Tag: privacy

Foursquare Personas

An example on the site illustrates just how much Foursquare can know about the habits of an individual user. For a man aged 45-49, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Foursquare can use data about which shops, bars, and other buildings the man visits regularly to assign “personas,” which then can be used by advertisers to target the user more effectively. Because Foursquare can tell the man visited AT&T Stadium between 19:00 and 22:30, and he stopped by Harry’s Sports Bar last week, Foursquare has him pegged as a “Sports Lover.” Similarly, the man’s visit to Pepper’s Grill between 17:00 and 18:30—his second trip to the establishment this week, it notes—confirms the “Casual Diner” persona.

Return on Data

an interesting new way of thinking of privacy law.

Consumers routinely supply personal data to technology companies in exchange for services. Yet, the relationship between the utility (U) consumers gain and the data (D) they supply — “return on data” (ROD) — remains largely unexplored. Expressed as a ratio, ROD = U / D. While lawmakers strongly advocate protecting consumer privacy, they tend to overlook ROD. Are the benefits of the services enjoyed by consumers, such as social networking and predictive search, commensurate with the value of the data extracted from them? How can consumers compare competing data-for-services deals? Currently, the legal frameworks regulating these transactions, including privacy law, aim primarily to protect personal data. They treat data protection as a standalone issue, distinct from the benefits which consumers receive. This article suggests that privacy concerns should not be viewed in isolation, but as part of ROD. Just as companies can quantify return on investment (ROI) to optimize investment decisions, consumers should be able to assess ROD in order to better spend and invest personal data. Making data-for-services transactions more transparent will enable consumers to evaluate the merits of these deals, negotiate their terms and make more informed decisions. Pivoting from the privacy paradigm to ROD will both incentivize data-driven service providers to offer consumers higher ROD, as well as create opportunities for new market entrants.

Break Up Facebook

I take responsibility for not sounding the alarm earlier. Don Graham, a former Facebook board member, has accused those who criticize the company now as having “all the courage of the last man leaping on the pile at a football game.” The financial rewards I reaped from working at Facebook radically changed the trajectory of my life, and even after I cashed out, I watched in awe as the company grew. It took the 2016 election fallout and Cambridge Analytica to awaken me to the dangers of Facebook’s monopoly. But anyone suggesting that Facebook is akin to a pinned football player misrepresents its resilience and power. An era of accountability for Facebook and other monopolies may be beginning. Collective anger is growing, and a new cohort of leaders has begun to emerge. On Capitol Hill, Representative David Cicilline has taken a special interest in checking the power of monopolies, and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ted Cruz have joined Senator Warren in calling for more oversight. Economists like Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, are speaking out about monopolies, and a host of legal scholars like Lina Khan, Barry Lynn and Ganesh Sitaraman are plotting a way forward.

Brave

Brave will give users a 70% cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style “cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for $, but Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.

Utah Digital Privacy

Utah Just Became a Leader in Digital Privacy

Utah legislators voted unanimously to pass landmark legislation in support of a new privacy law that will protect private electronic data stored with third parties like Google or Facebook from free-range government access. The bill stipulates that law enforcement will be required to obtain a warrant before accessing “certain electronic information or data.”

Facebook Privacy Pivot

Ultimately, Zuckerberg doesn’t address the biggest trade-off: Are these changes compatible with Facebook’s fundamental business model, which relies on a steady supply of user data? If these changes are truly implemented, there will be a substantial business cost to bear. Until he fully answers that, Zuckerberg’s vision of privacy will be incomplete.

The move towards privacy seems designed to respond to a number of problems. To some extent, it responds to Facebook’s content-moderation problem: if a conversation that violates the company’s “community guidelines” is encrypted, such that even Facebook’s software can’t read it, then the company can’t be expected to expunge it. It responds to the Ralph Northam-yearbook problem (“People want to know that what they share won’t come back to hurt them later”), since, by default, content will auto-delete. And it responds to the China problem, as Zuckerberg vows “not to build data centers in countries that have a track record of violating human rights like privacy or freedom of expression.” It also attempts to address Facebook’s public-relations problem: after a scandalous year, fewer people trust the network than ever.

Data Is Not the New Oil

data isn’t the new oil, in almost any metaphorical sense, and it’s supremely unhelpful to perpetuate the analogy. Oil is literally a liquid, fungible, and transportable commodity. The global market is designed to take a barrel of oil from the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia and, as frictionlessly as possible, turn it into a heated apartment in Boston or a moving commuter bus in New York. With data, by contrast, the abstract bits are functionally static. The distinction between the service that provides user value and the previously cited bounty hunters who buy trafficked location data becomes clear when considering the 2 biggest triumphs of privacy legislation: the European Union’s GDPR and California’s Consumer Privacy Act. Both require data handlers to gain user consent and place various administrative hurdles around the third-party use of data. A well-known app, publisher, or online store like Facebook, The New York Times, or Amazon can easily collect consent. Who doesn’t just click Accept on all the popups to get to the story or product you want? But what if some random company like LocationSmart (implicated in the bounty hunter data leak) needs to find you and collect consent? Best of luck with that.