4 ms·

Why is it legal for them to sell personal data? It should be explicitly asked each time, not buried in a ToS and legalese. If it's information you wouldn't just

Why is it legal for them to sell personal data? It should be explicitly asked each time, not buried in a ToS and legalese. If it's information you wouldn't just offer to a stranger (like your address or where exactly you went last weekend), why are companies allowed to just offer it?

jdavis703 5y ago
By this standard there would never have been phone books.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  I feel like we can find a middle ground between phone books and "let me by the location of every homosexual in a country".
- toolz 5y ago
  If you're implying phonebooks were a net value add to society I strongly disagree. Needing someones consent (not necessarily the person you're contacting) to contact someone should really be the default. Further selling ad space in a book filled with other peoples information and those people who are the unwilling product get nothing but spam calls in return? Seems pretty gross if you ask me.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Back in the day, phone books were pretty damned useful. Of course they no longer are, but arguing that they weren't a "net value add" is absurd. You could easily opt out of being listed in the phone book, and many people did.
    - toolz 5y ago
      So your information should be public domain until you opt-out? How is it that somebody else should be making money off of my information and I have to do the extra work to opt-out? That doesn't pass any smell test.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        When you signed up for landline service, they would ask you if you wanted to be listed or not. Sounds more like opt-in if you ask me. I had a friend that allowed his number to be listed on an alias of David King so that in the book it showed up as King, David. It amused him.
        toolz 5y ago
        That may be true for your friend, but it was not true for me - caller ID would even display names of people who asked to be unlisted. If it was opt-in I would have no issue, but it wasn't for me at least.
        kelnos 5y ago
        I think the caller ID thing is different. I don't think people should be allowed to opt out of caller ID, except in some pretty narrow cases. If you're going to call someone, you should be required to affirmatively identify yourself. I do agree that an opt-out-required phonebook sounds crazy now, but it didn't back in the 80s and 90s. Mass data collection was not the norm, and all that information wasn't available in digitized form to any person or company who wanted it. So abuse of that data was pretty low.
        toolz 5y ago
        Well you can't really require identification and if you do you're placing undue trust in a system that would make no difference to pro-social users and grant malicious users more trust than is deserved. I agree that phone book data seemed just annoying at the time, but in hindsight it was a bad idea to normalize letting other people sell your data. Just look where we are now - I imagine a society more privacy focused when it was just annoying might not end up in a surveillance state quite so quickly. Hindsight 20/20 and all, so I'm just looking at the past through todays lens and wondering if the modest (at best) convenience was worth the normalization of letting other people sell our data.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      No, you could not "opt out" of being listed in the phone book. You could pay to be removed. Furthermore, usefulness does not equal consent.
      - mPReDiToR 5y ago
        In England at least you could opt out for free on landlines in the 90s. When mobile phones started up (back in the ten digit days) you could call a cellular provider and query a number if you had a name. The STD (yes, yes, laugh at the STI joke) prefix used to signal the network the user was on so you could ask Orange for "John Smith" if the number started 0973. This was also free to opt out of.
