21 ms·

Why we should end the data economy

519 points by oppodeldoc 5y ago

anm89 5y ago
Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest, lowest value category of journalism. It's a plague.
- iso8859-1 5y ago
  Downvoted for clunky sentence construction.
- jtdev 5y ago
  Uhhh, you can stop using said services and software that abuse privacy, e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, TicToc, etc.
  - anm89 5y ago
    That doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of your personal interaction with the data economy.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      If enough people end their own interaction with it it ceases to exist, right? If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.
      - fsagx 5y ago
        A person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to not interact with services that aggregate and sell data. No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.
        SahAssar 5y ago
        The point is that for each person that ends their interaction with these companies the less data they have on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do. Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.
  - lsb 5y ago
    You can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all the time.
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      facebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a facebook account
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Here's another industry that relies on aggregating your data: Credit reports. Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database. No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
    - gspq 5y ago
      And they have an API to these data. Selling your data to data vendors. And now this: https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?
  - tejtm 5y ago
    True, but there is no practical way to get through our work days without them using us anyway.
  - Nicksil 5y ago
    But that doesn't stop their abuse. Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc. You're ever getting away.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook" Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone
  - Jorengarenar 5y ago
    In theory. I've deleted my Facebook account. Few years later needed to create new one and used same e-mail address. Guess what welcomed me! My old account! Heck, even posts I had deleted and whole journal (or however its called) related to them, yes it was back again, waiting to be clicked "unhide".
- royaltjames 5y ago
  In any form of communication, it's the worst.
- ginko 5y ago
  I certainly think there's ways to achieve this: Implement and enforce GDPR-like laws and fine spy corporations into oblivion.
  - DennisP 5y ago
    Which is what the article implies with statements like "we should not allow X." There are several specific rules it suggests, which clearly would have to be laws.
- Impassionata 5y ago
  There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit. Burn it all down.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    "Burn it all down" as a solution — inevitably applied to cultures, systems or industries viewed from the outside — is also a plague of laziness.
    - NoGravitas 5y ago
      The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      I've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over from scratch!" be called laziness before.
      - bpodgursky 5y ago
        "It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly, civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data industry warts and all. There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.
      - awillen 5y ago
        It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down. It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code. The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix. It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
- dominotw 5y ago
  we should end this category of journalism.
  - anm89 5y ago
    Ha, well played.
- omgJustTest 5y ago
  Just because something is impractical or a solution is unknown doesn't make it valueless. There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out! I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
- _vertigo 5y ago
  You can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that makes people care more is a step in the right direction.
akomtu 5y ago
If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine, then surveillance capitalism is a modern steam engine with lots of sensors optimizing its performance.
- UI_at_80x24 5y ago
  >If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine I rather like this simile. Kudos!
bdamm 5y ago
The author writes as if exploitation is a new phenomenon. It is annoyingly naïve.
rhacker 5y ago
We need to go back to the TV model. I mean we sold things back in 1995 right? You go to a website about babies, you get baby ads. You go to a website about electrified fences, you get ads for trucks, tractors, backhoe rentals (even in your area because of your IP address - but that's it) It's damn near equivalent to local / cable TV.
- brokencode 5y ago
  Does anybody know if targeted ads based on tracking even work? Are they worth all the extra cost and complexity compared to traditional ads? It doesn’t seem like it. Half the time I see a super-targeted ad, it’s for a product I already purchased. Also, what ever happened to showing ads to people who aren’t already interested in your product to expand your brand and maybe bring in new customers? The current ad model feels overfitted to me.
  - SonicScrub 5y ago
    Yes, yes they do work. That's why it's a billion dollar industry. It allows industries to micro-target specific ads for communities and speak to them directly. It gives you more ability to expand your brand to new customers, not less, as it allows to you to specifically target niche groups who previously had no interest in you. It's important to get a sense of the extreme level of refinement that firms have access to through data-driven marketing. Want to design a marketing campaign for dog-owning, outdoorsy lesbians? Subaru launched an ad campaign in the 90s using subtle coding in their wide-net ads. Now companies can do that much more effectively by directly targeting those communities. As for the common complaint that you always see ads for products you already purchased, that's actually a very good time to make an impression. What are the odds that you are thinking about buying a new dishwasher at any given moment? Probably next to 0. You probably would completely ignore any dishwasher ad you saw. Now imagine you just replaced your dishwasher with a new one. You probably noticed that dishwasher ad now. You might have even clicked on it to see if you got a good deal on it. You probably care more right now about dishwasher specs than you ever have in your life up to this point. Maybe there's a better deal out there. This is the perfect time to send you more dishwasher ads.
pascalxus 5y ago
And yet, with all this information about me, they still struggle to come up with even the slightest big of relevant advertising. 99.9% of the products I see advertised to me are either completely irrelevant to me or products I down right hate: and I never buy them. If they do have all the information the article claims, it just doesn't seem like they're able to use it in an effective manner. So what's the harm? the key here, is, just don't buy products you don't want or don't need. as long as you do that, you'll be fine. I have yet to meet a single Ad that forced me to buy a product I didn't really want or need. And, just don't let the ads manipulate you.
version_five 5y ago
What these kinds of articles (that basically just say how much of our data is being collected, and assert that it's bad) miss is the whole "attention economy" side of the equation, which I believe is more detrimental. Data is concretely used to maximize engagement, outrage, polarization, etc. in order to get more attention, which is at a root of a lot of the public discourse challenges we have these days. It would be much more benign if tracking was really just about trying to see what I am most likely to buy and target that to me.
- croes 5y ago
  Still a bad thing. Most likely to buy neither means you need it nor you really can afford it. It's still just exploitation for profit.
- n0on3 5y ago
  This is the point I feel most as well. I think this trend of burning attention is both destructive in ways and depth we don't completely understand yet - possibly making unrecoverable damage to our society on ridiculously large scale - and a blunt exploitation of the bias to consider attention as an infinite resource / not a real cost. Personally I dislike also the "tracking to show me what I'm most likely to buy" but this itself (assuming such thing could exist in a vacuum, which seems unrealistic to me) has an inherently limited impact.
DanielBMarkham 5y ago
I think a big part of the problem here is that our computers, and the associated data they collect, are part of our extended brains. They're not record players, hotel registers, or any other metaphor society or our legal system has used in the past. It's virtually as if you could take part of your brain out and hand it to somebody, perhaps to whistle a tune you remember from school or recount that chat you had with your previous SO. It's not okay to take a person and hold them against their will, even if they've signed some sort of agreement. Indentured servitude and slavery are considered non-viable business arrangements. No matter what I promise you or what our trade-off is, these contracts cannot exist. I think the only way this reasonably ends is when the rest of society catches up to that conclusion. It might be a while, though. I honestly don't think most people _want_ to know what's going on, since it's quite frightening and there's nothing they can do about it. This is going to have to get more and more stressful to the average citizen until most folks realize what kind of world we've crept into.
Hasz 5y ago
Ending the data economy means ending inference. Most of the examples listed in the opening paragraph are not direct measurements, but mundane behavior that can associated with something interesting. I don’t think stopping inference is possible (or a good idea!), but it is easy to subvert and reign in, at least online. Simply letting your browser emulate the browsing habits of a wide variety of people could knock down your uniqueness if done in bulk. I’m pretty sure there was a chrome extension a while ago that browsered major sites to obfuscate your actual traffic. I also like the EFF’s panopticon if you’d like to see some real value uniqueness scores.
djoldman 5y ago
Anyone know of a confirmed instance of: > They generate profits by ... selling [your personal information] to ... prospective employers ... ? This one seems unlikely but who knows.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  It's indirect. Employers use one of many firms that do background checks, and those firms pay for access to the data.
  - djoldman 5y ago
    If you're a background check company, it seems like a dangerous game to attempt to systematically match data from such unofficial sources to potential employees. Aren't they opening themselves up to lawsuits if they match the wrong person to the wrong potential employee? Additionally, isn't it illegal to decide to hire/not-hire based on a bunch of protected traits? (age, sex, orientation, religion, etc.) It seems like a lot of the quoted information would be off-limits.
    - metalliqaz 5y ago
      have you ever dealt with background checks? they don't care
- jeffbee 5y ago
  There certainly are firms that will sell a dossier on you employers or anyone else who wants it, it's just not any of the players mentioned in the article. That's why I hate these articles filled with non sequitur fuzzy thinking. If you want to end the data economy you need to start with the real players: telcos, payment processing networks, ISPs, insurance companies, credit bureaus.
- arcticfox 5y ago
  It's one of the top use cases listed for https://www.peopledatalabs.com/ https://www.peopledatalabs.com/ (candidate sourcing). And incidentally, PDL was the source of a 1.2-billion person data breach a few years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/ https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/
34679 5y ago
Anyone engaged in the collection and sale of data should be required to maintain a list of their customers. Upon the sale of data, the customer should be required to provide their list to the broker. At the point of collection/consent, the list should be made available to the consumer. For example: You want to vote in an online poll by company A. Company A collects data about you and sells it, so you must agree to their privacy policy. Company A's privacy policy discloses that they sell your data to Companies B, C and D. Companies B, C and D have provided a list of its customers to Company A, and Company A includes those lists as well. In addition, the customers of those companies provide lists (as all data brokers would be required to do). If its seems like it could get overly complicated with huge lists of data brokers for a simple online poll, that's the idea. You shouldn't have to wonder how many entities you're giving access to your information when, for example, you want to vote for MLB All-stars. MLB wants your name, address, email, phone number, and they disclose they'll "share it with partners" but they don't say who those partners are, how many exist, and if they have their own "partners". Vote for your favorite player and you could be getting a phone call for life insurance 15 minutes later after your number has been passed through 5 different companies.
- hedgedoops2 5y ago
  CCC has a longstanding policy demand called the "Datenbrief" ('data letter'). Under this proposal, every corporation that keeps personal information about a natural person would be obligated to, once a year, mail the subject a letter containing their information, with instructions how to exercise their existing statutory deletion/correction rights. If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply an obligation to inform the subject about it. I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure. [1] https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
Just have it so that any time a person or company's data is sold or leased, the company doing the selling must mail (via physical correspondence) the person or company with a notification of what data was sent and why. People will get tired of the junk mail and companies will lose money trying to peddle data.
nostrademons 5y ago
People should own the data about them, and should be free to rent or trade usage of it to companies in exchange for money or services. Actual ownership should continue to rest with the person, however, who can revoke access the same way that a landlord can evict tenants or a worker can quit. The biggest barrier to this has been that lots of valuable data (eg. Facebook's social graph, Android contact data) is data about relationships between people, not the people themselves, and so would logically have multiple owners. But that's not really a big barrier with modern technology: the crypto world solved multi-person ownership with multisig wallets several years ago.
- fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
