Stuff like this makes me glad to live in NYC, but it does kind of depress me that it has to come to an explicit law, and moreover even more annoyed that it was ever legal to do that in the first place.
Trying to beat/get ahead of regulation is a fairly significant aspect of many businesses. So many startups exist that either outright break laws (Uber, Airbnb) or try to find gray areas that are difficult to enforce from a regulatory standpoint.
We don't like to think of businesses as behaving this way, and certainly many don't, but this is feature of capitalism, not a bug.
I said "explicit" law, since I would have hoped it was covered under previous law. Clearly I didn't word this correctly, so I apologize for any confusion.
Honestly without laws and regulations capitalist organizations would eventually just straight out rob and/or blackmail people and claim that doing anything less would be unfair to their shareholders.
I hate bad and onerous regulations as much as the next person, but I'm always amazed by how ingrained the `regulations == bad` sentiment has become in society.
Regulations are the rules that make systems stable. Without them we'd just cycle between abuse and violent revolution...
They're also the rope that strangles innovation and progress.
There's a balance to be struck here, and we're always working on finding it. The US seems to tend to come down on the side of "legal until proven it shouldn't be" and the EU seems to lean a little more towards "prevent bad things" than the US.
Personally, I prefer the US version, and I'm glad I live in the US.
I think you're being uncharitable here. He was clearly referring to the effect regulations generally have (reduced innovation). This is generally accepted by most people.
> Because in order to prevent all bad things, you need to prevent many good things, too.
That's nonsense. Please explain, for example, how you think making it illegal to sell people's telco data in the 80s when we already knew this was happening would have prevented some good thing.
Preventing selling data would have only prevented a few rich sociopaths from getting a bit richer. They knew it was wrong, we knew it was wrong, the only reason it happened (and is still happening) was because people like you refuse to ever allow regulation, and people will likely prevent any regulation that does happen from having any teeth or a broad enough scope, so it will just keep happening. The "innovation" your ideology is incentivizing is just finding new loopholes to crawl through and screw people over.
I get it, the concept that regulation might have side effects makes sense if you talk about it only in general terms. But whenever I find myself arguing against this ideology, it's in a specific situation where your ideology is just being used to let sociopaths profit off of amoral behavior. Your ideology makes sense in theory, but over and over again it simply doesn't play out in practice.
I think a counter example could be something like home video, like VHS or Betamax. VHS can (and did) lead to piracy, so you could make an argument to it by saying "the studios are going to lose money, that's a bad thing, and so it should be illegal", but fortunately the courts disagreed with that.
I think home video is overall a net good.
EDIT:
Just to make it clear, I think I more agree with your point overall than the previous poster, I just felt the need to provide a counterexample.
IANAL but what could be the US-equivalent of a GDPR? A conglomeration of local laws? Federal? Can our government pass a sweeping regulation like GDPR without being unconstitutional? (Meaning, can it be argued that businesses/individuals have a right to enter into the kinds of contracts they create to sell personal data?)
This is the same place that has E-ZPass trackers and automated license plate readers all over the city tracking vehicle movement, that has an untold number of CCTV cameras, and corrupt cops that get away with murder.
I'm not saying we shouldn't commend them for this, just that there are many other major related issues that should be equally concerning.
Cities don't tend to propose shooting their golden goose in the foot so I hope this is a decently strong signal that the finance industry doesn't make all that much use of this data.
Edit: Why is this down-voted so heavily? Too cynical?
Everything "free" on the internet could potentially have a reduced revenue stream. People will have to make up the difference somewhere in order to provide these services if they can no longer monetize the data.
Users that already pay for these services for this exact reason shouldn't be impacted, but it will impact other services that people consider "free", I would imagine.
> Why would there be any significant added cost to consumer good pricing?
Assuming ad tech makes advertising more effective, banning it would make challenging a market incumbent more difficult. You'd need to burn more cash to teach more consumers about your product, a larger fraction of whom would be outside your target market.
Granted, ad tech does not always add value. And there is a legitimate question as to the trade-off between privacy and consumer prices. But the tradeoff exists. Reducing the threat of new entrants means incumbents will raise prices.
That assumes there is only one way to reach users, ie through internet wide surveillance. This is simply not true. You have a new wakeboard gadget, advertise it on a wakeboard forum or a wakeboard site. I visit EETimes so I can see the ads.
An intermediary doesn't need to know me so they can profit from selling my existence and desires to a 3rd party at the drop of a hat.
> That assumes there is only one way to reach users
No, it doesn't. If you have three pipelines between points A and B, removing one of them will raise downstream prices. It doesn't matter that there are two others. Removing an option will increase the cost of the others, even assuming equal effectiveness.
