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Pretty sure the mechanics as detailed in the article are factually wrong. Google does not sell personal data. It collects all the personal data it can and then stockpiles it, where it becomes an asset that the company can use to build products and charge rent (largely from advertisers, but also from consumers). Selling an extremely valuable proprietary asset to competitors would be a really dumb move - the money in today's economy is in owning monopoly assets and charging rent for them.
The actual mechanism behind the behavior the author observed is that the user went to Google, searched for a product, and then visited the product's website. The product's website contains a tracking beacon that associates a unique cookie for the user with the visit. The website's owner can then choose to run ads on Facebook or Twitter that are shown only to people who previously visited the website. This program is well-known among Facebook advertisers (it's apparently quite profitable to them), but Facebook understandably doesn't publicize it much to the general public.
Agree that it'd be cool if the person involved could actually control who and where it went to and was compensated for the use of it, but that'd likely require a fundamental change in how the web works.
Google does sell personal data, a little at a time. If I make an ad that targets young dog owners in Seattle, then when someone clicks that ad I know Google thinks they're a young dog owner in Seattle. Google sold me data about that person.
I propose that it would require a minor change in web browsers only. Consider that we have 'incognito' and 'private browsing' sessions. The implementations are slightly different between browsers (e.g. Firefox appears to allow sharing between tabs in a window; Safari keeps each tab completely isolated), but the principle is the same. Modify the browsers so they're always in 'private' mode, and to only permit sharing once the bill is paid.
Arguably, they already do. They pay us in services such as communications software, social software, search, etc.
Also, this is very common in some countries/industries. In the U.K. if you want to buy insurance or open a bank account etc, you’ll often use a comparison website, and they will likely give you an incentive (such as free cinema tickets) for choosing a service through them. This is paid for directly by the affiliate revenue. Cashback sites also exist that do this through affiliates. Credit cards do this with air miles, cashback and other rewards too.
The argument is that the intangible costs of the current scheme (life under total surveillance) make it desirable to force a direct dollar-value recognition of people's personal data.
A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up completely is an acceptable outcome of this policy. Make everyone go back to non-targeted advertising!
First parties might compensate me by providing a service in exchange.
What of the third parties with whom they share my personal data? When those parties profit off my data, what compensation do I receive?
Similar to the leader of a scam sect who pays you in spiritual enlightment: you might find it to be a reasonable deal, if you even recognize it as such, but ultimately it is not a solid foundation for a stable society.
The usual question arises: What would a civilized solution to the problem look like?
Edit: Having a unhinged competition where the winner is he who manipulates the masses most effectively without getting cought doesn’t seem like a good way to get to a better future to me.
I like to pay in dollars - can I pay for their services in dollars and not be tracked everywhere I go?
Advertising is a negative value add on pretty much all modern interactions, it needs to go away and stop imposing such a steep cost on consumers for the atrociously marginal value it delivers to producers.
I bet for 90% of users of Facebook(or Google) it is not clear how actually Facebook makes money
Perfect example in picking affiliate comparison sites - they skew the market, and don't include companies or plans that aren't in the affiliate scheme, so you rarely end up with the actual best value through them.
Just the sort of conflicting loyalties that leads to insurance, pension and mortgage misselling scandals.
More generally the exchange seems to have become one of being scammed out of £10 of data, tracking and inferences for every £1 of value received. It's years since it's felt like a fair and equitable exchange - like search in exchange for simple keyword ads without tracking.
This. Your data is already a currency. By visiting and consuming content you’re effectively paying for that content with whatever data they’re collecting.
Maybe this transaction needs to be somehow more explicit?
I know this is a really unpopular opinion, but what I don't get is why all this fuss over personal data? So what if facebook records what sites you've been to? If I visit starbucks, When I go to order my latte, the owners/baristas remember my name and face and maybe even what drink I ordered - you certainly don't mind that, right?
People aren't normally sensitive to these things: for example Govt on average takes 1/3 of people's incomes (thousand, tens of thousands of dollars) without the slightest hint of complaint. But when a company records where you've been online (with 0$ cost to you) it's all the sudden a disaster?
i genuinely struggle to understand this. if someone could explain it, that would be interesting.
