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Amazon is offering users $2 a month for letting it track phone data
- ianai 4y agoShould really be equal to my monthly income since the only person I’d be remotely comfortable with this amount of private compromise with would be a significant other. And there’s no reason to settle.
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoThen don't sign up?
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoIt’s kind of a funny comment because I assume your significant other isn’t responsible for paying your monthly income (though such a thing is possible). Not a criticism of you I just found it funny, since I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise the way the sentence is constructed.
- karaterobot 4y ago> The voluntary program could raise privacy concerns over how Amazon handles customer data. "I signed up to let Amazon track data coming through my phone in exchange for $2 a month, and get this — you won't believe it — I think they might be violating my privacy!"
- system2 4y agoI wonder if anyone would sell it for $2. I bet they made their market research to come up with this ridiculous number for what they are asking to do to.
- ArtemZ 4y agoMy wife is unemployed (and I don't think manual QA engineer without experience within the country is employable anymore) and trying to save every penny here and there, so it might actually work for her.
- jojobas 4y agoI bet they divided the expected profit from having the data by the number of users and then by 2 for good measure.
- GuB-42 4y agoNot me because I have no money problem but if I did, why not? It not much but the way I understand it, it is basically free money, you just check a box and you are tracked more, but other than that, no obligation on your part, and you don't get more ads. Yeah, privacy, but you get tracked anyways, in fact, Amazon already has the most sensitive information about you: they know where you live, they have your credit card, and they know what kind of stuff you buy. If you trust them all that, you might as well send them the ads you see and get your $2. And yeah, I guess they did their research. They probably don't want that many people to enroll in the program, and they are fine with the kind of profile $2 gets them. I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more.
- iudqnolq 4y ago> I don't think the extra data they get is worth more than $2, so I guess they want to enroll just enough people to conduct their market research, not more. Wouldn't they have a massive adverse selection problem unless the money is high enough to convince normies to sign up?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago$2? Is this a joke? Honestly if someone offered me $2 a month to do absolutely nothing, I would still be offended by it.
- hammock 4y agoAmazon does a lot of these "micropayments" - e.g. $2 digital reward for receiving your order on Saturday instead of Tuesday. The micropayments must work for it
- ceejayoz 4y agoThose don't really have a downside, if you don't mind getting your package on Saturday. It's up to $4 now (presumably so they can plan out Christmas shipping) so my Kindle books are pretty much all free right now.
- jxramos 4y agoit's an interesting strategy to monitize digital products in a different way. I wonder if the royalties work the same way under this scheme, they must right?
- ceejayoz 4y agoI would hope it comes out of Amazon's (substantial) cut.
- AussieWog93 4y agoFor what it's worth, I run an eBay store and this is how their promotions work. If you use a coupon (with a few exceptions, where the seller must explicitly opt-in), that comes off of eBay's bottom line. Same with eBay plus - we'll get an additional credit (usually AU$4) to cover the difference between regular and express shipping. Of course, they more than make up for this by taking a 10% cut off everything you sell through their site.
- 4y ago
- pixelpoet 4y agoNext year: Amazon is offering users $10 a month to let it watch them have sex in the bedroom. Why are we creating these fresh new hells all the time?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- trhr 4y agoJokes on them, that's a free $12/month since I barely use my phone and never have sex.
- upheaval7276 4y agoI'm sure the fine print will require a minimum number of encounters per 30-day period and a minimum duration per encounter.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoIt's probably more valuable for them to know if you aren't hitting a certain minimum threshold
- upheaval7276 4y agoI took “watch” to mean record and concluded that Amazon is going to setup a new “marketplace” that competes with the likes of pornhub. I mean, why not at this point.
- version_five 4y agoThey may be able to make back more than $12/mo with this knowledge from the average person in your circumstances
- tartoran 4y agoThey’d sell your schedule to the highest bidder burglar and instructions how to get into the house and a breadcrumb trail to valuables in the house. Entry by summining Alexa and providing a one time use passphrase
- RodgerTheGreat 4y agoIf they want that information bad enough to pay for it at all, it's worth more than $2.
- tartoran 4y agoQuite a few multiples of that. Im sure some people will take it
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- htag 4y agoAmazon specifically has you use their DNS server on a mobile device [0]. I imagine DNS allows them to get a confirmation of your identity when viewing ads served by Amazon on third party websites/apps. Their main page makes no mention on what rights they claim to DNS logs that are not related to ads, and I don't have the time or expertise to dive into their entire privacy policy. [0] https://panel.amazon.com https://panel.amazon.com
- Ayesh 4y agoUnless you change it to something else, the ISP-set DNS servers get all of these data anyway. I use NextDNS an all my devices. The amount of data you can gather from them about a person is mind boggling, given the amount of telemetry most services use, and the trend of very low DNS TTL.