  Simply assigning a price to an activity doesn't solve the ethical and moral issues that can arise from that activity. Having a price for something doesn't exactly help victims of human trafficking (whether the illegal organ trade, prostitution or anything else). What can help those victims is regulation and aggressive criminal prosecution of anyone who seeks to gain from the suffering of others. Unless people actually have a realistic and practical way of "revoking access" to their data which results in serious penalties for companies which continue to use said data (including company-destroying or even criminal penalties for senior managers/benefactors) then the negative-externalities of data-collection won't ever really be curtailed.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    The difference that ownership would give is consent. Western liberal democracies are based on the idea that you can do what you want as long as all parties agree to it. I willingly give my personal information over to a variety of firms knowing what they do with it, because I value the services I receive more. It's not your place to say whether that's okay or not, because it doesn't affect you. Human trafficking + consent = immigration. Organ trade + consent = organ donation. Prostitution between consenting adults arguably should be legal anyway, and already is in many places in Europe. And yes, there should be a practical way to revoke access to data. There are ways to accomplish this technologically (eg. capability-based security keeps the data within your possession and you export the particular query that an outside firm would use; federated learning lets them train machine-learning models on the data without the data ever leaving your possession). We just don't use them yet, for the most part.
pascalxus 5y ago
The article implies a lot of risk for having so much personal data circulating around without our control. but the article, and many others like it fail to show how all that risk can adversely affect us. I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did? maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me after I investigate the matter objectively.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  The article itself explains this: Privacy is important because it protects you from the influence of others. The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never know that you were discriminated against. If they know what tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you about politics and manipulate you into voting for their preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on. There are quite a few stories that have cropped up over the last decade or two that show this is actually happening.... the most precient one I can recall was where Target outted a pregnant teenager to her parents before she even knew she was pregnant: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-target-exposed-a-teen-girls-pregnancy-2012-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-...
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    I wonder how true that story is https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnancy-inside-story.html https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregna...
ram_rar 5y ago
Similar to KYC (Know your customer) [1] in financial services industry. We need Know your Data Broker for customers, where in customers can know which data brokers have used their information. Most of the data brokers run in the dark and very few outside of tech are aware of it. Data Brokers should allows customers to be opted out and purge information from their systems if needed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
Barraketh 5y ago
Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal data. Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products. And the open data exchanges were a great moat against platform centralization like FB. The fight against open data exchanges make the comparative advantage FB has in advertising to you larger. That's actually pretty bad, because FB has some pretty bad incentives wrt to the attention economy and optimizing for engagement. A world where advertising on independent websites is effective is a much better one - it would let websites put out better content, it would decrease the power of social networks, it could fund better journalism (which is being decimated right now), etc.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  While I agree with this it should be easier to opt out without disabling JavaScript across the internet.
- KyleBerezin 5y ago
  I want a system that tracks me and is 100% transparent to me.
  - Toks 5y ago
    Exactly. It's not the tracking that is the problem, it's the lack of control/transparency. I want a personal data bank where I can decide who knows what about me.
    - meh99 5y ago
      Don’t expect that with big corporate hoarding it all for you. It’s “their infrastructure” and their business. The west wants to be free of life’s problems while also being free to optimize time to avoid dealing with them. It’s almost as if physical reality is full of real constraints our imaginations can refuse to acknowledge.
scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
We can't really stop the Data Economy. If we're bleeding data all over the place then we can only maintain good habits of data hygiene. But then we know that will never be perfect. Some fingerprints will always remain, some breadcrumbs will always be hoovered up by the bots. I use adblockers and vpns and other such things but then I have accounts with facebooks and whatsapps. Could I camouflage my 'scent' with perfume? What's more - could I feed misleading data in? I really wouldn't mind being a VIP in the eyes of these shitty algorithms.
- fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
  Saying "We can't really stop the Data Economy" is like saying that humanity can't do anything about climate change because we can't afford to upset the petrochemical industry. We can have a discussion about the costs and benefits of the Data Economy but to simply state that it's impossible to do anything about it is reductive to the point of absurdity and, frankly, only serves the interests of those who want to continue profiting without bearing any of the societal costs.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
    No no - I mean 'we' as in we here right now, in this conversation. I'm all for regulating the Data Economy and all the efforts to impose laws and regulations and what not. It's just that all these devices and microchips have opened a way to trade on data that we'll never be able to regulate and control with 100% clarity and precision. So we're definitely gonna have to get more clever than just asking the government to ban them.
    - fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
      > It's just that all these devices and microchips have opened a way to trade on data that we'll never be able to regulate and control with 100% clarity and precision. So we're definitely gonna have to get more clever than just asking the government to ban them. There's nothing fundamentally different about the technology in the last ~decade that has caused this trade to explode. Bandwidth, storage and compute have all gotten cheaper, but there's not much more that has actually technologically changed to cause this explosion. What has changed is that companies now see this sort of data-gathering as a potential source of profit and have essentially never had to pay more than a fraction of the costs that they incur on society when this data is abused/leaked, etc. If there was actual civil and criminal liability attached to negligence, misuse of user data, etc. then most of these problems would disappear pretty quickly. The reason why this hasn't already happened is almost certainly related to the immense amounts of money and influence that the data-gathers can wield on politicians. A key part of any sort of effective regulation in this space would also require that breaches or misuses of data that didn't involve negligence were also heavily punished (similar to how some toxic waste spills are handled). This would create a powerful incentive for companies to just not collect the data in the first place unless there was a serious business need for it which justified the additional risk to the company. I can't see that ever being popular here though given how entrenched online advertising $$$ is in SV/YC/HN...
atomicbeanie 5y ago
Hogwash. Sharing data and having it stolen are two different things. Luddites did not account for what their idea of the future would miss out on. The data future offers new opportunities in reality based communication. Working on serious problems like climate change would be hobbled without the rise of the data economy. But to be an economy it must have rules that protect private, personal and ethically important entities.
cs702 5y ago
No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): > who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby > whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up > whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment" > your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have > your restaurant visits and shopping habits > how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer > your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone > whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger across your phone’s screen > if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been searching online for a divorce lawyer No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either -- especially if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications. We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.
- jackjeff 5y ago
  But the only penalty is “seeing” personalized ads. It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.
- d1lanka 5y ago
  > We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale. Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ Spread it around.
- nutellaandgo 5y ago
  That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc. If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.
29athrowaway 5y ago
If you can't hide your activity just pollute their data to the point it becomes unuseable. Give them data that makes them lose money. Search random stuff you are not interested in and see them desperately throw money into the toilet. Search plane tickets to Congo, saxophones, windsurf equipment, paintings of toucans... the most random shit you can think of. Then you will start seeing ads for that, which is seeing the ad tech imploding in front of your eyes. The more you do it and the more other people do it, the less profitable ad tech becomes. Also search for stuff outside your demographics, like stuff for older people, so they get your profile wrong.
cevered 5y ago
I highly suggest you guys checkout Decentr. They are building blockchain platform that allows individuals to have ownership over their personal data to exchange and leverage for economic benefits in a decentralized and secure way. I think it's false to say we can't collect data in a secure way therefore stop the data economy. We should be seeking to empower individuals with the ownership of their own data to create a true data economy.
- aeoleonn 5y ago
  when I hear "blockchain" my eyes glaze over
- Jwarder 5y ago
  How paranoid should I be of a browser plug-in that promises to track every interaction I make and provide that data for advertiser targeting?
  - cevered 5y ago
    All of your data is stored in an encrypted wallet/ID via decentralized storage solutions. Only you have access to your data and control over your data via a private key like a crypto wallet.
bobthechef 5y ago
Articles that make declarations about how bad X is and then follow that up with empty calls to action like "We need to end X" to get people nodding their heads in agreement are common and cheap. What's your solution? Is there one? Sure, you can draw attention to something bad, but if all you ever do is live off the drama and frantically declare that X "needs to stop" (I loathe that airheaded phrase like few others), what good are you? Who's going to stop it? Passive voice does not impress. When I need to eat, I eat. I don't say "I need to eat" and leave it at that. I'd starve. Clearly you think it can be stopped. Clearly you think it's not just an unfortunate malady of the age that we must bear. You think it can be fixed. Where's your proposal? How are we going to shift the tech economy away from surveillance? The growth of the data economy is like the growth of finance. Neither finance nor data gathering actually produce anything. They can help produce something, inform or facilitate the production, but it's not productive in itself. In the limit, you're left with a hot potato economy where people gather data to sell for the purpose of gathering more data. Maybe this is incentivized by the killing of the industrial base. Everything we buy is from China. All the US does is consume.
- meh99 5y ago
  It’s not a journalists job to dictate policy. It’s to emotionally masturbate a message. Then the people will look at the politicians offering fixes. This is the whole point of division of labor. So many on this thread are looking for Superman. Did you found the company you work for and take out the garbage, while refilling the snack machine? You want someone like PG to write down some elementary math and say it’s a solution to something? No one does it all.
networkid 5y ago
"Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us", Really? Maybe it's all your politicians does?
infogulch 5y ago
Somehow organizations get an immense amount of value out of tracking everything you do, say, think, and buy; everywhere you go; and everyone you meet. Two questions: 1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent? (Hint: they shouldn't.) 2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should just do it my damn self and actually get something out of it. It's like we need an open source community for personal data collection, aggregation, and analysis.
- j56no 5y ago
  there are ways to be paid, just don’t expect google/apple/fb to do that until they will be forced. eg see new eu laws coming forward, and some companies soon will disrupt this space. it will happen like gdpr, someone is already preparing for it, without making too much noise...
- ianai 5y ago
  Exactly, there’s a dollar value to you that they’re not paying you. You’d need a “property right” over it. (You are your own “property” already anyway.)
  - amelius 5y ago
    Too late. You already clicked "I agree" on that EULA.
    - ianai 5y ago
      Since the civil war, you can’t sign ownership of yourself over to another. The ownership of data that intensive seems the same thing.
      - amelius 5y ago
        Ownership is the wrong word, since you will always own your data. The problem is others claiming to own it too.
      - 5y ago
ayngg 5y ago
Data feels like the next resource (like hydrocarbons or other resource extraction) where it can be exploited for massive profit while its costs externalized for the rest of society to bear. Like how it took decades for society to come around to human influenced climate change, it will probably take a while for people to accept the social and mental health costs associated with the extraction and use of this resource, or we will get to a point where people are manipulated enough to be insulated from such a realization.
not_jd_salinger 5y ago
