Hypothetical scenario: I am an advertiser and I want your personal data. How much cold hard cash would I have to offer you for you to willingly give it to me?

Blue and Orange@lemm.ee to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 67 points –
45

What kind of personal data?

If you give me $5, I will tell you if I went grocery shopping this week or not.

Look at that, without us even providing you any money you've already admitted that you regularly grocery shop. That's going in your file.

That data is likely already being scraped for free unless you always pay cash and never use any sort of customer reward card.

..and don't carry a phone with you.

The grocery stores in my area are also full of video cameras. If I wanted to go full-privacy, I would have to wear a mask to foil facial recognition, gloves, and generic clothes that I change out of after I leave so I can't be tied to videos showing my face elsewhere.

Then how do I get to the grocery store? Drive into the store parking lot with my license plates hanging out in the wind? Lol, no.

You drive one car to the store and another from the store, on both trips you switch cars midway through the journey, and you never drive the same vehicle twice.

And doing that, you'd be instantly recognisable due to the mask

No deal. I'm always going to assume you're planning to fuck me in some way that's out of proportion to any gain I might make from the exchange.

I see you've played Capitalism before.

I hire some poor guy in India to create a fake sample digital identity which is sold to the ad companies. The Indian gets 3% of what I make.

That's how one plays Capitalism.

Some percentage of the value it provides you.

That's kind of a weak answer. The data 's privacy might be worth much more to you than i the data itself is worth to the advertiser. Remember the advertiser won't keep it private after they get it.

I assume the marginal worth of one person's data is nothing. It's when you have lots of people's data that it gets valuable.

More than I'm getting paid for my data now, that's for damn sure

I'd make my data into a monthly subscription, 599.99$/month and I'd have a 20 page long "ECLA (End company license agreement)" that describes precisely where and how they're allowed to use my data.

If we're talking passwords, that's a no. If we're talking enough personal data that you could use it for spear phishing, identity theft or targetted malvertising, that's a no.

Honestly, no matter how innocous the information you want is, I would be extremely suspicious why you'd want it. And I'm certainly not turning off my ad blocker either.

Most people will never question Google or Meta's data harvesting while using their apps, but I'm sure you know this already.

The issue with offering me money directly for personal information is that I'd immediately nope away because that sounds like a scam or something malicious.

I'll charge you: $0 but every time it's re sold you have to pay me $1

Easiest way to become a millionaire.

It sorta hard to say without knowing what personal data I would be giving up. Account numbers and mothers maiden name. um. no.

You give me 5 mill, and I give you my old email that doesn't exist anymore.

That's about as fair as data collection is the other way around.

The real answer is close to free, provide people justification for giving you that data, and a little bit of barrier to entry to something they're already mentally invested in. And they'll give up their data. They shouldn't but they do

"Personal data" is something very abstract and most people have little to no idea what it means to give it away. Nowadays it's getting harder and harder to limit what's being shared so even those that have a vague understanding of what it means may not care too much.

I don't have social media accounts and I've been using VPNs nonstop for the last 10 years. Degoogled, Firefox, uBlock Origin, PiHole, etc. I got used to this, but it's a balancing act. I don't self host. I'm forced to use Windows at work. Credit card for groceries and stuff.

It's incredibly weird to think how easy it is to create a behavior profile of the average joe. It's unsettling to imagine companies like Meta and Google have decade's worth of data on people.

As you said, they shouldn't share that, but they do. And in places with no way to have that data "erased", some people will have an unfathomable amount of information about them harvested throughout their whole life.

Even if that data is never used for anything malicious, it's still disturbing.

You sound like the devil trying to trick me out of my souls posession.

I feel like no one really wants the personal data of people who are so poor they are willing to sell their personal data.

Nothing, if I had a choice, my data wouldn't be for sale for any amount of money, and neither would anybody else's

Try this: first, give me (mere offers are refused). the cold hard cash. This experiment will cost you, oh, $1000. Cash in advance. Per hour. Second: see what you get.

More than €250/year.

I'm currently not using membership cards at the local grocery store. The discount I'd get is worth approximately that much for me.

If you are on a smart phone, discount memberships are the least of your farming worries.

Sure my phone manufacturer has my data. Does not mean I'll give it to the grocery store.

They'd get it too if it was a choice between no food or giving up my data.

You should ask another demographic, they're cheaper 😄.

A livable wage after tax in the city where your CEO office is located.

In the first day, 5 euro. And every next day, double the amount of the previous day

For cold hard cash per month per "person", you can get any number of AI-generated "personal data" from "me"...