- Sanzig 5y ago
  The internet and indexing changed the equation. Before the web, a phonebook was mainly a local thing: you could look somebody up in your area, but you couldn't easily look up somebody across the country. You'd have to dial directory assistance in that other area, and even then, you're only getting a few names that way. With the web, everything is online and accessible using a simple lookup from a device in your pocket. You can also automate the acquisition and processing of entire phone directories with ease: going through the entire phonebook to annotate profiles on people would have taken weeks with paper, but you can do it in seconds with a Python script. Indexing and rapid data processing fundamentally changes the character of datasets, both in terms of positive utility and in terms of potential misuses. We still haven't figured that out yet as a society.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    > Before the web, a phonebook was mainly a local thing: you could look somebody up in your area, but you couldn't easily look up somebody across the country. You'd have to dial directory assistance in that other area, and even then, you're only getting a few names that way. Right, but you still can't easily look somebody up across the country - unless you pay for access to that data - which you could've done with phonebooks. I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in...
    - Sanzig 5y ago
      > Right, but you still can't easily look somebody up across the country - unless you pay for access to that data - which you could've done with phonebooks. Sure you can, all the phone directories are online and aggregated now - for example: https://www.whitepages.com/ https://www.whitepages.com/ > I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in... Yes, but there's a lot more effort involved with (1) ordering a phone book from Bell for a city located on the other side of the country, and (2) looking up the persons of interest in the paper directory. I wouldn't be suprised either if Bell sold phonebook data in the pre-internet age, but that's still a larger barrier to entry than somebody who can search for anything they want to know about somebody using a laptop in coffee shop. We've democratized open source intelligence to the point where the barrier to entry is a bored teenager that doesn't even need to leave their house. I don't think we've figured out the massive societal implications of that just yet.
- JohnFen 5y ago
  At least you could request to be unlisted in the phone book but still have a phone number. True, you paid a fee for the "privilege," but at least it was possible.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    What do you think makes it impossible today?
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      The lack of phone books, at least in my area.
      - jfrunyon 5y ago
        Eh? Guess you aren't in the US.
dylan604 5y ago
>Why is it legal for them to sell personal data? Because there is no law preventing it. >why are companies allowed to just offer it? Because these users did just offer it to a stranger. That's what is so confusing to me. Users claim they would not offer this info to a stranger, yet they gladly post it on social. Maybe there's still confusion on how private settings do/don't work??? Maybe people just are not capable of understanding the difference of the stranger/social post??? Maybe they don't really care, and are only saying they wouldn't give info to a stranger because they don't understand/like the question, and just answer how they think the questioner wants to hear?
jfrunyon 5y ago
It is abundantly clear that you are making certain info public when you use Grindr.
- tolbish 5y ago
  It is abundantly clear how all of your data will be used, not buried in ToS/legalese?
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    I don't know about "all of your data", but yes, it is certainly abundantly clear that you are making your location and other information which appears on your - and everyone else's - profile public.