The "data economy" is just an extension of the "Advertising Economy". Of course the idea of an "Advertising Economy" should cause people to pause a bit since advertising, by its nature, can only help maximize profits for somebody else. In theory the money that gets pumped into advertising can only be squeezed from the profits of other companies who are doing some optimization, weighing the cost of advertising vs the increase in their market. The maximum amount it makes sense to pay an advertiser is proportional to the increase in the audience they provide, with the assumption that your profit - fee * population_ads > profit * population_no_ads. One thing should be very clear, advertising cannot create value, it can only extract some of the surplus value that other companies are creating. This puts a pretty hard limit on how big advertisers can grow. The solution to this was of course to take the byproduct of advertising, the generation of large amounts of demographic data, and transform that into a product. Suddenly selling, sorting and manipulating data create an entirely new class of products and create demand for new professionals as well. The advertising industry, specializing in creating the illusion of value when their may be none, has done a brilliant job of convincing everyone that data is inherently values. Allowing tech companies to sell not only their data, that is often of questionable actual value, but the infrastructure to use this data, and sell training in the skills necessary to work with big data. The "data economy" is just advertising turned in on itself. Anyone who works with data knows deep down that all of this is a farce, but I think we still have a bit of time before all of this hits the fan, so enjoy the ride.
- dk775 5y ago
  Damn sometime I think as an analyst in LE that the obsession with data while crime skyrockets is stupid. I also vehemently hate advertising. Never thought that the whole time I pivoted from public policy > stats > data as a result of advertising’s influence. Makes me sick, time to crawl back towards stats and get out of this world.
intricatedetail 5y ago
Ban ad targeting first and suddenly it won't be economical to store such data.
peter303 5y ago
Irony: I got an "accept cookies" button when reading the article.
ivan888 5y ago
We need something like the Nutrition Facts label for digital consent: government mandated, consistent format, easy to scan. Even better if it was an interactive form to allow you to selectively consent to specific options
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joadha 5y ago
The so-called "data economy" has improved our lives in immeasurable ways. I can more easily discover products that are relevant to me. Deserving innovations are granted a platform for quicker adoption. The world at large is more efficient, because relevant products and services are being delivered more quickly and efficiently than ever before. The author is extremely paranoid. She uses the word "should" a whole lot, but does not back up her dictatorial statements with any reasoning. This article has failed to scare me as intended.
- throwawaywindev 5y ago
  Efficiency is not always a good thing. We’re not machines and we shouldn’t aspire to some Wall-E existence where we do nothing but consume without any inconvenience.
- starchild_3001 5y ago
  There has to be limitations to the use and distribution of data. E.g. sensitive topics should be disallowed to be tracked. Otherwise, personalized ads are great. They make our lives immeasurably richer by enabling a free internet. They make small businesses grow and thrive. They allow users to find products they need w/o looking for them endlessly.
uberdru 5y ago
I remember a time when the virtue that separated the U.S. from, say, East Germany, was the assurance that your library borrowing history was sacrosanct.
EMM_386 5y ago
I'm curious, can insurance companies get access to this information to potentially affect policy rates? That would be insane. If they know how sedentary you are, or if you aren't sleeping well, or if you are driving too fast, driving at dangerous hours, or if you hang out at the bar too much ... can you imagine the implications? It gets even wilder with things like Fitbit Charge 4 where this data, in the hands of data brokers, can include data like your resting heart rate, your SpO2 levels, exactly where/when you walk.
- tootie 5y ago
  The data collectors only provide anonymized data. But it's possibly for a company that collects PII to stitch together their own user profile data with the anonymous data. So, yeah, maybe. Like if you login to your car insurance website and that website is using third-party tracking to piece together a profile, they can correlate to your identity. I don't think I've actually seen this done and I'm not sure if it's entirely legal. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guide https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guid...
dontparticipate 5y ago
There's not a single person that doesn't understand the "why" of this, especially on HN. There's just no "how" there. It's pretty clear so far that GDPR/CCPA have been complete failures. Companies just design around them and consumers are in no position to jump through the hoops those companies have set up to defend themselves. The game is already over and we've lost and articles like these are just hope porn wishing for a better world that we will never see.
prohobo 5y ago
This is a bit weird... The Reboot is sponsored by DFINITY, which is the company behind the Internet Computer and did a presentation at the World Economic Forum in 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw) The WEF is 100% pro datamining the shit out of everyone, and AFAIK they only invite people who share their vision of the future. So, why is DFINITY making presentations for them while also sponsoring anti datamining journalism? I'm not saying that "THIS IS WRONG!" I'm just confused as to what's going on here.
bsedlm 5y ago
I think we should go further, into a full review of what it means to own something. However this is rather ambitious considering that the idea of ownerhsip lies at the very foundation of civilization as we do it. But the nature of "digital property" has changed things. If you think the printing press changed the nature of human societies, just wait until the internet has existed for a few hundred years and their corresponding number of generations. Capitalist market economies, trade-centric as they are, have evolved around a world in which all property is exclusive. However starting from printing press up to "model-T"--style mass production (the development of industrial societies) reduced the cost of copying and duplicating stuff more more until the creation of the internet brought about "digital goods" (such as all your personal data) which has duplication costs _below_ marginal (I think digital copying has essentially ZERO cost). Digital goods provide a huge boon if we are able to stop trying to force-fit them into a system which works great for physical (i.e. exclusive) goods. Why and how did Microsoft become what it is during the 90s? because of huge savings in duplicating their software in a society that expected said duplication to have a not-negible cost.
websites3434 5y ago
The people who are OK with this kind of thing -- "But nothing bad has ever happened to anyone IRL" -- are obviously not part of a minority ethnic/religious/sexual orientation/gender group. This kind of technology is already used to do harm in China. Those of us in those groups don't have the luxury of "waiting to see if the nightmare becomes real" because of some of us would be in the crosshairs, not potential bystanders.
- slim 5y ago
  In Palestine too https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldiers-turn-whistleblowers-over/5741508 https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldier...
anticristi 5y ago
> Ending the data economy may seem like a radical proposition, Not in 2021. In 2018, GDPR went into force in the EU. In 2018, CCPA went into force in California, US. In 2021, VCDPA went into force in Virginia, US. At least with GDPR serious fines were passed. The right to data privacy is no longer a John-Lennon-like hippie idea. It is law. Now go and fix you business model.
julienb_sea 5y ago
We derive great benefit from the "data economy" in the form of services which are NOT free to develop or operate but have no cost associated with their usage. We also enjoy the benefits when it comes to social connections, disaster recovery, and tracking our lost valuables. It is not going away. The potential pitfalls of the data economy are about overbearing or violent governments, or about poorly managed data protection. This has much more to do with the bad actors than the tools they are using. It's sort of like saying we should ban information distribution because bad actors can spread misinformation.
Aunche 5y ago
Disclaimer: I work at a company that collects user data. The author is fearmongering big tech because she envies all the money they are making. Facebook does not sell user data, and I'm pretty sure the author knows this but intentionally perpetuates this misconception anyways. Facebook would collect about as much user data regardless of whether they used it for targeted advertising.
jeffrogers 5y ago
“They generate profits by compiling a profile of you from your data trail and then selling it to the highest bidder” Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data correction… and when to provide some sort rehabilitation method, people will eventually become just a collection of their mistakes and forced into one bucket or another. We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.
tibiahurried 5y ago
The Data Economy is what enables "free" product for the end-user. Think about email, drive, video. Users are now used to get most of this stuff for free. And that's possible thanks to the Data Economy. End such economy basically means the users will start paying for the internet. Never gonna happen.
agumonkey 5y ago
Isn't the data economy a sign of the end of the economical ladder ? we have nothing new to sell ..
emodendroket 5y ago
This reminds me of when people want to "reverse financialization" or "get rid of the shareholder value model." How are you going to reverse an idea and what are you going to replace it with?
- jjulius 5y ago
  >How are you going to reverse an idea... In this case, make mass data collection and targeted advertising illegal. >... and what are you going to replace it with? The model(s) we had before - generalized advertising based on who advertisers believe the broader audience that watches X show or views Y website is.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Making "mass data collection" illegal seems pretty fraught. I doubt that anybody would want that in its literal form. I'm not sure anyone is too interested in nuking our tech sector either but maybe I'm wrong about that part.
kazinator 5y ago
Part of the data economy is this curious phenomenon: nicely styled web articles, where 99.9999% of the effort goes into producing the graphical artwork (often just for that article, not from a stock library!), and the text is just someone banging out some Reddit-comment-level crap for 5-10 minutes. Imagine this in a plain document with no CSS: <body> <h2>Why We Should End the Data Economy</h2> <p>The data economy depends on violating our right to privacy on a massive scale, collecting as much personal data as possible for profit.</p> <p>...</p> ... Now it's just the rant of some loser who doesn't even know the first thing about making an attractive web page, and doesn't have any friends who are graphical designers or artists to help him or her sell the idea to the masses.
hvocode 5y ago
I'm all for significantly limiting the "data economy", but I suspect too many people have become too used to getting free stuff. I see this all over the place - there are products and services that are quite expensive to build and provide, but they're free because people (often unwittingly) exchange data about themselves in place of the actual cost. If you still want those products/services without the data industry supporting it, someone will have to pay for them. I think lots of people opposed to the data economy will become less opposed when faced with actually paying for stuff it supports. I learned this the hard way trying to sell something that competed with free tools from Facebook/Google/[other giant data monetizing companies]. Our tool was/is competitive, but we aren't in the business of data harvesting or advertising - so, the engineering cost (many years of effort) would have to be paid from actually selling the product. The response? People want the free ones, and could really care less how the engineers that built it were paid as long as THEY (the consumer of the tool) got it for free. As long as the "someone else will pay for X so I can have it for free" attitude is acceptable and widespread, we're likely stuck with a pervasive and deep data economy.
ipsin 5y ago
As I understand it, CCPA means any California resident could hypothetically write a data broker, get their own file, and determine how much actual tracking is going on. All the hypothetical examples are realistic, but... what are the names of companies that are actually providing that level of data about me?
RGamma 5y ago
Viewing the world through the data lens makes you blind to the things you didn't measure or that you cannot conceive a measurement for. It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck"). When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's behavior at scale you're no longer an independent observer anyway, complicating things further (a measurement that becomes a target stops being a measurement). There isn't one truth you could uncover in data; life is an open-ended chaotic system. Let's keep it that way.
- dgb23 5y ago
  I've been thinking about data-driven AI systems that generate art, photography and the like. One thing about these systems is that they are always learning from past works. They don't create in the same chaotic - as you say - way as we do. Recognizing the limitation of these systems is key to be able to use them well and when not to use them.
  - RGamma 5y ago
    These systems lack any form of coherent world view, artistic vision, moral imperative, culture or ability to reflect on their own surroundings, limitations and assumptions (higher-order thinking). Even if one adds randomness to create new phenomena within their given framework, one can never compensate for that. Uncarefully applied data-driven narratives have not enriched our thinking, they're blunting it. And they blind us to what could be.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Human art is also based off of past works. Moreover, AI art tends to be more, not less, chaotic than human art.
    - RGamma 5y ago
      Past works are one component. Major happenings, fantasy, wishes, emotions, etc play a bigger role overall (historically).
holoduke 5y ago
Wasnt here on hn someone who created a bot able to randomly like messages on FB, search for nonsense on Google, post random tweets on twitter etc, spoofs GPS etc. Would love to use something like that
EGreg 5y ago
And how do you propose to do that? I wrote this back in 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 And here is the solution: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html Thoughts?
2dog 5y ago
I'm in the data business, this article is wrong on many levels but whatever... The biggest faux pas is "your PII is sold to the highest bidder". Not true, your PII (and mine) is sold to any bidder who hits the minimum threshold/rate, currently less the 12cents CPM
herunan 5y ago
If only it were about advertising… Your attention is everything. Even beyond buying things or not. Your views about certain aspects of your life are affected by your senses and experiences, and so much comes from what you see, hear, and read online. Your data informs a lot of what ends up in your screen, which keeps shaping who you are. This vicious circle is what I call losing agency in the digital age. Are you OK with losing your individuality? What makes you… you? That’s my reason towards privacy.

