasn't talking about alcohol consumption. In other words I'm worried about a rating being decided by an obscure algorithm that no one can vet.