That is a position that only the privileged can take. There are a lot of people who are happy to pay for services with personal info rather than cash because they have to save what little of the latter they have to pay for things like food and shelter.
"Happy to" is quite a stretch. Being forced into having your privacy invaded due to economic circumstances does not make such practices acceptable.
If all the privacy-violating companies go out of business, there will be plenty of underserved customers for companies with more legitimate business models.
A lot of people simply don't care about "having your privacy invaded". I've yet to be convinced, and I'm even a technical person.
Even the words words "privacy" and "invaded" are such loaded and ambiguous language, I don't see how smart tech people are playing along with it as if it's some sort of innate human right in the electronic sense. You have to convince us, you don't get to just skip a few steps and tell us we're all crazy plebs that don't understand the implications of this thing you decided has to be the case. Hence the comment about this attitude being privileged (elitist).
No, I don't think so. I think most people would choose to pay with info rather than cash even if they have the cash simply because they don't fully grasp the actual cost to them. People make foolish (from my perspective) economic decisions all the time. I am currently traveling in the American south where I am surrounded by shockingly vast numbers of morbidly obese people who willingly trade their health for a sugar rush. No one is holding a gun to these people's heads and forcing them to drink sugary soda and eat fried food, but they do it anyway. They do it because they like it, and because they don't think about (or don't care about) the long-term consequences. People are (again, from my perspective) stupid. But I don't think it should be the role of government to save people from their own stupidity. That is a very slippery slope.
> They do it because they like it, and because they don't think about (or don't care about) the long-term consequences. People are (again, from my perspective) stupid.
Another reason for this is addiction. Addiction has people doing things that aren’t in their best interest despite them being otherwise intelligent humans.
People get the choice all the time with loyalty and reward points cards. It's pretty much a unique identifier that people carry in their pockets and handover willingly every time they make a purchase. It's more obvious and in-your-face sure, but the principle is the same and they have the choice.
Personally, I handover all my fitness information, driving habit information, spending and banking and investing information, my health information, even my location data, my STD statuses, etc to a company so I can get massive discounts on a bunch of stuff in various ways. It alters my behavior in a good way, it alters other peoples' behavior too, and I'm all the more happier about it. I much prefer this over stupid things like sin taxes, consumption taxes and laws that most people don't stick to or agree with (talk about choice and consent, huh).
People also chose to use Netflix or Steam (and other streaming platforms) instead of pirating. Last one would (and still is) be free. So it's not unprecedented.
Paying with personal data/advertising is an illusion.
People who buy ads or buy your personal data don't do so out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so in order to make up not only the cost of buying the ad/data in the first place but extract more money out of you, one way or another.
This means it should always be cheaper to just pay for the service yourself then "pay" via ads or exploitation of your personal data, since the latter involves more middlemen that want their cut.
The fact that poor people can currently "freeload" off the system is an artifact of imperfect targeting rather than intentional generosity on the advertisers' part to subsidize the poor population, and will be quickly closed off the second there will be a way to reliably distinguish the purchasing power of a user as to deny service to those whose ad views aren't profitable enough (as they would never be able to purchase the advertised products).
Personally, I would love to see the kind of offers companies would start to make for opt-in tracking. In a much cooler world, people would be able to sell their data, as subscriptions, to companies, with premiums placed on more 'valuable' data at whatever given time, based on advertiser interest.
Of course, no data tracking would be ideal, for me. But if someone wants to sell their personal data, they should at least be able to sell it for a market price.
Right? And it's not like the equation changes, for advertisers. The only difference in this scheme than the current one is that it doesn't allow for such severe money-pooling. Still some! Obviously facebook would have a great and well-vetted network of advertisers that they could connect you with, which would surely incur some maintenance cost. But being able to opt-in to someone's ad services would be just another way to prove the cost of a service (in this case, social media) to consumers. It's just wins, all the way around.
> That is a position that only the privileged can take. There are a lot of people who are happy to pay for services with personal info rather than cash because they have to save what little of the latter they have to pay for things like food and shelter.
What's the value of a persons data if that person cannot afford any of the products which are advertised using that data? On the other hand, persons on a limited budget are sometimes most happy to spend money unwisely.
Your views on the data market seem to be as narrow as your views on poor people.
The collection, buying, and selling of your personal data isn't always about ads. The data people have on you is increasingly used to determine what you can and cannot do, what opportunities you're offered, how much you pay for things, even how long you're left on hold when you call a company.
The data companies collect about you can get you arrested, can be used against you in family court, or prevent you from getting a job.
Even ads themselves aren't always about what you buy. Ads are often used to manipulate you, change the way you see the world, even change the way you vote.
That’s why any reasonable regulation tries to address that by saying the provider basically can’t do that e.g in the example of behavioral advertising. Basically you can show the page with dumb ads to users who don’t consent but you can’t say “you need to let us show the ads which pay more because otherwise we can’t keep the lights on”.
I urge you to step back and look at your comment, which is essentially "tracking as a business model is morally justified because it means that poor people can use Google", and think about other, potentially significantly more efficient, ways that this problem might be solved without needing to preserve the bottom-of-the-barrel status quo.
> tracking as a business model is morally justified because it means that poor people can use Google
No, that's not my position. My position is: tracking as a business model is morally justified if it is done with informed consent. A business arrangement is morally justified even if it has potentially deleterious side-effects to one of the parties so long as it is entered into with informed consent.
People buy and sell tobacco and firearms and motorcycles and junk food despite the fact that these products potentially have negative impacts on people's lives that are at least as serious as tracking. One could argue (and some do) that selling Coca Cola is not morally justified, but that position is hardly the slam-dunk that you imply.
It is only the privileged that is allowed to have any choice in their live in what they can do and what can be done to them. When the option is to die to starvation or the elements then anything, really anything, is better.
This is why many governments are in general responsible to provide enough social support that turns all citizens into privileged people.
It could be seen that way, although I disagree with that viewpoint. For the same reason I don’t think it’s privileged perspective to ban organ sales because someone would need to sell a kidney to eat.
I’m going to keep ensuring that this possibly-only-good-for-the-privileged world is realized and I think modern privacy regulation like the GDPR helps, which is why I’m supportive of it.
> I don’t think it’s privileged perspective to ban organ sales because someone would need to sell a kidney to eat.
We're going to have to agree to disagree about that. Have you ever actually faced that choice? I haven't. Until I have, I don't think I'm in a position to make that decision on someone else's behalf.
Here's another thing to consider: we allow people to put their lives at risk in exchange for money and social prestige by joining the military. The only substantive difference I see between that and selling an organ is that the latter doesn't provide any tangible benefits to the elites who make the rules whereas the former does.