519 points by oppodeldoc 5y ago

Explaining to people what they should do regarding matters that there are no ways to achieve the stated goals is the laziest, lowest value category of journalism. It's a plague.

iso8859-1 5y ago
Downvoted for clunky sentence construction.
jtdev 5y ago
Uhhh, you can stop using said services and software that abuse privacy, e.g., Facebook, Google, Twitter, TicToc, etc.
- anm89 5y ago
  That doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of your personal interaction with the data economy.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    If enough people end their own interaction with it it ceases to exist, right? If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.
    - fsagx 5y ago
      A person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to not interact with services that aggregate and sell data. No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.
      - SahAssar 5y ago
        The point is that for each person that ends their interaction with these companies the less data they have on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do. Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.
- lsb 5y ago
  You can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all the time.
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    facebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a facebook account
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Here's another industry that relies on aggregating your data: Credit reports. Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database. No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.
  - gspq 5y ago
    And they have an API to these data. Selling your data to data vendors. And now this: https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?
- tejtm 5y ago
  True, but there is no practical way to get through our work days without them using us anyway.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  But that doesn't stop their abuse. Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc. You're ever getting away.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook" Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  In theory. I've deleted my Facebook account. Few years later needed to create new one and used same e-mail address. Guess what welcomed me! My old account! Heck, even posts I had deleted and whole journal (or however its called) related to them, yes it was back again, waiting to be clicked "unhide".
royaltjames 5y ago
In any form of communication, it's the worst.
ginko 5y ago
I certainly think there's ways to achieve this: Implement and enforce GDPR-like laws and fine spy corporations into oblivion.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Which is what the article implies with statements like "we should not allow X." There are several specific rules it suggests, which clearly would have to be laws.
Impassionata 5y ago
There's a way to achieve the stated goals: have the government come down real hard both on the low-level data crime and the big players that are supposedly legit. Burn it all down.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  "Burn it all down" as a solution — inevitably applied to cultures, systems or industries viewed from the outside — is also a plague of laziness.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
  - Judgmentality 5y ago
    I've never heard "hey this isn't working, let's start over from scratch!" be called laziness before.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      "It isn't working" is also lazy, when you're describing an industry that powers half the economy, and frankly, civilization is trucking along pretty OK with the data industry warts and all. There are certainly problems, but you haven't put enough thought into what the statement even _means_ (Would this eliminate EMR systems? Bank transfers? Credit scores?) to consider what "burning it down" means, or "it's not working" means.
    - awillen 5y ago
      It's lazy when it doesn't come with a proposal to replace the stuff that you want to burn down. It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code. The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix. It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
dominotw 5y ago
we should end this category of journalism.
- anm89 5y ago
  Ha, well played.
omgJustTest 5y ago
Just because something is impractical or a solution is unknown doesn't make it valueless. There are possible truths that exist in mainstream math formalisms[1]... for which the formalism says there may be no proof of. Just because the formalism can't explain everything doesn't mean we should throw it out! I view communications like this as: a. making ppl aware (who may not be technical) b. doing the work that may not be worth $$$ c. avoiding future coordination failures of society All of these in a hyper-optimized and hyper-educated societies may seem inefficient, but in a non-optimized and not highly educated world we live in they are the difference between chaos and not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_...
_vertigo 5y ago
You can point out a problem without having a solution. Part of the reason why this issue feels unsolvable is that people don't really care enough to do anything. A piece of journalism that makes people care more is a step in the right direction.

akomtu 5y ago

If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine, then surveillance capitalism is a modern steam engine with lots of sensors optimizing its performance.