Others explained, let's do a simple experiment instead: I see you are posting as "thorwasdfasdf". Why don't you instead not only use your real name, but also post your salary, profession, address, current and past lovers, intimate messages with them, what you like, what you don't, fights you had over electronic messaging...
What's the hold up? Is it not the same as the barista at Starbucks knowing your name and what coffee you like?
(Also, I don't get the comparison to taxes. You do realize that taxes pay for your infrastructure, safety, health--at least indirectly through regulation even if your country does not have public health care, justice system? But that's not really relevant to the topic here.)
Imagine that an entity knows your worst fears, deepest desires, biggest perversions, most sensitive insecurities, the people you love, the people you hate, the things you covet.
Now let's pretend that they know how to use this information to change your opinion. And not just your opinion, but the opinion of however many people fit their targeted persuasion campaign. Then understand that the moment the data is sold to another group, they have the same power. The new group might want to do things more sinister than sell you designer jeans.
Finally, realize that the information will last longer than you will. It'll probably be your legacy.
This explained it quite well to mw previously: https://robindoherty.com/2016/01/06/nothing-to-hide.html
A couple of other answers are a bit over the top, so I’ll give it a go too.
When you go to Starbucks you make an active choice to give the baristas your name (or any name) without them checking it’s actually yours.
What companies like Facebook and Google do is record your every move online with no effort or repeated decisions on your part on what to share with them. They, and whoever they sell your data to, can then build a profile around whatever aspect of your interests they choose, which will consist of associated risks and gains. That’s quite scary to me because they probably know more about some things about me than my closest friends and family do.
If someone without good intentions, someone who wants something from me, someone I’ve wronged, someone who could just gain something from me has that data they can use it to manipulate me.
I'll give it a shot. Yeah, so you don't give a crap about being tracked everywhere, having your every inclination, desire, thought, intention, or deed recorded. You're fine with them knowing everything about you, about your family, friends, associates, acquaintances, and all their doings and preferences too. But then one day you wake up and you realize that your entire existence is being mined to corral you into corridor of sameness, conformity, and malaise. You don't think anything edgy or dangerous, don't do anything remotely controversial or embarrassing. They mostly track you to monetize your sameness, your complete and utter lack of originality, your total lack of value to them except as cattle to be fed a diet of carrots and sticks; ads and special offers. You don't mind the digital eyes stalking you everywhere from the shadows. You don't mind having your complete existence watched over for--for now, seemingly innocuous if slightly annoying cajoling to buy more crap.
But you live a charmed life without imagination. Without dangerous ideas. Who wouldn't hurt a soul. To you, your life couldn't possibly matter. To you, you're one of the herd. You like it. Blending right in.
Enjoy your charmed life that complete and utter indifference to the digital dystopia being erected around you, beyond your control. You probably won't do anything edgy or interesting, because you're caught in that loop that they love you to be in. Inured and desensitized, caught in a self-reinforcing loop made by the background of your mind, constructed by your subconscious that knows that you're being watched--all the time.
For your sakes I hope you never stumble on a crime, disagree with prevailing political opinions, or speak up against the powers that be. Or that you look like someone who might. Or are close to someone who might. Better steer clear of sex toys, risky behavior and embarrassing maladies, live your bland existence under the watchful eye of the overlords who seem harmless, if only a little greedy.
Don't live your life any way that makes you unique and don't make yourself a target! Don't bother to use your imagination! Keep your lips off that whistle! And make sure to vote, or not, because who the fuck cares how society treats its citizens, amirite?
And don't bother looking back to the expectation of privacy that just a generation ago, was some kind of normal. To see the governments and power structures that wielded tyranny over people and engaged in genocide, to the documents and bills of rights that were put in place to restrict that tyranny, and how thoroughly founders understood that people just have a right to be free. But lattes!
Others have already provided good answers. I'll add my 2 cents:
Assume that the companies today are ethical with your data today - they only use algorithmic techniques to figure out what advertisements to sell to you.
What guarantee do you have that these companies will be around for the next 20 years? What guarantee do you have that somebody won't acquire these companies when their stocks are languishing - and that the new masters over this data will not abuse it?
