Go Ahead, Sell My Data

This is addressing the wrong problem, at least in my view. I don't really care about what Facebook does with the data I consciously give them. And ads are just an side-effect.<p>My main problem is that they actively try to get their hands on data I don't want to give them. Like, my constantly actualized GPS coordinates, or my browsing history. And that they store it. And process it. And store me into some kind of box.<p>Oh, and it candidly considers that Facebook, or any other person to whom it sells the data, won't do anything nasty with it. Just serving ads might be okay. But ultimately, they <i>could</i> do much more.<p>Do you want to know who the gay people are around you ? We could sell you that list ! Do you want to know who votes for your opponent ? We could sell you that list ! And so on.<p>The day Facebook, or Google, or anyone with a comparable database actually decides to do something evil, it will look ugly. Will they ? Don't know. Don't want to find out.<p>As a side note, I might pay for Facebook. Or I might have paid. Now, they will just get my money and sell my data anyway, so why bother ?

&#62; There is certain information (address, account numbers, ss #, etc.) that if obtained by a third party, could result in some real world problems that will negatively impact my life. But information social networks sell to advertisers doesn't fall into this category.<p>That's both wrong and incredibly short-sighted.<p>First, Facebook collects way more data than necessary. In fact, they try to collect data of people <i>which aren't Facebook users</i>. And what's more, in some cases (facial recognition), <i>there's nothing you can do against it</i>. But wait, you can! Guess how? By <i>registering on Facebook</i>, to remove tags. I don't know what to call this, but it feels awfully similar to extortion.<p>Second, the unnecessary data that Facebook collects is dangerous by virtue of existing. Yes, that data might be safe now. We cannot guarantee this to be true tomorrow, next month or in five years, actually, we cannot even be sure if it is safe right now (which is a matter of transparency again). Besides, I don't see how a detailed (which might be an understatement) biography of my life is necessary to sell targeted ads.<p>Third, as rwolf pointed out in another comment, it's not like targeted ads are the only option. Yes, it might be the best alternative in terms of making profit, but we cannot ignore the side effects.<p>Besides, I seriously ask myself when in the hell "profit" became an argument to infringe on basic rights and liberties (of which privacy and control over your own data is - or at least should always be - part of). To present a hyperbole: slavery was very profitable as well. I don't see people arguing that we should allow slavery again.

While there is nothing inherently wrong with making a profit from data about users, there is quite a bit wrong with the way it's being done on Facebook, and much of the rest of the web/mobile for that matter.<p>For one thing, services fail to properly inform their users of what they're doing. It's quite common for ordinary users to either not know that their data is being collected and used in those ways, or the extent of the data which is being collected (e.g. Location, Phone Identifiers, and sites visited across the web).<p>For another, opting out is generally designed to be quite difficult. Unless you're vigilant enough to know which hosts to block (among other things) it's almost impossible to keep your browsing history out of the hands of the hands of third parties (especially with all the different ways browsers can store information, see, <a href="http://samy.pl/evercookie/" rel="nofollow">http://samy.pl/evercookie/</a>). This is the case <i>even if you do not sign up for or use a service like Facebook</i>.<p>Also, as someone noted below, there is an issue with the simple fact of the data's existence, since from that point on it is out of my control, and can be used by anyone who can get their hands on it, in any way, which may well be harmful to me.

I guess the problem isn't targeted advertising per se. It's that you don't know what your personal information will be used for in the future. Maybe it will give you better, more targeted advertising. Maybe it will be used to deny you an insurance policy or be sold to a recruiting firm that will reject your job application. I guess Facebooks terms don't allow that, but those terms can change at any time.<p>Maybe not next year, but what about 30-40 years from now? Facebook or Google might not even exist then, but you can be pretty sure that your data will exist, along with your social graph. That's a tangible asset that can be sold, no matter what happens to these companies. Or seized by some government, for that matter.<p>Is this just being paranoid and obsessed with privacy? Lets hope so.<p>A german friend put it this way: Most jews in pre-nazi Germany didn't mind having their religious affiliation listed in their passport. Many were indeed proud to be jews.<p>Would anyone of them have been able to imagine what this information would be used for just a few years down the line? Wouldn't anyone worrying about this collection of data have been laughed at and called paranoid?

I will give you one example. Somebody uploads my picture to Facebook and tags me in it. Facebook now matches my face to my name - forever. I can't ask them to forget that they know me, I can't ask them to delete that data, and I can't get a new face (although sometimes I would like to).<p>Facebook now has that information forever and I played no part in them obtaining it. They could launch a feature tomorrow where you can take a picture of a stranger at a bar and be given their 'closeness' to you, or their name. Or that data could be stolen, or misappropriated.<p>This is about companies over-reaching and then either the data accidentally leaking or intentionally being used without user permission. Most people don't have a problem with it, until something goes wrong.