UI_at_80x24 5y ago
>If greed is steam and capitalism is a steam engine I rather like this simile. Kudos!

bdamm 5y ago

The author writes as if exploitation is a new phenomenon. It is annoyingly naïve.

rhacker 5y ago

We need to go back to the TV model. I mean we sold things back in 1995 right? You go to a website about babies, you get baby ads. You go to a website about electrified fences, you get ads for trucks, tractors, backhoe rentals (even in your area because of your IP address - but that's it) It's damn near equivalent to local / cable TV.

brokencode 5y ago
Does anybody know if targeted ads based on tracking even work? Are they worth all the extra cost and complexity compared to traditional ads? It doesn’t seem like it. Half the time I see a super-targeted ad, it’s for a product I already purchased. Also, what ever happened to showing ads to people who aren’t already interested in your product to expand your brand and maybe bring in new customers? The current ad model feels overfitted to me.
- SonicScrub 5y ago
  Yes, yes they do work. That's why it's a billion dollar industry. It allows industries to micro-target specific ads for communities and speak to them directly. It gives you more ability to expand your brand to new customers, not less, as it allows to you to specifically target niche groups who previously had no interest in you. It's important to get a sense of the extreme level of refinement that firms have access to through data-driven marketing. Want to design a marketing campaign for dog-owning, outdoorsy lesbians? Subaru launched an ad campaign in the 90s using subtle coding in their wide-net ads. Now companies can do that much more effectively by directly targeting those communities. As for the common complaint that you always see ads for products you already purchased, that's actually a very good time to make an impression. What are the odds that you are thinking about buying a new dishwasher at any given moment? Probably next to 0. You probably would completely ignore any dishwasher ad you saw. Now imagine you just replaced your dishwasher with a new one. You probably noticed that dishwasher ad now. You might have even clicked on it to see if you got a good deal on it. You probably care more right now about dishwasher specs than you ever have in your life up to this point. Maybe there's a better deal out there. This is the perfect time to send you more dishwasher ads.

pascalxus 5y ago

And yet, with all this information about me, they still struggle to come up with even the slightest big of relevant advertising. 99.9% of the products I see advertised to me are either completely irrelevant to me or products I down right hate: and I never buy them. If they do have all the information the article claims, it just doesn't seem like they're able to use it in an effective manner. So what's the harm? the key here, is, just don't buy products you don't want or don't need. as long as you do that, you'll be fine. I have yet to meet a single Ad that forced me to buy a product I didn't really want or need. And, just don't let the ads manipulate you.

version_five 5y ago

What these kinds of articles (that basically just say how much of our data is being collected, and assert that it's bad) miss is the whole "attention economy" side of the equation, which I believe is more detrimental. Data is concretely used to maximize engagement, outrage, polarization, etc. in order to get more attention, which is at a root of a lot of the public discourse challenges we have these days. It would be much more benign if tracking was really just about trying to see what I am most likely to buy and target that to me.

croes 5y ago
Still a bad thing. Most likely to buy neither means you need it nor you really can afford it. It's still just exploitation for profit.
n0on3 5y ago
This is the point I feel most as well. I think this trend of burning attention is both destructive in ways and depth we don't completely understand yet - possibly making unrecoverable damage to our society on ridiculously large scale - and a blunt exploitation of the bias to consider attention as an infinite resource / not a real cost. Personally I dislike also the "tracking to show me what I'm most likely to buy" but this itself (assuming such thing could exist in a vacuum, which seems unrealistic to me) has an inherently limited impact.

DanielBMarkham 5y ago

I think a big part of the problem here is that our computers, and the associated data they collect, are part of our extended brains. They're not record players, hotel registers, or any other metaphor society or our legal system has used in the past. It's virtually as if you could take part of your brain out and hand it to somebody, perhaps to whistle a tune you remember from school or recount that chat you had with your previous SO. It's not okay to take a person and hold them against their will, even if they've signed some sort of agreement. Indentured servitude and slavery are considered non-viable business arrangements. No matter what I promise you or what our trade-off is, these contracts cannot exist. I think the only way this reasonably ends is when the rest of society catches up to that conclusion. It might be a while, though. I honestly don't think most people _want_ to know what's going on, since it's quite frightening and there's nothing they can do about it. This is going to have to get more and more stressful to the average citizen until most folks realize what kind of world we've crept into.

Hasz 5y ago

Ending the data economy means ending inference. Most of the examples listed in the opening paragraph are not direct measurements, but mundane behavior that can associated with something interesting. I don’t think stopping inference is possible (or a good idea!), but it is easy to subvert and reign in, at least online. Simply letting your browser emulate the browsing habits of a wide variety of people could knock down your uniqueness if done in bulk. I’m pretty sure there was a chrome extension a while ago that browsered major sites to obfuscate your actual traffic. I also like the EFF’s panopticon if you’d like to see some real value uniqueness scores.

djoldman 5y ago

Anyone know of a confirmed instance of: > They generate profits by ... selling [your personal information] to ... prospective employers ... ? This one seems unlikely but who knows.

metalliqaz 5y ago
It's indirect. Employers use one of many firms that do background checks, and those firms pay for access to the data.
- djoldman 5y ago
  If you're a background check company, it seems like a dangerous game to attempt to systematically match data from such unofficial sources to potential employees. Aren't they opening themselves up to lawsuits if they match the wrong person to the wrong potential employee? Additionally, isn't it illegal to decide to hire/not-hire based on a bunch of protected traits? (age, sex, orientation, religion, etc.) It seems like a lot of the quoted information would be off-limits.
  - metalliqaz 5y ago
    have you ever dealt with background checks? they don't care
jeffbee 5y ago
There certainly are firms that will sell a dossier on you employers or anyone else who wants it, it's just not any of the players mentioned in the article. That's why I hate these articles filled with non sequitur fuzzy thinking. If you want to end the data economy you need to start with the real players: telcos, payment processing networks, ISPs, insurance companies, credit bureaus.
arcticfox 5y ago
It's one of the top use cases listed for https://www.peopledatalabs.com/ https://www.peopledatalabs.com/ (candidate sourcing). And incidentally, PDL was the source of a 1.2-billion person data breach a few years ago: https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/ https://www.wired.com/story/billion-records-exposed-online/

34679 5y ago

Anyone engaged in the collection and sale of data should be required to maintain a list of their customers. Upon the sale of data, the customer should be required to provide their list to the broker. At the point of collection/consent, the list should be made available to the consumer. For example: You want to vote in an online poll by company A. Company A collects data about you and sells it, so you must agree to their privacy policy. Company A's privacy policy discloses that they sell your data to Companies B, C and D. Companies B, C and D have provided a list of its customers to Company A, and Company A includes those lists as well. In addition, the customers of those companies provide lists (as all data brokers would be required to do). If its seems like it could get overly complicated with huge lists of data brokers for a simple online poll, that's the idea. You shouldn't have to wonder how many entities you're giving access to your information when, for example, you want to vote for MLB All-stars. MLB wants your name, address, email, phone number, and they disclose they'll "share it with partners" but they don't say who those partners are, how many exist, and if they have their own "partners". Vote for your favorite player and you could be getting a phone call for life insurance 15 minutes later after your number has been passed through 5 different companies.

hedgedoops2 5y ago
CCC has a longstanding policy demand called the "Datenbrief" ('data letter'). Under this proposal, every corporation that keeps personal information about a natural person would be obligated to, once a year, mail the subject a letter containing their information, with instructions how to exercise their existing statutory deletion/correction rights. If you keep PII, you'd also need to keep some contact info for the subject, and use it to ensure they know about their rights / the data. The existence of the data-related right would imply an obligation to inform the subject about it. I guess I'd prefer a web interface displaying all the data holders with little "delete" buttons, over getting a gazillion letters, but if this is implemented by a single organization that actually has all your data (even if only for the purpose of faciltating GDPR), it could be a central point of failure. [1] https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief https://www.ccc.de/en/datenbrief