> That assumes there is only one way to reach users, ie through internet wide surveillance. This is simply not true. You have a new wakeboard gadget, advertise it on a wakeboard forum or a wakeboard site. I visit EETimes so I can see the ads.
This assumes "ad tech" == "internet wide surveillance". That is certainly the most profitable subset, but it is still just a subset. Something needs to serve those ads and make sure they are relevant to the content they are shown with, even if it exclusively uses the context of the specific page being loaded. Something needs to manage campaign tracking to know which specific sites or which specific ad copy is driving users in, even if no information about the users themselves is captured. Something needs to manage the connections between the ad copy and the site being advertised, both to ensure users go to the place they are supposed to and to combat malicious or hijacked ads.
All of this is "ad tech". Even if you think we should return exclusively to the days of random, untracked banner ads some amount of ad tech is necessary.
I agree, and I don’t think it is necessarily bad. But biz and marketing folks tasted milk and honey of the panopticon and they will fight kicking and screaming to keep it.
This assumes companies can raise prices profitably. But if that were the case, why wouldn’t they raise prices right now, independent of what happens to costs?
I don’t buy many of the “costs will be passed on to consumers” arguments against regulation. If you assume companies already price things efficiently to maximize profit, then they cannot raise prices any further and make more money.
Look up tax incidence and elasticity of supply / demand curves. Yes, it could definitely be reasonable to assume, from a modeling perspective, that companies currently charge the optimal price for maximizing profit. However, once you impose extra transaction costs on companies (like a tax), the equilibrium price will then change (previous equilibrium is no longer the equilibrium because external state has changed).
By your argument, taxing a transaction in a market would not ever raise the price charged to the demand side. It's pretty easy to see by reading a chapter about tax incidence (which is different from where the tax is legally placed) and elasticities of supply/demand curves that this is definitely false (not just in theory, but also in practice)
That's assuming adtech is somehow making advertising disproportionately more effective for new companies than for established ones. If that assumption is wrong, and I suspect that it is, then rolling it back will make challengers no worse off than before - while hugely benefiting both every living human on the planet[0] individually, and every society as a whole.
A similar argument could apply to cut the entire advertising industry down to mail-order catalogs and trade shows, which is something I'd like to see happening.
Advertising is the zero sum arms race in established markets especially (which would be a majority of markets I suppose) -- if one company spends more or has more effective ads, it pushes competitors to spend or improve on their own ads.
That cost is being passed down to consumers. So by getting rid of all advertising everybody would see bigger margins and can cut prices.
Sadly advertising went to away, it'll just shift back to less efficient forms. I remember that there used to be an even worse ad to content ratio and I would pay every month for TV and magazines and there would still be a ton of ads. Ads are bad but I don't see nearly as many anymore (the main thing is to avoid some of the different news sites and blogs that have way too many).
I imagine ad efficiency from customer point of view is seeing perfect ads for things they didn't know existed that they actually need right now to improve their wellbeing.
Efficiency from advertiser's point of view is showing ads to people who would buy the things advertised, as in the case above but also including when customers don't need them, can't afford them, when they are actively harmful (say gambling ads for gambling addicts), shown at the most psychologically effective times (when you are vulnerable, desperate, not thinking clearly, etc).
There is a small overlap in those two cases, but the money is on the harmful end.
> psychologically effective times
if this were true, then billions of dollars would be spent advertising in bars and therapy centers (where people are most vulnerable).
I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable.
> don't need
90% of what we buy are not necessities. So this is not just a problem for advertising but for 90% of what we produce. It's okay for people to buy (and advertise) things that they want, not need. In the modern era, we have wealth way beyond covering necessities.
> can't afford them
is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility?
> they are actively harmful
Is advertising the problem here? If a product or service is actively harmful, why is it legal? Or you prefer a system where there are legal harmful products, but we just can't talk about them?
It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem. Maybe consider it's the core business you don't like?
> I agree psychological tricks can be used by advertising ("one weird trick to...") but it's not a major practice to advertise when they are vulnerable.
That might be a current technical limitation, I'm sure facebook is working on that as we speak. A breakthrough or two in psychology, some improvements in data gathering and crunching, and no user would have a chance against professionals whose job it is to find what exactly to show and when to induce that sale. Humans generally can't exactly install firewalls in their heads and keep it up to date, not against a motivated onslaught.
> can't afford them is this a problem with advertising or people's finical responsibility?
With truly effective persuasion techniques, lines of 'responsibility' will become gray. If you drive through and intersection and somebody shone a bright light and blinded you temporarily, are you responsible for the accident? If you go about your day and somebody distracted you while their partner pick-pocketed your wallet, are you responsible for not guarding your valuables? If herbalife salesman cornered you in a coffee shop and (using half-truths, exaggerations, outrageous promises, pushing on your greed and confusion, social proofs and other sales-fu) sold you a garage-full of product, are you responsible of that mistake?