- ineedasername 4y agoI know the gut intuitive reaction to this is negative-creepy, but I’d much prefer if all monetization of information about me and my shopping/behavioral patterns be this transparent. Heck I’d like it if ad-based business models had some type of GDPR-ish regulation around it the required companies to divulge something like: >Your use of this product/service is paid for by monetization of the following pieces of information about you. >We estimate that this informational contributes $X in annual revenue based on the market value of your demographic to advertisers and data brokers It’s what happens anyway, So why not? And of course I’d like there to be an opt out & option to simply pay for the service instead.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoI'd prefer it if monetisation of my personal data is illegal because it's a scummy practice that ultimately leads to scummy companies. Which is pretty much a truism in this day and age.
- johndhi 4y agoBeing upfront and paying for it is better than anyone else in the industry is doing. Bravo.
- typon 4y agoGoogle's customers: You guys are getting paid?
- bl0b 4y agoI think you meant to say 'product', not 'customers'
- xyst 4y agoKeep a dummy phone. Load up spyware. Write script to refresh amazon.com every 30 seconds. Throw it in a drawer. Let the passive income roll in. If other companies start paying for your “data”. Load them up. Rinse and repeat. edit: disable microphone if paranoid or wrap in a sound deadening material.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoYeah, only a few decades of that and the phone will pay for itself! /s
- selcuka 4y agoIt depends on where on earth you are, but here in Australia, for example, you can buy smartphones for about $10 when on special, or sometimes for free.
- nixgeek 4y agoDoes $2/mo even cover the power bill to have a smartphone on 24x7 though?
- selcuka 4y agoSolar power [1] and DNS-tunneling [2], which apparently works even with an expired SIM with no mobile or data plan at all. [1] Obviously using the solar generated power for something else to save on electricity might be more effective, but where is the fun in that? [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.xapek.andiodine/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.xapek.andiodine/
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y agoYeah, just a few milennia of that and the solar panel will pay for itself!
- 4y ago
- c3534l 4y agoPeople making money off of your data should get your consent and compensate you. No one does, though. But Amazon is the bad guy here for some reason.
- Apocryphon 4y ago$2 is so low that it's insulting. I'd rather pay tech companies to take my data, and I already do, since at least you usually get some sort of good or service in return, not a measly two bucks.
- c3534l 4y agoThen don't take the two bucks and keep your privacy.
- bvhvhfcgxfdf 4y ago
- dexterbt1 4y agoGetting there to "Skynet", if this takes off. Amazon already is listening via Echo and Ring and now this.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoIt's pretty exciting to see such a big company pilot a data profit sharing program. Think of what it demonstrates. It acknowledges a standard that your personal data belongs to you, that they value it, and they are willing to pay you for it. More importantly, they are willing to do it in a upfront manner instead of trying to sneak it into some new application. Hopefully more companies will take note. The whole premise of data privacy is that your data belongs to you, to do with it what you want, including selling it. I'm normally very privacy-minded but tempted to agree to it just on a matter of principle to help get such a market off the ground.
- heavyset_go 4y agoI wouldn't call this profit sharing, exactly. It's more akin to a fixed wage or fee than profit sharing.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoI dont want to get bogged down in technicality, so call it what you want. They think they can make money on the data and willing to pay a user for the data that they use. I haven't seen that before in the general consumer space.
- sublinear 4y ago> The whole premise of data privacy is that your data belongs to you, to do with it what you want, including selling it. Nice try
- s1artibartfast 4y agoPeople have discussed companies paying for personal data for a long time and I think this is an exciting step in the right direction. Not sure what your low effort comment is trying to say. That people shouldn't be able to sell their data?
- reb 4y ago
- hardwaresofton 4y agoThis is a huge development and change to the landscape. I wonder how many corporate value estimates are being rewritten across the sector, knowing a bit more about how users are valued/what companies may have to pay to motivate them to make ad targeting work properly. Thinking about it, do we have Apple to thank for this?
- paulhart 4y agoGood times. Recently I received several emails from Amazon offering me $15 if I would start using their Photos service. Never read the fine print, but that sounds skeezy - like they're trawling for more raw material to train ML systems on.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xnx 4y agoAt least they're more upfront about it than the dozens/hundreds of other companies that are doing this to users for $0 a month (ISPs, mobile network operators, apps, etc.).
- bmazed 4y agoi wouldn't accept, nice try tho l o l
- jeisc 4y agoit should be more like $2000 a month for what it is worth and how much they get out of it or how much is the human life experience worth?
- ranguna 4y agoI'm not selling my data for 2$, or 10, or 100. Regardless of that, I still think this is a nice move from amazon. People complain all the time that companies are stealing their data, then amazon comes in and offers to buy and people complain again... Yeah 2$ is away too low for a lot of people, but it's better than 0 for a start, hoping it will just go up from here.
- nosedrip 4y agoAmazon's cost-per-mille prices are much much higher for this type of super targeted reach, so $2 a month is peanuts in my view. Nevertheless, it's a great idea to start offering people a choice in which they understand and have a choice to monetize their own data.
- DueDilligence 4y ago.. given the many relevant and persistent Amazon connections I have blocked at my firewall, I'd say Amazon is already collecting a vast amount of data to the unsuspecting user already. so .. no. and for that paltry sum, not even worth it set up an old iPhone loaded with scripts and apps purely to muddy the data.