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

Just have it so that any time a person or company's data is sold or leased, the company doing the selling must mail (via physical correspondence) the person or company with a notification of what data was sent and why. People will get tired of the junk mail and companies will lose money trying to peddle data.

nostrademons 5y ago

People should own the data about them, and should be free to rent or trade usage of it to companies in exchange for money or services. Actual ownership should continue to rest with the person, however, who can revoke access the same way that a landlord can evict tenants or a worker can quit. The biggest barrier to this has been that lots of valuable data (eg. Facebook's social graph, Android contact data) is data about relationships between people, not the people themselves, and so would logically have multiple owners. But that's not really a big barrier with modern technology: the crypto world solved multi-person ownership with multisig wallets several years ago.

fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
Simply assigning a price to an activity doesn't solve the ethical and moral issues that can arise from that activity. Having a price for something doesn't exactly help victims of human trafficking (whether the illegal organ trade, prostitution or anything else). What can help those victims is regulation and aggressive criminal prosecution of anyone who seeks to gain from the suffering of others. Unless people actually have a realistic and practical way of "revoking access" to their data which results in serious penalties for companies which continue to use said data (including company-destroying or even criminal penalties for senior managers/benefactors) then the negative-externalities of data-collection won't ever really be curtailed.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  The difference that ownership would give is consent. Western liberal democracies are based on the idea that you can do what you want as long as all parties agree to it. I willingly give my personal information over to a variety of firms knowing what they do with it, because I value the services I receive more. It's not your place to say whether that's okay or not, because it doesn't affect you. Human trafficking + consent = immigration. Organ trade + consent = organ donation. Prostitution between consenting adults arguably should be legal anyway, and already is in many places in Europe. And yes, there should be a practical way to revoke access to data. There are ways to accomplish this technologically (eg. capability-based security keeps the data within your possession and you export the particular query that an outside firm would use; federated learning lets them train machine-learning models on the data without the data ever leaving your possession). We just don't use them yet, for the most part.

pascalxus 5y ago

The article implies a lot of risk for having so much personal data circulating around without our control. but the article, and many others like it fail to show how all that risk can adversely affect us. I mean, so what if my neighbor gets a different ad than I did? maybe he's into red shirts and I like blue shirts. so what if he got a cheaper plane ticket advertisement? I'm not going to buy a ticket unless it's cheap enough to do so. so what if i didn't get an advertisment for a college degree, it's not going to impact whether or not I'm going back to school, etc. so what if an ad uses emotional language specifically targetted towards my political demographic, it's not going to make a difference to me after I investigate the matter objectively.

tomc1985 5y ago
The article itself explains this: Privacy is important because it protects you from the influence of others. The more companies know about you, the more power they have over you. If they know you are desperate for money, they will take advantage of your situation and show you ads for abusive payday loans. If they know your race, they may not show you ads for certain exclusive places or services, and you would never know that you were discriminated against. If they know what tempts you, they will design products to keep you hooked, even if that can damage your health, hurt your work, or take time away from your family or from basic needs like sleep. If they know what your fears are, they will use them to lie to you about politics and manipulate you into voting for their preferred candidate. Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us in an effort to undermine public trust and cooperation. The list goes on and on. There are quite a few stories that have cropped up over the last decade or two that show this is actually happening.... the most precient one I can recall was where Target outted a pregnant teenager to her parents before she even knew she was pregnant: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-target-exposed-a-teen-girls-pregnancy-2012-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-...
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  I wonder how true that story is https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnancy-inside-story.html https://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregna...

ram_rar 5y ago

Similar to KYC (Know your customer) [1] in financial services industry. We need Know your Data Broker for customers, where in customers can know which data brokers have used their information. Most of the data brokers run in the dark and very few outside of tech are aware of it. Data Brokers should allows customers to be opted out and purge information from their systems if needed. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Barraketh 5y ago

Honestly, I'm kind of sick of how bad a rap advertising gets. Now sure, companies knowing a lot about your personal life is creepy on an intuitive level, but the fact of the matter is that cookie tracking data has NEVER been associated with any leak or data breach that resulted in personal harm. The thing people SHOULD be worried about is stuff like the Experian leak, where credit companies collect your non-anonymized personal data. Also, fact is that matching consumers with products that they like doesn't just have enormous business value, but is actually socially positive! If you can more easily reach a niche audience, you can build better more targeted products. And the open data exchanges were a great moat against platform centralization like FB. The fight against open data exchanges make the comparative advantage FB has in advertising to you larger. That's actually pretty bad, because FB has some pretty bad incentives wrt to the attention economy and optimizing for engagement. A world where advertising on independent websites is effective is a much better one - it would let websites put out better content, it would decrease the power of social networks, it could fund better journalism (which is being decimated right now), etc.

edgyquant 5y ago
While I agree with this it should be easier to opt out without disabling JavaScript across the internet.
KyleBerezin 5y ago
I want a system that tracks me and is 100% transparent to me.
- Toks 5y ago
  Exactly. It's not the tracking that is the problem, it's the lack of control/transparency. I want a personal data bank where I can decide who knows what about me.
  - meh99 5y ago
    Don’t expect that with big corporate hoarding it all for you. It’s “their infrastructure” and their business. The west wants to be free of life’s problems while also being free to optimize time to avoid dealing with them. It’s almost as if physical reality is full of real constraints our imaginations can refuse to acknowledge.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago

We can't really stop the Data Economy. If we're bleeding data all over the place then we can only maintain good habits of data hygiene. But then we know that will never be perfect. Some fingerprints will always remain, some breadcrumbs will always be hoovered up by the bots. I use adblockers and vpns and other such things but then I have accounts with facebooks and whatsapps. Could I camouflage my 'scent' with perfume? What's more - could I feed misleading data in? I really wouldn't mind being a VIP in the eyes of these shitty algorithms.

fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
Saying "We can't really stop the Data Economy" is like saying that humanity can't do anything about climate change because we can't afford to upset the petrochemical industry. We can have a discussion about the costs and benefits of the Data Economy but to simply state that it's impossible to do anything about it is reductive to the point of absurdity and, frankly, only serves the interests of those who want to continue profiting without bearing any of the societal costs.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  No no - I mean 'we' as in we here right now, in this conversation. I'm all for regulating the Data Economy and all the efforts to impose laws and regulations and what not. It's just that all these devices and microchips have opened a way to trade on data that we'll never be able to regulate and control with 100% clarity and precision. So we're definitely gonna have to get more clever than just asking the government to ban them.
  - fuckyouriotshit 5y ago
    > It's just that all these devices and microchips have opened a way to trade on data that we'll never be able to regulate and control with 100% clarity and precision. So we're definitely gonna have to get more clever than just asking the government to ban them. There's nothing fundamentally different about the technology in the last ~decade that has caused this trade to explode. Bandwidth, storage and compute have all gotten cheaper, but there's not much more that has actually technologically changed to cause this explosion. What has changed is that companies now see this sort of data-gathering as a potential source of profit and have essentially never had to pay more than a fraction of the costs that they incur on society when this data is abused/leaked, etc. If there was actual civil and criminal liability attached to negligence, misuse of user data, etc. then most of these problems would disappear pretty quickly. The reason why this hasn't already happened is almost certainly related to the immense amounts of money and influence that the data-gathers can wield on politicians. A key part of any sort of effective regulation in this space would also require that breaches or misuses of data that didn't involve negligence were also heavily punished (similar to how some toxic waste spills are handled). This would create a powerful incentive for companies to just not collect the data in the first place unless there was a serious business need for it which justified the additional risk to the company. I can't see that ever being popular here though given how entrenched online advertising $$$ is in SV/YC/HN...

atomicbeanie 5y ago

Hogwash. Sharing data and having it stolen are two different things. Luddites did not account for what their idea of the future would miss out on. The data future offers new opportunities in reality based communication. Working on serious problems like climate change would be hobbled without the rise of the data economy. But to be an economy it must have rules that protect private, personal and ethically important entities.

cs702 5y ago

No one sane would ever want their relatives, friends, work colleagues, and neighbors to be able to know (quoting from the OP): > who you sleep with because both you and the person you share your bed with keep your phones nearby > whether you sleep soundly at night or whether your troubles are keeping you up > whether you pick up your phone in the middle of the night and search for things like "loan repayment" > your IQ based on the pages you "like" on Facebook and the friends you have > your restaurant visits and shopping habits > how fast you drive, even if you don't have a smart car, because your phone contains an accelerometer > your life expectancy based on how fast you walk, as measured by your phone > whether you suffer from depression by how you slide your finger across your phone’s screen > if your spouse is considering leaving you because she's been searching online for a divorce lawyer No one sane is OK with corporations, governments, and other third parties being able to obtain and save this information either -- especially if their only hurdle is to get you to click "OK" to agree to some legal agreement almost no one has the time to read or expertise to understand in its full implications. We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale.

jackjeff 5y ago
But the only penalty is “seeing” personalized ads. It’s not exactly a problem for most people. Even I who’s privacy conscious don’t particularly care I block ads with ad blockers anyway.
d1lanka 5y ago
> We need a New Declaration of Human Rights for the 21st century that takes into account rapidly advancing technologies for collecting and acting on data at mass scale. Sir Tim Berners Lee already came up with "The Contract for The Web": https://contractfortheweb.org/ https://contractfortheweb.org/ Spread it around.
nutellaandgo 5y ago
That's not gonna happen. But there are services out there that are vastly more private such as ProtonMail, Telegram, Signal, etc. If you want privacy, quit Facebook and Gmail. News flash: they're NOT gonna stop spying on you. You need to stop using them.