Um, I was going to create a series of less and less clear-cut examples, but run out of imagination, hopefully idea is legible.
> It seems there are businesses that are bad (or you don't agree with), but you are projecting advertising as the root of the problem.
I'm sure I was imagining worst examples when writing that, but incentives mostly push towards selling more of the stuff you make, regardless of its effect, even for benign businesses. There are exceptions I'm sure, but I expect they are driven by external forces -- regulations, owner's direction that is not profit related, etc.
In presence of truly effective ad tech and barring any friction (like regulation, social blowback, etc), actors who use it will eat those who don't. Markets are red in tooth and nail.
> measured from the POV of profit made by advertisers, is not a good thing for people at large.
Why? Sorry this statement is not self evident. If I have the perfect ad system, that only targets people who will buy my product at 100% rate and no one else, why is that not a good thing for people at large?
Hopefully not, nobody reads the TOS and it's really unreasonable to expect users to. For example, Twitter's TOS clocks in at around 5,000 words, who has time for that?
Between the apps for work and the apps I use for fun, it would take me weeks to fully read through all of the TOS for every piece of software I use if I was insane enough to do it.
"Nobody reads those" isn't a valid defense. That said, I see a huge problem in adding abusive clauses when you have a monopoly or duopoly in the area. The customer can refuse, but then what? Will they simply not have a phone or Internet?
Why not? Presumably the goal is that consumers understand the agreements they're in. If nobody reads ToS and everyone knows that nobody reads ToS, then they aren't useful communication.
It's wild how common this is, especially on Android, and how little people know about it. Those free apps you enjoy? Many of them make money by shipping with a 3rd party SDK that records your location (among other identifying information), collates it with other identifying information, and feeds it into the massive real time ad-tech system that powers large swaths of the internet.
> Amid the ensuing customer outrage and mounting congressional scrutiny, the major US carriers promised to stop selling user location data to outside brokers. Which is part of what makes the Motherboard story so troubling: Seven months later, it remains easy and cheap for anyone to buy data about a phone's location without a warrant or any justification at all. All you need is a phone number to target. In Motherboard's case it was a T-Mobile customer, but data brokers claim to be able to provide location information from all the major carriers.
Pledging to stop and stopping are two very different things.
Pledging to stop is pretty standard operating procedure whenever bad privacy practices cause a PR stink, but it's quite common to see the same company with the same PR stink a year or two later. Pledges to stop often have more to do with the media cycle than any actual intention to stop.
Yeah, a good example of this is Pepsi pledging to remove Brominated Vegetable Oil from their drinks in response to a campaign by a young student that caught media attention.
Years later, they never did any such thing.
"SUPL 2.0 features the use of geographical ‘triggers’, which enable the UE to report its position if it enters, leaves, or is within a particular area. Triggering may be enabled either by the network or by the SET, with the two entities agreeing on trigger criteria. Area Event triggers enable key mobile applications such as Check-in services, shopping deals and offers, location based advertising, and child location."
Towers can triangulate you with latency and signal strength. I don't know how accurate that can be made, although as successive generations switch to higher frequencies it can only be getting better.
Please understand I'm not excusing anything, it's horrendous it took this long to have user controls. That having been said, in the Android Q preview, Android occasionally lets me know that an app has access to my location at all times and makes it easy for me to immediately revoke that access, or limit it to ONLY when the application is open.
For example, this is what I can see by searching "Location" in settings and choosing one of the first results: https://i.imgur.com/jDF9vq6.png. It was shocking what this list looked like when I first upgraded to Q.
Yeah, that's Android Q, which is in Beta and not widely adopted. The vast majority of Android devices are running on OS's that have way less granular permissions.
I appreciate the move in the right direction, but I suspect that Google is reading the tea leaves to see that they've likely got antitrust on the horizon and they need to start laying the groundwork to fight that.
It's almost like my own comment said I wasn't making excuses and pointed out it was a preview release. I don't know why I bother.
Also, I don't understand what Google being in trouble for anti-trust has to do with a bunch of third-party apps and third-party SDKs accessing and selling my information.
This is a meaningful tactic. Voters and cell providers alike are alerted this is coming down the pipeline. It is a way to gauge voter interest, ie how hard should the politician push for this particular regulation given the returns on support that can be anticipated from public engagement. It also puts the cell providers on notice and incentivizes them to compromise and cooperate to avoid more hostile regulation.
Just let me profit or opt-out of the sale! Some how the mindset/unspoken agreement/TOS-spoken agreement that I have to "pay" with my personal data to use these products has become too commonplace. It doesn't have to be much, but if I were allowed to generate an extra $20 a month that'd be great! I already use Google Rewards, and at this point that's the only "surveys" I get.
