I was thinking about a related idea recently - how much is my grocery information privacy worth for me? Summed up, I'm currently saving just over 11% on all the groceries + ~7% on fuel cost by sharing that information with 5 companies. (car insurance, CC, shop card, honey, airline)<p>I'm not attached to this, I'd rather the programs like this get destroyed. But also by stacking the offers, I believe I'm getting more value here than they do.<p>So for now I'm cool with this exchange. Would others put the privacy/money break-even somewhere else? (This is assuming reasonable shopping - I make a full list before starting to order a pickup, I rarely actually go through a shop, so there's no upsell here)
Very nice article!<p>Last year I was part of a working group on a data dividend proposal for the state of California, which you can read about at <a href="https://www.datadividends.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.datadividends.org/</a> .<p>Our conclusions led us much closer to the spirit of this EFF article than the term "data dividends" might suggest. We recommended against any kind of personalized payments. We considered a small universal basic income funded by a "data tax", but because of the small amount (as mentioned by the EFF), we focused on use of a data tax to fund public projects and initiatives aimed at redistributing the benefits of data more equitably.<p>We mostly stayed away from recommending privacy or data ownership regulation because (a) California had recently passed the CCPA and (b) this question seemed outside of our mandate, but I agree that the two should be considered together.
This is just a bunch of falsehoods<p>> You wouldn’t place a price tag on your freedom to speak. We shouldn’t place one on our privacy, either.<p>You do place a price tag on a lot of your freedoms, that's what your employers pay you for. And it's not like people are going to be <i>forced</i> to give their data, or even forced to give all of their data, it's entirely voluntary.<p>We either put a price tag on all user-generated content (including private data) or we abolish all intellectual property laws and copyrights. Suggesting otherwise is dishonest double standards.<p>> should not be incentivized to pour more data into a system that already exploits them and uses data to discriminate against them.<p>The system is already sucking <i>all</i> their data. There's nothing else. If anything this will force companies to compete and pay them more than $0.<p>> Facebook is a massive, global company with billions of users, but each user only offers Facebook a modest amount in revenue.<p>Plenty of websites would be kept alive if they could earn $28 / year from each one of their users (hell, i 'd be rich), and in fact it shows why such a scheme would be beneficial for the web and the world as a whole.<p>Privacy and attention are currently being grabbed , stolen and sold in marketplaces nowadays . It's just so wrong to try to convince people to keep doing so.<p>This isn't 2003, and the price of "free services" is no longer high enough to justify giving our data for free (by law). I don't even understand what's the motive behind this post, and why Hailey felt the need to support such abuses
Have never understood EFF's objection to 'pay for privacy' (covered in the middle of this article). Being able to pay for privacy is better than <i>not</i> being able to. It creates the beginning of accountability for cos and optionality for users.
> In truth, the data dividend scheme hurts consumers, benefits companies, and frames privacy as a commodity rather than a right.<p>Privacy should be a right but it isn’t. At this moment privacy is very much a commodity or else we wouldn’t need articles like these.
> It’s also why we advocate strongly for laws that make privacy the default<p>I always wonder: didn't this use to be the case? In the 80s, could we even imagine a telco listening in on our conversations? When did things go sideways?
In principle it sounds convincing but in practice we are currently giving up our data for free so it reminds me a bit of the free software argument. Sure I agree but isn't something better than nothing? We are not giving up rights to make future advancements by asking for a compromise that may be more within reach.<p>In particular, I think this idea of trading your data is easy to understand and communicate. Also, could it be the case that as soon as companies are forced to offer a price for your data a lot of the predatory data collection schemes may not be profitable enough as a result? I imagine you can't just make a crappy app and start collecting user info en masse because it now incurs a real cost.
Also I think data should be traded precisely where every data point generated should be worth something. Not just as a one time thing.
What about renting data?
In that way, it is not once off but for instance per "query" or time, same way Amazon is "selling" us books. Those books are not quite ours, so data companies would buy are not quite theirs?
TLDR: companies will likely shaft you as the market value for your individual dataset isn't that much, companies derive value by <i>aggregating</i> data over a large number of consumers.