29athrowaway 5y ago

If you can't hide your activity just pollute their data to the point it becomes unuseable. Give them data that makes them lose money. Search random stuff you are not interested in and see them desperately throw money into the toilet. Search plane tickets to Congo, saxophones, windsurf equipment, paintings of toucans... the most random shit you can think of. Then you will start seeing ads for that, which is seeing the ad tech imploding in front of your eyes. The more you do it and the more other people do it, the less profitable ad tech becomes. Also search for stuff outside your demographics, like stuff for older people, so they get your profile wrong.

cevered 5y ago

I highly suggest you guys checkout Decentr. They are building blockchain platform that allows individuals to have ownership over their personal data to exchange and leverage for economic benefits in a decentralized and secure way. I think it's false to say we can't collect data in a secure way therefore stop the data economy. We should be seeking to empower individuals with the ownership of their own data to create a true data economy.

aeoleonn 5y ago
when I hear "blockchain" my eyes glaze over
Jwarder 5y ago
How paranoid should I be of a browser plug-in that promises to track every interaction I make and provide that data for advertiser targeting?
- cevered 5y ago
  All of your data is stored in an encrypted wallet/ID via decentralized storage solutions. Only you have access to your data and control over your data via a private key like a crypto wallet.

bobthechef 5y ago

Articles that make declarations about how bad X is and then follow that up with empty calls to action like "We need to end X" to get people nodding their heads in agreement are common and cheap. What's your solution? Is there one? Sure, you can draw attention to something bad, but if all you ever do is live off the drama and frantically declare that X "needs to stop" (I loathe that airheaded phrase like few others), what good are you? Who's going to stop it? Passive voice does not impress. When I need to eat, I eat. I don't say "I need to eat" and leave it at that. I'd starve. Clearly you think it can be stopped. Clearly you think it's not just an unfortunate malady of the age that we must bear. You think it can be fixed. Where's your proposal? How are we going to shift the tech economy away from surveillance? The growth of the data economy is like the growth of finance. Neither finance nor data gathering actually produce anything. They can help produce something, inform or facilitate the production, but it's not productive in itself. In the limit, you're left with a hot potato economy where people gather data to sell for the purpose of gathering more data. Maybe this is incentivized by the killing of the industrial base. Everything we buy is from China. All the US does is consume.

meh99 5y ago
It’s not a journalists job to dictate policy. It’s to emotionally masturbate a message. Then the people will look at the politicians offering fixes. This is the whole point of division of labor. So many on this thread are looking for Superman. Did you found the company you work for and take out the garbage, while refilling the snack machine? You want someone like PG to write down some elementary math and say it’s a solution to something? No one does it all.

networkid 5y ago

"Foreign countries use data about our personalities to polarize us", Really? Maybe it's all your politicians does?

infogulch 5y ago

Somehow organizations get an immense amount of value out of tracking everything you do, say, think, and buy; everywhere you go; and everyone you meet. Two questions: 1. Why should they profit off of my data without my consent? (Hint: they shouldn't.) 2. Why is it so hard for me to get value out of it? Shit, if it's gonna be collected, aggregated, and analyzed anyway, I should just do it my damn self and actually get something out of it. It's like we need an open source community for personal data collection, aggregation, and analysis.

j56no 5y ago
there are ways to be paid, just don’t expect google/apple/fb to do that until they will be forced. eg see new eu laws coming forward, and some companies soon will disrupt this space. it will happen like gdpr, someone is already preparing for it, without making too much noise...
ianai 5y ago
Exactly, there’s a dollar value to you that they’re not paying you. You’d need a “property right” over it. (You are your own “property” already anyway.)
- amelius 5y ago
  Too late. You already clicked "I agree" on that EULA.
  - ianai 5y ago
    Since the civil war, you can’t sign ownership of yourself over to another. The ownership of data that intensive seems the same thing.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Ownership is the wrong word, since you will always own your data. The problem is others claiming to own it too.
    - 5y ago

ayngg 5y ago

Data feels like the next resource (like hydrocarbons or other resource extraction) where it can be exploited for massive profit while its costs externalized for the rest of society to bear. Like how it took decades for society to come around to human influenced climate change, it will probably take a while for people to accept the social and mental health costs associated with the extraction and use of this resource, or we will get to a point where people are manipulated enough to be insulated from such a realization.

not_jd_salinger 5y ago

The "data economy" is just an extension of the "Advertising Economy". Of course the idea of an "Advertising Economy" should cause people to pause a bit since advertising, by its nature, can only help maximize profits for somebody else. In theory the money that gets pumped into advertising can only be squeezed from the profits of other companies who are doing some optimization, weighing the cost of advertising vs the increase in their market. The maximum amount it makes sense to pay an advertiser is proportional to the increase in the audience they provide, with the assumption that your profit - fee * population_ads > profit * population_no_ads. One thing should be very clear, advertising cannot create value, it can only extract some of the surplus value that other companies are creating. This puts a pretty hard limit on how big advertisers can grow. The solution to this was of course to take the byproduct of advertising, the generation of large amounts of demographic data, and transform that into a product. Suddenly selling, sorting and manipulating data create an entirely new class of products and create demand for new professionals as well. The advertising industry, specializing in creating the illusion of value when their may be none, has done a brilliant job of convincing everyone that data is inherently values. Allowing tech companies to sell not only their data, that is often of questionable actual value, but the infrastructure to use this data, and sell training in the skills necessary to work with big data. The "data economy" is just advertising turned in on itself. Anyone who works with data knows deep down that all of this is a farce, but I think we still have a bit of time before all of this hits the fan, so enjoy the ride.

dk775 5y ago
Damn sometime I think as an analyst in LE that the obsession with data while crime skyrockets is stupid. I also vehemently hate advertising. Never thought that the whole time I pivoted from public policy > stats > data as a result of advertising’s influence. Makes me sick, time to crawl back towards stats and get out of this world.

intricatedetail 5y ago

Ban ad targeting first and suddenly it won't be economical to store such data.

peter303 5y ago

Irony: I got an "accept cookies" button when reading the article.

ivan888 5y ago

We need something like the Nutrition Facts label for digital consent: government mandated, consistent format, easy to scan. Even better if it was an interactive form to allow you to selectively consent to specific options

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

joadha 5y ago

The so-called "data economy" has improved our lives in immeasurable ways. I can more easily discover products that are relevant to me. Deserving innovations are granted a platform for quicker adoption. The world at large is more efficient, because relevant products and services are being delivered more quickly and efficiently than ever before. The author is extremely paranoid. She uses the word "should" a whole lot, but does not back up her dictatorial statements with any reasoning. This article has failed to scare me as intended.

throwawaywindev 5y ago
Efficiency is not always a good thing. We’re not machines and we shouldn’t aspire to some Wall-E existence where we do nothing but consume without any inconvenience.
starchild_3001 5y ago
There has to be limitations to the use and distribution of data. E.g. sensitive topics should be disallowed to be tracked. Otherwise, personalized ads are great. They make our lives immeasurably richer by enabling a free internet. They make small businesses grow and thrive. They allow users to find products they need w/o looking for them endlessly.

uberdru 5y ago

I remember a time when the virtue that separated the U.S. from, say, East Germany, was the assurance that your library borrowing history was sacrosanct.