Who owns Yahoo mail now? Who owns MySpace now? What are they doing with all that data? What incentives do they have to not abuse it?
The usefulness of your personal data has an extremely long half-life period. I'd guess it is much much larger than what the average life-span of an internet company.
I've been thinking instead of paying individuals, gov't should levy a tax on PII that is stored. A $/person identified/fingerprinted would be interesting.
This would allow ethical companies like Firefox and Signal to operate at much lower margins than Chrome and Messenger.
This is not a new movement, and Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID is good but not the first attempt to address this.
The first I heard of something like this was in the Berkman Identity Group, which grew into the Identity Commons. At the time the movement was called Vendor-Relationship-Management (VRM), an inversion of the CRM practice where customers controlled the information and could be incentivized in various ways (discounts, paid, etc.) to share that information for agreed upon durations.
https://www.idcommons.org/working-groups/vendor-relationship...
This movement was one of the drivers for the link contract work done as part of the Extensible Data Interchange (XDI) OASIS technical committee.
I don't know if this is the first instance of this kind of movement, but it was the first I heard of it.
Doc Searls reports another recent development: VRM is alive and well, under a new acronym that plays on B2B, Me2B. Source: http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
I used to support this point on view, but after the Facebook VPN scandal [0][1] I think using this approach will do more harm than good. It's a good way to make sure only poor people lose their privacy, since those that can afford it will use other platforms that charge a fee in exchange for a private experience (say no ads, or better privacy defaults).
Arguably, this is already happening with Apple, positioning themselves as privacy-aware, but charging a huge markup for it.
[0]: Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for access to all of their personal data https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/30/18203803/facebook-re...
[1]: Discussion on Hacker News https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055
Why would they pay you for your data? How much is it worth?
If you click on 0 ads per year, you generate $0 for Facebook and therefore your data is worth $0.
For a personally targeted (using your data) ad click on FB, you're looking at ~$3.25. For a web targeted ad click on a niche website, you're probably looking $0.50-$2.50.
In other words, your "data" is worth $0.75-$2.75 per click of revenue
FB spends 17% of revenue on direct costs and another 18% on marketing. Let's ignore R&D improvements and assume 35% of costs to serve that revenue.
Profit per click for FB = $0.49-$1.79 per click.
Please consider that these clicks must have real intent behind them. In other words, there should be at least 10% chance you'd actually buy that product.
In other words, your data is not worth that much money.
...
On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?
I think I looked that up like 4 years ago and found a few platforms where you could resell your data - thing is it wasn't worth much, like you could make 4 bucks a month with regular smartphone usage.
Even if the data we generate is profitable it's only so when aggregated (e.g. across thousands / millions of users) so the value of a given person's data is heavily diluted.
Then again maybe it isn't worth that much because the price is being set by the people collecting the data and not by the users - if there is a paradigm shift in which people become aware that they're basically working for free, maybe the value would increase ?
(I used to work in a company that was basically harvesting some users' GPS data (via a SDK / without their explicit consent) and using it to make consumer studies for retail companies so it made me think)
This page sends your data to:- Google
- Facebook
- Disqus
Maybe the author should practice what they preach.
I strongly disagree in trying to actually cost out the usage of our personal data. I think the right to privacy should be protected and that the extreme compromise of your personal thoughts is abhorrent. A market around this data would just lead to a normalization of this behavior into the socially acceptable realm. Similar to how we don't allow people to sell themselves into slavery we should prevent people from selling off their personal history.
> Do you remember when you were looking for good pair of hiking boots on Google and almost imminently you start seeing promoted posts about nice shoes discounts on Facebook and Twitter.
I don't think this happens?
> Basically what happens is that Google without your (explicit) confirmation collects all history of you search requests and sell it to another company.
This definitely does not happen. Google doesn't sell search history to anyone else. It may be the case that Google itself remarkets things to you. But I don't think so, since how would they get paid in that transaction? Through affiliate links? Doubtful.
Instead, I think what actually happens is that people make a search, they click a link, and target of that link (be it Amazon or some other store) associates their profile with interest in a particular product, then remarkets to that profile on Facebook.
worth noting that this is why Andrew Yang is justifying a tax-funded Universal Basic Income proposal in the US: if corporate research makes money of citizen's data, then citizens should be compensated accordingly.