&#62;While it is true that "we pay with our data" for many of the free (as in no monetary cost) social networks we use, what is the alternative? People don't want to pay money for these types of services and this is a business model that allows companies to operate and thrive while providing a valuable service to their users.<p>That strikes me as a pretty weakly supported argument. Facebook is in a position where they could do something very similar to Github. Free accounts that are publicly searchable and paid accounts with strict access controls. Many people would in fact pay for that, probably to the point that they could ditch ads on the free version.<p>Now, they would have to stop rewriting the code that manages access permissions every six months, but I would bet they could totally do that if they stopped treating ad revenue as <i>the only way.</i>

I agree that Facebook and other social networks have a right to make money through their business model. As the article puts it, if they didn't make money, they wouldn't exist and that would be a loss for many people.<p>However, there's nothing that says Facebook has the right to become a $100B company through extreme invasion of privacy and other distasteful tactics (whatever they may be - I sure don't know what fully goes on over there). Send me some targeted advertising if you have to, but I will protest against you if you make new "share-with-others-additional-information-about-yourself" features a confusing opt-out hassle.<p>Just recently my wife shared a photo album via Picasa and Google+, and she couldn't figure out how to restrict who could access the album, though it was very simply prior to Picasa's integration into Google Photos. Do you think Google+ engineers couldn't keep the same Picasa privacy functionality as before or is it because they want to force people to share more than they're comfortable with?<p>No one is saying that social networks shouldn't make money through advertising and most people are probably okay with some personal data being used for targeted advertising. But given past invasive practices and privacy concerns, there are definitely valid concerns with regards to the extent to which social networks are commoditizing/selling users' personal information in an effort to maximize profits. Furthermore, who knows what happens to sold personal information down the line?<p>Simple question: If changing social networks was as simple as changing your online shopping preferences, do you think Facebook could get away with what it does? Facebook can obviously take advantage of the fact that its users cannot easily leave to appropriate user data that other sites could not.

The evilness comes into play when companies are not transparent about what user data they are collecting and how there are monetizing this data.

It's not clear to me that ad-supported == targeted ad-supported. The claim that there is no alternative is false--the alternative is less effective (and therefore less lucrative) ads.<p>If you ask a HN-reader to choose either 1) less intrusive data collection or 2) more profits to the website, I think it's clear why the user prefers door #1.

I agree, but most people probably haven't thought it through, or if they have considered it, they're stuck on the revelation that they are the product, not the customer. Perhaps some of these companies should be more up front about 'the deal' to their users, and what its boundaries are.

I think what irks me most about this is the laziness in relying on user data as a means to sell advertising to fund their "services".<p>The writer poses the question "what's the alternative?" to this business model. My answer, "Stop being lazy about it and come up with a new model. I have."<p>It might work it, it might not, but we all have to keep trying if we don't want what there is now - and the implications.<p>We are uniquely positioned to come up with another avenue of generating revenue so it doesn't have to be this way.<p>I'm sure if you work at Facebook or Google you see no harm in gathering and cross-polinating the data, I can see the sheer power of what you can do must be quasi-orgasmical, and it must almost have a life of it's own. Just how much can you gather, from how many different methods? It's like a college project with no limits but it won't last forever, someone somewhere with something different, will come and take that crown, and maybe, just maybe, it won't be as clandestine as it is now.

Selling data is not the problem; the problem is the emerging social norm whereby letting data about your life be aggregated and mined proves you are a trustworthy person. We are already at the stage where simply not having a social networking presence makes you suspect.<p>Eric Schmidt's "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" and Randi Zuckerberg's "I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away" are some choice quotes that should give anyone pause.<p>"Go ahead, sell my data" doesn't bother me. "How come you aren't putting yourself out there and letting your data be sold like the rest of us" bothers me.

All the arguments that defend Facebook e.a come down to: "making money trumps human rights".<p>There's no arguing about this subject with people who believe that people should not have the right to control their own data, just as there is really no arguing with people who don't believe in the value of free speech or the right to vote.<p>This is not meant as an insult. Believe what you believe. But if you want to argue the reality of negative consequences, please pick up some history books first. And if you do business in my part of the world, respect the local law.

What if your "private" data were sold on the open market?<p>What if your boss checked which sites you visited before hiring you? What if you wanted to keep something from your wife or your children? What if the person you just met at a bar wanted to find out all the pages you visited? What if a stalker wanted to know where you shopped and what you bought?<p>All of the above can easily be done with just the tracking information the Like button has.

