[liberationtech] FT: Companies scramble for consumer data (personal data are so cheap... why bother to protect them)

[Alfonso De Gregorio]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 7:24 PM, ale fernandez <skoria at gmail.com> wrote:
> With all this talk of how snooping agencies and companies are trading people's data, wouldn't a citizen aggregated and voluntary free / creative commons database or similar be of value - perhaps at least as a way of reducing the value of all these data mining companies?
>
> Ale

Such self-exposure may sounds kind of personal-data pornography -- and
somebody might argue that it wouldn't be so different than disclosing
our life to a random peer on a social media site.

More seriously, if we believe there is value in privacy, we shouldn't
erode our own privacy as modern privacy-kamikaze just to destroy
personal information market value. Let's play to win!

Of course, a large number of individuals, who genuinely would like to
protect their privacy, will not do so because of cognitive biases well
documented in behavioral economics and decision research [1].

Cheers,
Alfonso

[1] Acquisti A., John L., Loewenstein G., "What is privacy worth?",
Future of Privacy Forum,
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/papers/acquisti-ISR-worth.pdf