EMM_386 5y ago

I'm curious, can insurance companies get access to this information to potentially affect policy rates? That would be insane. If they know how sedentary you are, or if you aren't sleeping well, or if you are driving too fast, driving at dangerous hours, or if you hang out at the bar too much ... can you imagine the implications? It gets even wilder with things like Fitbit Charge 4 where this data, in the hands of data brokers, can include data like your resting heart rate, your SpO2 levels, exactly where/when you walk.

tootie 5y ago
The data collectors only provide anonymized data. But it's possibly for a company that collects PII to stitch together their own user profile data with the anonymous data. So, yeah, maybe. Like if you login to your car insurance website and that website is using third-party tracking to piece together a profile, they can correlate to your identity. I don't think I've actually seen this done and I'm not sure if it's entirely legal. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guide https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-data-platform-guid...

dontparticipate 5y ago

There's not a single person that doesn't understand the "why" of this, especially on HN. There's just no "how" there. It's pretty clear so far that GDPR/CCPA have been complete failures. Companies just design around them and consumers are in no position to jump through the hoops those companies have set up to defend themselves. The game is already over and we've lost and articles like these are just hope porn wishing for a better world that we will never see.

prohobo 5y ago

This is a bit weird... The Reboot is sponsored by DFINITY, which is the company behind the Internet Computer and did a presentation at the World Economic Forum in 2020. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfTJEMj1GTw) The WEF is 100% pro datamining the shit out of everyone, and AFAIK they only invite people who share their vision of the future. So, why is DFINITY making presentations for them while also sponsoring anti datamining journalism? I'm not saying that "THIS IS WRONG!" I'm just confused as to what's going on here.

bsedlm 5y ago

I think we should go further, into a full review of what it means to own something. However this is rather ambitious considering that the idea of ownerhsip lies at the very foundation of civilization as we do it. But the nature of "digital property" has changed things. If you think the printing press changed the nature of human societies, just wait until the internet has existed for a few hundred years and their corresponding number of generations. Capitalist market economies, trade-centric as they are, have evolved around a world in which all property is exclusive. However starting from printing press up to "model-T"--style mass production (the development of industrial societies) reduced the cost of copying and duplicating stuff more more until the creation of the internet brought about "digital goods" (such as all your personal data) which has duplication costs _below_ marginal (I think digital copying has essentially ZERO cost). Digital goods provide a huge boon if we are able to stop trying to force-fit them into a system which works great for physical (i.e. exclusive) goods. Why and how did Microsoft become what it is during the 90s? because of huge savings in duplicating their software in a society that expected said duplication to have a not-negible cost.

websites3434 5y ago

The people who are OK with this kind of thing -- "But nothing bad has ever happened to anyone IRL" -- are obviously not part of a minority ethnic/religious/sexual orientation/gender group. This kind of technology is already used to do harm in China. Those of us in those groups don't have the luxury of "waiting to see if the nightmare becomes real" because of some of us would be in the crosshairs, not potential bystanders.

slim 5y ago
In Palestine too https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldiers-turn-whistleblowers-over/5741508 https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/am/fmr-israeli-soldier...

anticristi 5y ago

> Ending the data economy may seem like a radical proposition, Not in 2021. In 2018, GDPR went into force in the EU. In 2018, CCPA went into force in California, US. In 2021, VCDPA went into force in Virginia, US. At least with GDPR serious fines were passed. The right to data privacy is no longer a John-Lennon-like hippie idea. It is law. Now go and fix you business model.

julienb_sea 5y ago

We derive great benefit from the "data economy" in the form of services which are NOT free to develop or operate but have no cost associated with their usage. We also enjoy the benefits when it comes to social connections, disaster recovery, and tracking our lost valuables. It is not going away. The potential pitfalls of the data economy are about overbearing or violent governments, or about poorly managed data protection. This has much more to do with the bad actors than the tools they are using. It's sort of like saying we should ban information distribution because bad actors can spread misinformation.

Aunche 5y ago

Disclaimer: I work at a company that collects user data. The author is fearmongering big tech because she envies all the money they are making. Facebook does not sell user data, and I'm pretty sure the author knows this but intentionally perpetuates this misconception anyways. Facebook would collect about as much user data regardless of whether they used it for targeted advertising.

jeffrogers 5y ago

“They generate profits by compiling a profile of you from your data trail and then selling it to the highest bidder” Connecting another dot on this point: The creation and widespread use of such profiles -which are not merely comprised of data, but are summary conclusions about people- may well make the U.S. into a genuinely caste society. Without rules regarding things like data aging, publicly accessible profile monitoring, and bad data correction… and when to provide some sort rehabilitation method, people will eventually become just a collection of their mistakes and forced into one bucket or another. We need something akin to the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a set of laws that provide better guide-rails for when data can be collected, by who, for what purpose, when it can be sold or used for a purpose other than why it was first collected, etc.

tibiahurried 5y ago

The Data Economy is what enables "free" product for the end-user. Think about email, drive, video. Users are now used to get most of this stuff for free. And that's possible thanks to the Data Economy. End such economy basically means the users will start paying for the internet. Never gonna happen.

agumonkey 5y ago

Isn't the data economy a sign of the end of the economical ladder ? we have nothing new to sell ..

emodendroket 5y ago

This reminds me of when people want to "reverse financialization" or "get rid of the shareholder value model." How are you going to reverse an idea and what are you going to replace it with?

jjulius 5y ago
>How are you going to reverse an idea... In this case, make mass data collection and targeted advertising illegal. >... and what are you going to replace it with? The model(s) we had before - generalized advertising based on who advertisers believe the broader audience that watches X show or views Y website is.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Making "mass data collection" illegal seems pretty fraught. I doubt that anybody would want that in its literal form. I'm not sure anyone is too interested in nuking our tech sector either but maybe I'm wrong about that part.

kazinator 5y ago

Part of the data economy is this curious phenomenon: nicely styled web articles, where 99.9999% of the effort goes into producing the graphical artwork (often just for that article, not from a stock library!), and the text is just someone banging out some Reddit-comment-level crap for 5-10 minutes. Imagine this in a plain document with no CSS: <body> <h2>Why We Should End the Data Economy</h2> <p>The data economy depends on violating our right to privacy on a massive scale, collecting as much personal data as possible for profit.</p> <p>...</p> ... Now it's just the rant of some loser who doesn't even know the first thing about making an attractive web page, and doesn't have any friends who are graphical designers or artists to help him or her sell the idea to the masses.

hvocode 5y ago

I'm all for significantly limiting the "data economy", but I suspect too many people have become too used to getting free stuff. I see this all over the place - there are products and services that are quite expensive to build and provide, but they're free because people (often unwittingly) exchange data about themselves in place of the actual cost. If you still want those products/services without the data industry supporting it, someone will have to pay for them. I think lots of people opposed to the data economy will become less opposed when faced with actually paying for stuff it supports. I learned this the hard way trying to sell something that competed with free tools from Facebook/Google/[other giant data monetizing companies]. Our tool was/is competitive, but we aren't in the business of data harvesting or advertising - so, the engineering cost (many years of effort) would have to be paid from actually selling the product. The response? People want the free ones, and could really care less how the engineers that built it were paid as long as THEY (the consumer of the tool) got it for free. As long as the "someone else will pay for X so I can have it for free" attitude is acceptable and widespread, we're likely stuck with a pervasive and deep data economy.

ipsin 5y ago

As I understand it, CCPA means any California resident could hypothetically write a data broker, get their own file, and determine how much actual tracking is going on. All the hypothetical examples are realistic, but... what are the names of companies that are actually providing that level of data about me?

RGamma 5y ago

Viewing the world through the data lens makes you blind to the things you didn't measure or that you cannot conceive a measurement for. It also stifles original thought that is conceived independent of how things are or what people like ("culture becomes stuck"). When dealing with data you need to be aware of your own unfixable shortcomings as an observer. And if you can influence people's behavior at scale you're no longer an independent observer anyway, complicating things further (a measurement that becomes a target stops being a measurement). There isn't one truth you could uncover in data; life is an open-ended chaotic system. Let's keep it that way.

dgb23 5y ago
I've been thinking about data-driven AI systems that generate art, photography and the like. One thing about these systems is that they are always learning from past works. They don't create in the same chaotic - as you say - way as we do. Recognizing the limitation of these systems is key to be able to use them well and when not to use them.
- RGamma 5y ago
  These systems lack any form of coherent world view, artistic vision, moral imperative, culture or ability to reflect on their own surroundings, limitations and assumptions (higher-order thinking). Even if one adds randomness to create new phenomena within their given framework, one can never compensate for that. Uncarefully applied data-driven narratives have not enriched our thinking, they're blunting it. And they blind us to what could be.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Human art is also based off of past works. Moreover, AI art tends to be more, not less, chaotic than human art.
  - RGamma 5y ago
    Past works are one component. Major happenings, fantasy, wishes, emotions, etc play a bigger role overall (historically).

holoduke 5y ago

Wasnt here on hn someone who created a bot able to randomly like messages on FB, search for nonsense on Google, post random tweets on twitter etc, spoofs GPS etc. Would love to use something like that

EGreg 5y ago

And how do you propose to do that? I wrote this back in 2014: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 And here is the solution: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html Thoughts?

2dog 5y ago

I'm in the data business, this article is wrong on many levels but whatever... The biggest faux pas is "your PII is sold to the highest bidder". Not true, your PII (and mine) is sold to any bidder who hits the minimum threshold/rate, currently less the 12cents CPM

herunan 5y ago

If only it were about advertising… Your attention is everything. Even beyond buying things or not. Your views about certain aspects of your life are affected by your senses and experiences, and so much comes from what you see, hear, and read online. Your data informs a lot of what ends up in your screen, which keeps shaping who you are. This vicious circle is what I call losing agency in the digital age. Are you OK with losing your individuality? What makes you… you? That’s my reason towards privacy.