A typical "evil" example is health insurance companies who may be interested in your participation in health-related facebook groups.<p>A good rule of thumb is to just assume that anything you post could be made available to any company.

Damn right, I don't understand why people are going all up in arms for privacy on the Internet, this is _Internet_, you know, the place where everything is public.<p>If you want to show your life on the Internet, you have to expect some people taking interest in it, whatever the intention.<p>What I can't understand is how we are all upset about Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and our privacy when we have NEVER given a damn about how credit card companies profile their client.<p>And credit card companies are so much worse because they first sell you credit card (via flat fee or interest rates) and then profile you and use that information to sell you even more stuff.

I couldn't agree more. Really don't see what the big deal is. In a perfect world, they wouldn't be selling my data, and I wouldn't have to pay for all the services I use.<p>In the world we have, though, I'll take what I can get.

A lot of my peers would say this is just one line of code away from a society in which our every single action or movement is influenced by hyper personalized advertisements. They fear losing control of their own lives.<p>I say bring it on. I look forward to the day when an algorithm tells me my taste buds prefer extra spicy beef panda express, order now and have it air delivered to you in ten minutes

I might agree to let companies sell my data if they told me which data they were selling, to whom, and asked me nicely first instead of just doing it.

Is this really a problem or are people just reacting to hype? It seems to me that our data has been monitored for years both online and offline. That data is used to target businesses marketing messages but its nothing new. For example, insurance companies collect data on people and re-sell it to marketing companies. They then use that information to send you custom messages in the mail or offers based on your demographics. Data on customers will always be sold to advertisers and frankly, we should encourage this evolution. Instead of watching advertisements for motorized wheelchairs during "Murder she wrote" (I cant help it, I love that show) It would be more enjoyable if I saw advertisements for something like Motorized Dirt Bikes. People will always have to see advertisements so isn't it better to see things that interest you? If the product is free, you are the product and I prefer to be sold to what intrigues me.

I'm not sure the poster understands. The information that is sold can be and is linked up with other information. The big consumer database companies in the United States maintain databases with thousands of fields of data per person in the U.S.A. That's today (or ten years ago). Tomorrow, or ten years from now, it will probably be hundreds of thousands of fields of data per person in the United States. Your consumer profile, readily available for sale, will include not only the fact that your favorite tampon brand is Tampax Ultra with Wings (that's already there) but also that you take medication for incontinence (that's already there) and that you spend 15 minutes every day at the local coffee shop during working hours (beep! This app requests to know your location Y/N?) and that you view a disproportionate number of webpages dealing with alcoholism and depression on days after days in which you have purchased 2L bottles of Wild Turkey.<p>Facial recognition is shortly going to render every digital photo and video ever uploaded to the net FULLY IDENTIFIABLE as to all of the people pictured. Coming in 2020: a startup (or Facebook plugin) that traces your entire life through publicly available photos and videos.<p>Kevin Curtin has a very limited imagination regarding the privacy apocalypse that is upon us. The data shadow that follows every person around is already huge, and will become gargantuan. It's already inescapable and out of your control.

Very few sensible people are worried about anonymised, aggregated data being sold in return for a useful free service.<p>But what of the more specific nature of some of the things you and your friends discuss on Facebook?<p>What if bosses or potential employers could pay to look at your timeline? What if they could ask to see your GPS tracking data? What if Facebook could rent out user info to advertisers based on like button activity? Ever 'liked' anything pretty dodgy?<p>The point isn't that, obviously, they can't and probably won't at the moment. The point is how far down this route do we want to go and at which point should we draw the line.

I agree with OP. People are mostly over-reacting. Trying to regulate the collection of personal data is a waste of time.<p>We should be focused on limiting the 'evil' applications of personal data, regardless of the source. If an employer, bank, or insurance company discriminates against you on the basis of personal data they purchased from Facebook, Facebook isn't the offender.<p>We regulate the credit rating agencies and how credit scores can be used. That's sufficient. Why wouldn't a similar model work for personal data?

Once consequence of them not being able to sell my data is that these "services" wouldn't exist.<p>And surprisingly, seeing what they are and are not capable of, I don't have a problem with that.

Its simple - FB is not transparent about the value exchange. Why?<p>We represent top 1% most aware users here.. most users do not understand they are exchanging their data / attention for a social networking service.

Is personalized data like browsing habits or GPS info or anything else they collect market on and sell considered intellectual property? If so why can these companies sell it without compensating me?

the writer must be Canadian to blindly trust the public profit hogs that are our data keepers. he probably also doesn't lock his front door