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Wow, five bucks. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info
by cs702 14y ago
Wow, five bucks.
As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. The new twist here is that the product (i.e., your FaceBook info) is now being sold in the open market for only $5.00/1,000,000, or $0.000005 per person.
Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand, so the inescapable conclusion is that there's abundant oversupply of this product in the open market. Yikes!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dalore 14y agoA 'small' slice of your facebook info.
- rmc 14y agoYour implication is that Facebook themselves sold this data. The orignial article says that it was from apps that people isntalled from a 3rd party, not Facebook.
- tvladeck 14y agoDoesn't matter. The company that got the data then sold it on for $5, which gives us an indication of how much they had to pay [1] to get the data from FB in the first place. [1] I'm using "pay" loosely here. I have no idea what they had to give up or produce in order to get the data, but presumably FB received something of value.
- hkmurakami 14y agoI imagine this data came from the "allow this app to access XYZ of your information: YES/NO" thingy that pops up when authorizing apps on these social media platforms. The only payment to FB that I can think of would be in the form of marketing costs (or does FB have a developer membership cost like Apple?)
- tvladeck 14y agoMost likely that's true. In this case the company dedicated time and resources to making an app, and Facebook is enjoying some of the fruit of those efforts. And the fact that this kind of data can sell for $5 gives us an indication of the value of those efforts. [1] [1] Not necessarily a good indication, as this may be a last ditch effort convert _some_ value out of their app development efforts, and who knows to how many buyers the seller has sold this data.
- rmc 14y agodoes FB have a developer membership cost like Apple? No, it doesn't cost anything to create a Facebook app.
- notatoad 14y ago>Prices normally go down only when supply exceeds demand I don't think that rule applies for digital goods where the cost of reproduction is zero. The supply is infinite.
- TylerE 14y agoNitpick: Cost per unit of digital goods is low, but not zero. Servers, bandwidth, CC fees, sysadmins, etc.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- 001sky 14y agoNot a nitpick, beacuse the cost to enter the data by the user is also not zero (thus supply is not infite either). These are subtle but not trivial things to keep in mind, when dealling with massive scale (A billion users, ect.)
- notatoad 14y agoThose are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.
- 001sky 14y agoCare to explain a bit more? On the face of it, I don't believe this can make sense. All costs scale, all costs are at some stage marginal. What are you proposing is the trigger or cause of incurrence?
- esrauch 14y agoI think the case they are describing is where the marginal cost is highly nonlinear and the price delta between two reasonable values is so negligible that the marginal cost isn't meaningful. A 2MB file does not cost twice as much to email send to someone as a 1MB file; you aren't going switch to a different internet connection or email provider because of your file is twice as big. The first 1 byte is very expensive and every subsequent byte has no observable marginal cost until 20 orders of magnitude later.
- SethMurphy 14y agoThe price is not low because of supply and demand, but because it is not a very useful list. When you pay a lot for a list it is because it has been curated and you are buying a list with X user having Y attribute[s]. Y='Facebook user' here, that is hardly worth anything. The network is too large for it to be significant for any real marketing campaign. Essentially you have a list of 1,000,000 VERY loosely related users.
- hkmurakami 14y agoI was considering the possibility of selling these emails to a spam email list, but then realized that since so many accounts' email addresses were changed to FOO@facebook.com, the value of these 1MM facebook accounts has diminished rather significantly in this regard.