If I play fantasy futurologist for a second, it would even make for some interesting economics. Underrepresented groups for a particular analysis could pay more, because those groups' data is rarer. A straight, white, male techie is probably a saturated market, so I wouldn't generate much, but a Hispanic woman's could be more valuable.
The economics of location data is such that if providers had to pay them much per person, they'd no longer buy the data. If they paid the real worth per person, it'd probably come down to 1/2 cent a month.
Not true. I work on a targeting product, and if we could have accurate targeting data for a business decision maker, we’d pay significantly more per individual. The problem is that most people’s targeting data is not worth that much. Particularly the data of those who’d want to make a buck off it.
> the mindset...that I have to "pay" with my personal data to use these products has become too commonplace
I don't mind it so much when it's Facebook because it's clear they have to make money somehow. When it's the phone company that I pay money to, it's more surprising, and it feels like I'm being taken advantage of.
How are these different? Even if you already pay for a service they will maximize their return by doing everything that is legally allowed. This needs CCPA-style disclosure and opt out I think.
It's not your phone company that's making money from your location data so much as the third party apps (Yelp, Weather Channel etc.) that you have installed on your phone for free. In order to use those apps, you often have to consent to them sharing your location data to ad-tech companies to help them serve ads to you if you're in specific areas.
These companies use your data to make money. Paying you would mean they'd have to make more than they pay you from the addition of said data.
Today, I suspect the benefit of having said data is probably unknown. This data is probably only valuable in aggregate to determine trends.
Showing you a random advertisement vs an advertisement based on the page info vs an advertisement with your data included. I suspect an advertisement based on the page info is 90+% of the value.
That being said, they can't truly pay you meaningful amounts for your data and answer to their shareholders. That's why it's not really done yet.
Plus, they dont' need to in many cases. The whole internet is designed to collect all this data from you, without your consent being necessary.
> Paying you would mean they'd have to make more than they pay you from the addition of said data.
> This data is probably only valuable in aggregate to determine trends.
I disagree with this data point only because their current profits are being generated because they do not have to pay their data producers. And while I agree with the sentiment that the data is only valuable in aggregate, this doesn't mean my data is worth $0.00. Its still worth pennies, so maybe instead of $20, I earn $5, or less. The point is I'm paid for it. An analogy I had while I was driving over this comment is the equivalent to, say, an orange tree. A single orange is not as valuable as an "aggregate" of oranges.
In the current data economy, companies have maintenance expenses for their "orange harvesters", but not for the oranges themselves. Again, this has often brought up points of "you are using their service, its their data", but I'd say a) this bill clearly shows that some people do not agree with that sentiment, and b) (to continue with the farm analogy) this is where something like share farming [1] would be a usable model.
Jaron lainier wrote a great book about your model called “Who Owns the Future.” In it, he describes a future where almost all profits go to large cloud centres and there are no jobs. He argues that by monetizing the data people produce that trains the ai of the future, people could avoid some of this and still have dignified lives and be self sufficient
Just to continue the discussion about the book, he dislikes basic income because it makes everybody fully dependent on the government for their wellbeing. He prefers a system where people have the dignity of having a way to earn their money :)
I'm not whether sure I agree or not, but the book was interesting
I don't mean basic income as a government expense; rather that the basic income is coming from selling your data and dictated by what the market is willing to pay for it.
Yea, I really don't understand how T-Mobile (the Uncarrier!) hasn't figured out that they could just offer a $10 monthly credit in exchange for "opting in" and bask in the massive marketing windfall they could get from it.
It would depend on what percentage of the data revenue is purely going to bounty hunters (my guess: low). Also, my understanding is that most bounty hunters are basically doing collections, not chasing down hardened criminals.
I highly recommend Doctorow's "Radicalized" for the other angle of this: pervasive, locked IoT devices baked-in to a rental agreement. "Only use proprietary soap for your washing machine - after all, that's the reason your rent is priced where it is."
1. You are profiting - you get all the apps and content for free.
2. > Underrepresented groups for a particular analysis could pay more, because those groups' data is rarer. A straight, white, male techie is probably a saturated market, so I wouldn't generate much, but a Hispanic woman's could be more valuable.
Audience size doesn't equate well to cost of data. Buying power is most correlated thing to data cost. In this fantasy, rich white techy males earn more money form their data, and a hispanic woman earns very little.
When I leave home I turn off all networking. I'll turn it on if I need it, but then turn it off again until I get to work. Same when heading home in the evening.
You will have to be in airplane mode (no cell reception) for this to be meaningful. Even then you probably turned it on enough times in the places you frequent for the data to be solid.
Stories about bills that haven't passed yet are mostly fluff, because most proposed bills never go anywhere. This is a story about a bill that hasn't even been introduced yet. That makes it an announcement of an announcement, the gold standard of offtopicness.
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