Why not sell our data and for that money buy non - free services? In that sense we can at least control what to give and services will compete not only for a good service but also for a good price.
That sounds like what Brave Rewards does... https://brave.com/brave-rewards/
Be careful, as you legitimize a practice that has been very secretive and dishonest in tech, and in many cases should be considered criminal.
I suggest that we're tremendously outclassed in understanding how this all works, and how to find angles or "evil" in it.
Also, it could be somewhat similar to what we get with class-action settlements that are just a minor cost of doing business to let the wrongdoer off the hook, while paying some middleperson to facilitate that.
I’d rather be given the option to just straight up pay for a service with assurance that my personal data isn’t being used. That is what I would like to “make them” do.
Could we just not let anyone use our personal data? I don't need, neither do I want to lease my personal data to google or facebook. I very much want that they don't use my personal data.
Note that I use neither google searcj nor facebook, but both google and facebook do collect my personal data, for example from my use of whatsapp, my Android phone and the google play store, etc. That really has to stop.
https://solid.inrupt.com/
Tim Berners Lee is already working on something similar
Start by figuring out how much YOUR data is worth - that's the hardest part of all this. Individuals will need to create scarcity like the big ad networks do today, otherwise a market flooded with copies of personal data will have very little value. https://app.fastgarden.io/assessment
I have said this for the longest time
ECHO, GOOGLE HOME etc...
DNA tests, Ancestry et al. should pay the users and not the other way around.
The initial concern of "the service would have to be paid for" is insurmountable to this generation.
If the average Grandma and High School kid had to pay per query to Google in return for ad free search ( Google did have this product with CSE) what miniscule percentage of users would pay?
The Brave Attention Token tackles this problem in a logical manner
If anyone is interested in some long-form writing, Vi Hart posted a very well-reasoned article about the same subject (and much more besides) a few weeks ago: https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/
In theory I agree, but the somewhat depressing realization is that your data is not especially valuable in and of itself.
The marginal value of your data with respect to 10,000,000 other people's data is almost (but not quite) nothing. The value is in the whole.
It might work well if significantly large groups of people got together and collectively sold their data - say 100,000 or more. That would be kind of cool - "hey we are 100,000 people with X demographics and are willing to share Y data for Z dollars.
Doing it on an individual basis may be a symbolic victory, but that would likely be it. "Personal" data has a huge asymmetry in value. There is some Danny Kahneman in here somewhere - I bet people would value their own data 10x what they value a random person's at.
In my opinion people would on average refuse to sell their data individually because what it is actually worth would almost certainly be lower (probably much lower) than they'd imagine, and that sounds like it would make people sad not happy.
The thing is, without those companies your data is absolutely worthless, users are not holding any cards. To own your data,put it in RSS format and let competitors bid to license them from you.
(Also author doesnt seem to know how google,fb work)
“GoGoDuck”. Clearly a user.
Disclaimer: this post is very subjective and all facts mentioned here are purely my assumption
So they're beliefs not facts
Good points, I will trade money for privacy myself if there is an option, but the product quality has to be good.
usertesting.com pays you for your data.
And earn.com pays you for your data
And let’s make them charge us for sending emails with attachments.
Under the spirit of capitalism, if privacy is such a popular product that so many consumers want, then why not make it available for them to purchase?
For Google users example, free-tier will allow each user account 5 searches per month that will not be tracked and recorded, so essentially users will have an option to specify right before the moment of each search to indicate whether this specific search is going to be “cognito” or “invisible” (perhaps by just ticking a checkbox).
Higher tiers offering greater amounts of private searches per month will simply cost more to purchase shall those consumers desire. Ran out of private searches? Top it up just like prepaid phone credit! This way those users who are extremely privacy conscious will have a solution to protect their own privacy while Google has invented a new revenue stream and can even increase profits from their valuable services.
The next generation Capitalism 2.0 will now enjoy privacy becoming a new cash cow industry overnight. The question then will be how much are people willing to pay for an unlimited account?
Although the idea sounds nice, I think it's impractical. Large companies don't care about you, they care about profit...