[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 8:59 PM, Andrés Leopoldo Pacheco Sanfuentes
<alps6085 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I truly believe "Internet Privacy" is an oxymoron. Therefore, any and
> all attempts to "protect it" are doomed from the start. It's just like
> "copyright" in the movie industry. Why not reverse the argument and
> make "privacy" irrelevant, with zero economic value? Since the wheels
> of industry are financial, industry will fail to profit from it.
> Best Regards | Cordiales Saludos | Grato,

There is a market value for personal information (i.e., demand side)
and there is a value of privacy to the individual the information
belongs to (i.e., supply side).
As long as privacy will be worth something to people -- for reasons
that goes beyond the realms of economic reasoning --  its value will
be (inevitably) non-zero.

> Andrés L. Pacheco Sanfuentes
> <alps at acm.org>
> +1 (817) 271-9619

Cheers,
Alfonso

> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:51 AM, Alfonso De Gregorio <adg at crypto.lo.gy> wrote:
>> 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
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