jdavis703 5y ago

By this standard there would never have been phone books.

madeofpalk 5y ago
I feel like we can find a middle ground between phone books and "let me by the location of every homosexual in a country".
toolz 5y ago
If you're implying phonebooks were a net value add to society I strongly disagree. Needing someones consent (not necessarily the person you're contacting) to contact someone should really be the default. Further selling ad space in a book filled with other peoples information and those people who are the unwilling product get nothing but spam calls in return? Seems pretty gross if you ask me.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Back in the day, phone books were pretty damned useful. Of course they no longer are, but arguing that they weren't a "net value add" is absurd. You could easily opt out of being listed in the phone book, and many people did.
  - toolz 5y ago
    So your information should be public domain until you opt-out? How is it that somebody else should be making money off of my information and I have to do the extra work to opt-out? That doesn't pass any smell test.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      When you signed up for landline service, they would ask you if you wanted to be listed or not. Sounds more like opt-in if you ask me. I had a friend that allowed his number to be listed on an alias of David King so that in the book it showed up as King, David. It amused him.
      - toolz 5y ago
        That may be true for your friend, but it was not true for me - caller ID would even display names of people who asked to be unlisted. If it was opt-in I would have no issue, but it wasn't for me at least.
        kelnos 5y ago
        I think the caller ID thing is different. I don't think people should be allowed to opt out of caller ID, except in some pretty narrow cases. If you're going to call someone, you should be required to affirmatively identify yourself. I do agree that an opt-out-required phonebook sounds crazy now, but it didn't back in the 80s and 90s. Mass data collection was not the norm, and all that information wasn't available in digitized form to any person or company who wanted it. So abuse of that data was pretty low.
        toolz 5y ago
        Well you can't really require identification and if you do you're placing undue trust in a system that would make no difference to pro-social users and grant malicious users more trust than is deserved. I agree that phone book data seemed just annoying at the time, but in hindsight it was a bad idea to normalize letting other people sell your data. Just look where we are now - I imagine a society more privacy focused when it was just annoying might not end up in a surveillance state quite so quickly. Hindsight 20/20 and all, so I'm just looking at the past through todays lens and wondering if the modest (at best) convenience was worth the normalization of letting other people sell our data.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    No, you could not "opt out" of being listed in the phone book. You could pay to be removed. Furthermore, usefulness does not equal consent.
    - mPReDiToR 5y ago
      In England at least you could opt out for free on landlines in the 90s. When mobile phones started up (back in the ten digit days) you could call a cellular provider and query a number if you had a name. The STD (yes, yes, laugh at the STI joke) prefix used to signal the network the user was on so you could ask Orange for "John Smith" if the number started 0973. This was also free to opt out of.
Sanzig 5y ago
The internet and indexing changed the equation. Before the web, a phonebook was mainly a local thing: you could look somebody up in your area, but you couldn't easily look up somebody across the country. You'd have to dial directory assistance in that other area, and even then, you're only getting a few names that way. With the web, everything is online and accessible using a simple lookup from a device in your pocket. You can also automate the acquisition and processing of entire phone directories with ease: going through the entire phonebook to annotate profiles on people would have taken weeks with paper, but you can do it in seconds with a Python script. Indexing and rapid data processing fundamentally changes the character of datasets, both in terms of positive utility and in terms of potential misuses. We still haven't figured that out yet as a society.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  > Before the web, a phonebook was mainly a local thing: you could look somebody up in your area, but you couldn't easily look up somebody across the country. You'd have to dial directory assistance in that other area, and even then, you're only getting a few names that way. Right, but you still can't easily look somebody up across the country - unless you pay for access to that data - which you could've done with phonebooks. I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in...
  - Sanzig 5y ago
    > Right, but you still can't easily look somebody up across the country - unless you pay for access to that data - which you could've done with phonebooks. Sure you can, all the phone directories are online and aggregated now - for example: https://www.whitepages.com/ https://www.whitepages.com/ > I strongly suspect that Bell sold their phonebook data to companies, but even if they didn't, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to obtain phonebooks from all the areas your business is interested in... Yes, but there's a lot more effort involved with (1) ordering a phone book from Bell for a city located on the other side of the country, and (2) looking up the persons of interest in the paper directory. I wouldn't be suprised either if Bell sold phonebook data in the pre-internet age, but that's still a larger barrier to entry than somebody who can search for anything they want to know about somebody using a laptop in coffee shop. We've democratized open source intelligence to the point where the barrier to entry is a bored teenager that doesn't even need to leave their house. I don't think we've figured out the massive societal implications of that just yet.
JohnFen 5y ago
At least you could request to be unlisted in the phone book but still have a phone number. True, you paid a fee for the "privilege," but at least it was possible.
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  What do you think makes it impossible today?
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    The lack of phone books, at least in my area.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      Eh? Guess you aren't in the US.

dylan604 5y ago

>Why is it legal for them to sell personal data? Because there is no law preventing it. >why are companies allowed to just offer it? Because these users did just offer it to a stranger. That's what is so confusing to me. Users claim they would not offer this info to a stranger, yet they gladly post it on social. Maybe there's still confusion on how private settings do/don't work??? Maybe people just are not capable of understanding the difference of the stranger/social post??? Maybe they don't really care, and are only saying they wouldn't give info to a stranger because they don't understand/like the question, and just answer how they think the questioner wants to hear?

jfrunyon 5y ago

It is abundantly clear that you are making certain info public when you use Grindr.

tolbish 5y ago
It is abundantly clear how all of your data will be used, not buried in ToS/legalese?
- jfrunyon 5y ago
  I don't know about "all of your data", but yes, it is certainly abundantly clear that you are making your location and other information which appears on your - and everyone else's - profile public.